Christ Church Mayfair shares its premises with
Bible Talks, located at 21 Down Street, on the north-west corner
with Brick Street. It opened as Christ Church Down Street in 1865
for this section of Mayfair. With congregations falling, it closed for
Anglican worship in the 1990s. It re-opened as an Evangelical church called
The Bible Talks which brought a congregation from St Helen Bishopsgate. A
second service was started in 2004 named Christ Church for a new congregation.
The Queen's Chapel is on the eastern side of
Marlborough Road in St James, which joins Pall Mall to The Mall. The
Christian chapel was designed by Inigo Jones and built between 1623 and
1625 as an adjunct to St James's Palace. It is one of the facilities of
the British monarch's personal religious establishment, the Chapel
Royal Buckingham Palace, and should not be confused with the room that
serves as that chapel in the palace, which is just across the road.
The Queen's Chapel was built for the Roman Catholic
Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, at a time when Catholic churches
were prohibited in England. From the 1690s it was used by Continental
Protestant courtiers, built as an integral part of St James's Palace. When
the adjacent private apartments burned down in 1809 they were not replaced
and in 1856-1857 Marlborough Road was built between the palace and the chapel.
It became a Chapel Royal again in 1938.
Methodist Central Hall, Westminster, is on Victoria
Street in London, just off Parliament Square, next to the Queen Elizabeth II
Conference Centre and facing Westminster Abbey. The hall was constructed in
1912 in order to mark the centenary of the death of John Wesley, founder of
Methodism. It took over the site previously occupied by the 1876 Royal Aquarium,
Music Hall & Imperial Theatre. Between 1932-2000 the hall was the headquarters
of the Methodist Church.
St Margaret's Church stands alongside Westminster
Abbey, on its northern flank. Until 1540, the abbey itself was run by
Benedictine monks. They found themselves being disturbed by the people of
Westminster who came to hear mass, so they arranged for the construction of
this church next to the abbey to serve the public. The church was dedicated
to St Margaret of Antioch about whom little is known, although her cult was
extremely popular in the Middle Ages.
The church was built around the later part of the eleventh
century and ministered by the monks until the Dissolution in 1540. The first
church was Romanesque and survived until the reign of Edward III (1327-1377).
Its nave was then replaced with one in the Perpendicular style. The entire
church was rebuilt between 1482-1523, and has undergone restoration in the
eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The church now serves the
Houses of Parliament.
Westminster Hall, Palace of Westminster is on the
eastern side of St Margaret Street, between the River Thames and Westminster
Abbey. The hall (on the left and centre of the photo) was built by King William
Rufus between 1087-1100 at the northern end of his palace. It was designed
originally as a place for feasting, but it also housed the first Parliament and
attached to it was the later royal Chapel of St Stephen. The hall survived
the fire of 1834 and the bombing of 1941.
St John the Evangelist Smith Square sits at the
centre of the square, with its entrance looking north onto Lord North Street.
By 1711, the population of the parish of St Margaret's Church (see above) had
grown to 20,000, so this church was built in 1728 to a design by Thomas Archer.
It is regarded as one of the finest works of English Baroque architecture,
featuring four corner towers (added for support after subsidence was found)
and monumental broken pediments.
The church suffered firebomb damage in 1941. It was sold
to a charitable trust as a ruin and rebuilt as a concert hall. The parish was
united to that of St Stephen Rochester Row, and the former church is now Grade
I listed. On the southern side of nearby Horseferry Road lay the burial ground
for the church which remained in use between 1731-1853, when all of London's
churchyards were closed by Lord Palmerston. It was reopened as St John's Gardens
in 1885.
Emmanuel Evangelical Church faces onto Marsham
Street, while the rear entrance (shown here) is on Tufton Street. This
apostolic, cell-based church was founded on 1 January 1989. It acquired
its present home in 1997, after stays at St Peter's Vere Street and two
other addresses in London. The building's previous occupiers are unknown,
as is the age of the building. The area for worship is circular, set in the
centre of the building which is mostly hidden from the street.
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