They are London’s lost cathedrals. A few people still worship in them, a few more know of them, but few visit them. Whenever I have dropped by, they have been locked and seem deserted. Yet inside, these are masterpiece monuments of London’s age of confidence and flair, that of high Victorian gothic. They must be revived.
Few 19th-century churches are a match for the soaring edifice of St Augustine’s, Kilburn, once dubbed the “cathedral of north London”. The area was settled by thousands of immigrant Irish workers, and the church was founded in 1870 as a missionary venture by Anglicans eager to keep at bay what promised to be a mass Catholic incursion. A dynamic vicar, RC Kilpatrick, sought help from like-minded – and wealthy – souls at All Saints Margaret Street in Marylebone. The church was duly high church Anglo-Catholic, as it is to this day.
The new St Augustine’s was to be as splendid as any new church in London. The star architect of the gothic revival, John Loughborough Pearson, was sent for, and no expense was spared. His design was French gothic, externally slender and elegant. Its stone steeple rising above red brick soars over the roofs of Maida Vale and the towers of Kilburn, calm and dignified. But it desperately needs a clean. It has that aloof and unwelcoming aura that so often descends on a neglected church.
The inside is extraordinary. It is in the form of a giant hall, 10 bays long, with double aisles on all sides. These carry wide galleries divided by brick buttresses, allowing a perambulation of the entire church at upper floor level, lit by stained-glass windows in the clerestory. The intersecting planes seem to enfold one another, giving St Augustine’s a remarkable atmosphere of light and shade.
Pearson’s Francophilia was intense and Kilburn was partially inspired by the mighty cathedral at Albi in the Languedoc. The interior was supposed to be painted throughout, though this extended only to the lower walls and side chapels. The contrast is all the greater with the unadorned brick roof vaults, seemingly gaunt and distant, like those of Catholic Westminster Cathedral.
The centre of the church is dominated by Pearson’s enclosed sanctuary. Its surrounding gothic arcades are topped by a frieze crowded with biblical and saintly statues, richly decorative. The altarpiece has a touch of art nouveau to it, as does the pulpit and the ironwork of the gates and railings.
A final touch is given by the Chapel of St Michael to the right of the chancel. This is a miniature cathedral in itself. Painted and restored throughout, its ribs and arches are picked out in reds, greens and golds. The altarpiece is a jewelled forest of golden finials. It must be one the loveliest chambers in London.
Set among bleak towers off the Edgware Road, this great building really should be open. Whether as concert hall, coffee bar, drop-in centre, crèche, library, youth club or even farmers’ market, something should bring it to life and people this glorious space.
The same goes for St Augustine’s two sisters. The first, St Mary Magdalene’s, Paddington, lurks beside the Grand Union canal, over which it should exercise patronal authority. Its door has been firmly locked whenever I have tried a visit, though it has been revived as an art venue under the auspices of the admirable Grand Junction social centre next door. Built at the same time as St Augustine’s, it too is a mission inspired by the Anglo-Catholics of All Saints Margaret Street. It again employed a top-flight architect, George Edmund Street, who in 1867 produced a red-brick church, cramped and picturesque outside and full of colour within, with polychrome tiles on floors and walls, and a restored painted roof. Its gem is in the crypt, a beautiful chapel designed in the 1890s in a perpendicular revival style by the last of the great “goths”, Ninian Comper, John Betjeman’s favourite architect.
My third church borders on madness. Its flèche spire can be seen rising over Earl’s Court from the busy A4 out to Heathrow. St Cuthbert’s Church Earl’s Court, on Philbeach Gardens, was built by an eccentric Victorian, Hugh Roumieu Gough, between 1884 and 1887. He dressed it with a mass of arts-and-crafts workmanship, railings, screens, altars, lecterns, candlesticks and carvings, a Victoria and Albert Museum in miniature. But it is the wildly baroque altar reredos that is astonishing. It rises the full height of the east wall, like something a conquistador might have erected in Mexico to remind him of home. There is nothing else like it in London.
These churches are glories of the city. They should be open, used, buzzing with visitors and life. It is time to bring Victorian London back into its own.
Simon Jenkins’ new A Short History of London is published by Penguin (£25); to order a copy for £20, including UK p&p, visit the Guardian Bookshop
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