In with the new

Thomas Cundy I changed the face of Mayfair with the refronting programme he launched as chief surveyor of the Grosvenor estate, but much of his work was lost in subsequent renovation, as Carla Passino discovers

- Carla Passino

IN November 1850, a mob gathered in the streets of Pimlico, so large and so irate that it threatened to pull down a gate. The unlikely cause of the fracas was a church that had opened only five months earlier: St Barnabas, where curate W. J. E. Bennett, a Ritualist, had revived liturgical practices reminiscent of Catholicism. At a time when, in the wake of the Catholic bishops’ return to Britain earlier in the year, anti-Popish feelings ran high, Ritualism was viewed with suspicion—hence the crowd’s attempt to storm the service and stop the ‘Popery’. The Pimlico church, however, also drew (rather more measured) dis- dain from an otherwise sympathetic quarter: the influential Ecclesiological Society, which promoted Gothic Revival architecture in churches. The group dismissed St Barnabas as too bland and too ambitious at the same time. ‘The western elevation is not successful, owing to its attempting more than the dimensions of the church justified, and claiming to be, as it were, a miniature cathedral façade,’ thundered the Society’s journal, The Ecclesiologist, in 1850.

But if St Barnabas was redeemed by fittings and internal decorations that made it ‘the most complete, and, with completeness, most sumptuous church which has been dedicated to the use of the Anglican communion since the revival’, there was no saving grace for its clergy house and parochial school: ‘We shall not dwell upon the architecture of these buildings, because we cannot bring ourselves to consider them altogether worthy of the church to which they are attached.’