Warwick Street began its life as a chapel in 1724 when the Portuguese ambassador came to live in Golden Square. Under the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713-14, Catholic ambassadors had the right to have Mass celebrated in their chapels. In 1747 the Bavarian Minister took over the building. This arrangement continued until 1871 when the chapel was transferred to the Diocese of Westminster.
The present church on Warwick Street has its beginnings in the new building designed by Joseph Bonomi the Elder, which replaced the chapel wrecked during the Gordon Riots in 1780. It was opened on 12 March 1790, a year before the Second Catholic Relief Act, on the feast of St Gregory the Great. About twice the size of its predecessor, its facade was deliberately unassuming; its main object was to escape notice as much as possible.
The exterior of the building was not architecturally notable and could scarcely be distinguished from any non-Conformist chapel. The interior was better, with a large and elegant gallery. The walls of the new chapel were very solid, being almost a yard thick; there were no windows at all at ground level and the solid wooden doors were lined with sheet metal on the inside.
Maria Fitzherbert, the Prince of Wales’s Catholic wife, worshipped regularly at the Bavarian Chapel, and St John Henry Newman was taken as a boy to the chapel by his father. As he recalled in his <em>Apologia Pro Vita Sua</em>, “All I bore away from it was the recollection of a pulpit and a preacher and a boy swinging a censer.”
However, he later went on to write: “Were St Athanasius or St Ambrose in London now, they would go to worship not at St Paul’s Cathedral but at Warwick Street.” They would have been in company with Daniel O’Connell, the great champion of Catholic Emancipation, who regularly attended Mass at Warwick Street in the 1820s.
In 1850 there was an outbreak of Protestant hostility after the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy. Punch depicted the prime minister, Lord John Russell, as a small boy, scrawling “No Popery” on the door of 35 Golden Square. A year later it was at the same house that Wiseman conferred the tonsure on the convert Henry Edward Manning, who would succeed him as Archbishop of Westminster.
By the late 1860s the building was beginning to look rather old-fashioned. Furthermore, it was in a sadly dilapidated condition. It was decided not simply to repair it but to build what amounted to a new church in the shell of the old. John Francis Bentley, the convert architect of the future Westminster Cathedral, was commissioned in 1874; he designed a minor Roman basilica of marble and mosaic on the lines of the seventh-century Sant’Agnese Fuori le Mura in Rome.
The cost was considerable; a subscription list was opened and an appeal was launched in the Tablet. Cardinal Manning wrote: “It would be a cause of much joy to me to see the church fittingly restored, and I gladly give a blessing on all who help in the work.”
The money came in very slowly, and work started at the east end. An apse was first made in the east wall, then the floor of the sanctuary was raised and paved with marble mosaic. The side galleries which extended to the east wall were shortened to their present length, and an ornamental cast-iron railing was substituted for the old panelling of the balustrade. The original pews in the gallery were left intact.
A series of stone pilasters with carved capitals was erected in the apse; the upper part of the apse was plastered for the time being, and the vault decorated with gold stars on a blue background. The original altar, erected in 1791, was removed and its fate is unknown. It eventually became clear that funds would not suffice for the reconstruction of the church as planned, and the work came to an end. The one remaining Embassy chapel was thus to a large extent preserved.
During this time devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary at Warwick Street grew steadily. A rather small statue of Our Lady stood on a side altar, which was replaced by a large and beautiful French statue of the Immaculate Conception. In 1877, Pius IX officially approved the shrine and granted a plenary indulgence to those who prayed there, under the usual conditions.
The rector at the time, Monsignor Gilbert Talbot, initiated and encouraged the custom of hanging votive hearts or medals, given in thanksgiving for favours received. Large numbers of these objects were received until the walls of the chapel became covered with them. Mgr Talbot’s successor, Canon Arthur Pownall, vigorously pursued the work of decorating the sanctuary and high altar as a memorial to his predecessor.
The walls of the apse were lined with marble; the stone pilasters were removed and replaced by white pavonazzo marble with a rich frieze of red and gold mosaic decoration. Bentley had prepared sketches of the beautiful mosaic in the vault of the apse, representing the Coronation of the Virgin. After his death, cartoons were prepared by George Daniels, and the mosaic was executed by George Bridge in 1910.
After the First World War things changed. The resident population had largely moved away and the schools associated with the church were closed. Warwick Street became more a centre of worship for people working in the West End but living elsewhere.
The Dukes of Norfolk remained parishioners at Warwick Street until Norfolk House in St James’s Square was sold to meet death duties in the 1930s; the 15th Duke was a particularly generous benefactor. One day in 1936, at the heart of the Abdication Crisis, Queen Mary visited the church and knelt before the statue of the Virgin. From that date until her death in 1953, she had flowers delivered to the church every week.
In 1937, Evelyn Waugh married Laura Herbert at Warwick Street; only a few years later the Second World War brought an end to most of the normal activities of the parish. The church was much used by American, Canadian and Free French forces, and although it was damaged and violently shaken on a great many occasions by bombs falling nearby, it survived the Blitz relatively intact.
By 1950 both the church and presbytery were in a sad state of repair, needing urgent attention. New confessionals were installed and new lighting put in. The Lady Chapel was entirely redesigned, with the installation of a new reredos in Regency style, and the organ was rebuilt by Noel Mander. The sanctuary was redone with the removal of the marble pilasters and two “altarini” on which stood statues of saints; they are now in the porches of Westminster Cathedral.
In 1957, Ursula Mary Levin disposed of her estate at Foxcote in Warwickshire and gave the splendid early-19th-century Italian classical marble altar from the private chapel there to Warwick Street. The altar was installed in the church and dedicated to St Gregory of whom a fine statue now surmounts it, together with an elegant reredos erected in 1965, the gift of the Knights of St Gregory.
Daily Mass and confessions were introduced in the middle of the day from 1953 for those working in the West End, many of them in restaurants and hotels, as was Benediction two or three times a week. Evening Masses on Sunday were introduced in 1954.
In 1966, the parish boundaries were re-drawn, with the loss of Mayfair to the Jesuits at Farm Street. Thankfully, little iconoclastic damage “in the spirit of Vatican II” was done to the church; although the sanctuary was reordered in 1976, the communion rails were left untouched. A sensitive reordering was carried out by the architect Anthony Delarue in 2019, at which stage the high altar was moved back to allow for the celebration of Mass in the Ordinariate rite.
In 2013, the church was dedicated by Cardinal Vincent Nichols to the use of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. It is the Ordinariate’s main church in the UK, while remaining also a parish church of the Archdiocese of Westminster.
<em>Michael Hodges’s History and Guide of Warwick Street (2023) is available from Peter Sefton-Williams at a cost of £10 plus £2.50 p&p: peter@seftonwilliams.com</em>
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