St James's Church, Piccadilly

St James's Church, Piccadilly, also known as St James's Church, Westminster, and St James-in-the-Fields, is an Anglican church on Piccadilly in the centre of London, England. The church was designed and built by Sir Christopher Wren.
The church is built of red brick with Portland stone dressings. Its interior has galleries on three sides supported by square pillars and the nave has a barrel vault supported by Corinthian columns. The carved marble font and limewood reredos are both notable examples of the work of Grinling Gibbons. In 1902, an outside pulpit was erected on the north wall of the church. It was designed by Temple Moore and carved by Laurence Arthur Turner. It was damaged in 1940, but restored at the same time as the rest of the fabric.
In 1662, Henry Jermyn, 1st Earl of St Albans, was granted land for residential development on what was then the outskirts of London. He set aside land for the building of a parish church and churchyard on the south side of what is now Piccadilly. Christopher Wren was appointed the architect in 1672 and the church was consecrated on 13 July 1684 by Henry Compton, the Bishop of London. In 1685 the parish of St James was created for the church.
The church was severely damaged by enemy action in the London Blitz on 14 October 1940. After the war ended, the church was restored by Sir Albert Richardson. Specialist contractors, Rattee and Kett, of Cambridge, under the supervision of Messrs. W. F. Heslop and F. Brigmore, undertook restoration work, which was completed in 1954. The old lead-covered spire was replaced by a much lighter fibreglass copy. The restored interior, with its pews and light fittings, represents a rare survival of a full suite of church furnishing by Richardson. Southwood Garden was created in the churchyard by Viscount Southwood after the Second World War as a garden of remembrance, "to commemorate the courage and fortitude of the people of London", and was opened by Queen Mary in 1946.
Like many central London churches surrounded by commercial buildings and ever fewer local people, St James's lost numbers and momentum in the 1960s and 1970s. When, in 1980, Donald Reeves was offered the post of rector, the bishop allegedly said "I don't mind what you do, just keep it open." During that decade and most of the 1990s numbers and activity grew, the clergy and congregation gaining a reputation for being a progressive, liberal and campaigning church. That has continued. The "congregation" rejects that description and prefers "community". It is centred on the Eucharist, the celebration of the principal Christian sacrament. It finds expression in a wide range of interest groups: spiritual explorers, labyrinth walking, Julian prayer meetings, the Vagabonds group (a lively discussion group which takes its name from a William Blake poem and in faithfulness to that text meets in a local alehouse), an LGBT group and many others. The community has actively supported, and supports, the ordination of women to all the orders of the church, the just treatment of asylum seekers and those living in poverty. It celebrates what it regards as the "radical welcome" found in the heart of the Gospels and attested to by the Incarnation. The church was embroiled in a controversy in 2023 after organizing a drag show in the Church, it drew some criticism, being described as "inappropriate". In May 2024 St James's was the first church to have a show garden at RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Its gold award-winning 'Imagine the World to be Different' garden was designed by Robert Myers to highlight the restorative power of urban green spaces and was sponsored by Project Giving Back in support of its fundraising campaign for the Wren Project, to revitalise the church and garden.
The west wall of the Church is dominated by a sumptuous organ case of carved and gilded oak by Grinling Gibbons, which originally contained an organ by Renatus Harris, originally built for the Roman Catholic chapel in Whitehall Palace, and installed here in 1691. This organ was entirely rebuilt in 1852 by J. C. Bishop, who added the choir case that now sits in front of the original Gibbons Case. A restoration project has been underway since at least 1982, which has not yet come to fruition. The current proposal is to re-build a new organ within the historic case. At present, the case sits empty, and an electronic replacement is used instead.
Concerts are regularly held in the church. Concerts have included performances by popular contemporary musicians such as John Grant, Tokio Myers, Victoria Canal, R.E.M., the folk musician Laura Marling as part of her "church tour", the collegiate Indian-American music group Penn Masala and Devin Townsend on his 2015 UK acoustic tour.
Hauser & Wirth, a contemporary art gallery, ran a programme of outdoor sculpture exhibitions in Southwood Garden in the grounds of the church in 2009–2010. The first exhibition was of work by the Swiss sculptor Hans Josephsohn.
From 23 December 2013 to 5 January 2014 the "Bethlehem Unwrapped" demonstration against the Israeli West Bank barrier featured an art installation by Justin Butcher, Geof Thompson, and Dean Willars, which included a large replica section of the wall. The installation blocked the view of the church, other than a section of the top of the tower, which was stated by church authorities to be part of the point of the demonstration.
Following a short-term residency based in the bell tower at St James's, Turner Prize nominated artist Jesse Darling's Miserere (a substantial new work in the form of a choir or congregation) was installed in the church 12-16 October 2022.
In September 2023, a series of murals by Che Lovelace were unveiled in the church, to mark the 250th anniversary of the baptism of abolitionist Ottobah Cugoano, which took place at St James's in 1773; it was the first permanent artwork commissioned by the church, as well as the first anywhere in the world to commemorate Cugoano.
† Rector died in post
A separate burial ground of St James's Church was developed in Camden, in use from 1790 until 1853. It had been obtained via a 1789 act of Parliament (29 Geo. 3. c. 47), which also provided for the erection of a chapel of ease for the parish, designed by Thomas Hardwick and opening in 1791.
With the railway-related expansion around Euston Station, the Chapel was given a parish of its own in 1871, but the cemetery fell into disrepair and became St James's Gardens in 1878 with only a few gravestones lining the edges of the park. Part of the Gardens, located between Hampstead Road and Euston railway station, was built over when Euston station was expanded in around 1887. To avoid public outcry, the affected remains were reinterred at St Pancras Cemetery. The Gardens were closed to the public in 2017 to allow the further expansion of Euston station for the High Speed 2 (HS2) rail project. Between October 2018 and 2020, archaeologists working on HS2 excavated approximately 40,000 burials. It was proposed to re-bury the remains after they had been examined by osteo-archaeologists. The remains were agreed to be re-interred at Surrey's Brookwood Cemetery which has received relocated remains from London since the 1870s. While almost all remains would be relocated there, it was agreed in 2019 that Matthew Flinders' remains would be buried in his home village of Donington, Lincolnshire. Work to prepare for the arrival of the remains at Brookwood began around August 2020 and was completed sometime after November 2020. The Church hosted an exhibition, Stories of St James's Burial Ground, with Museum of London Archaeology in spring 2023.
Notable burials included: