St Martin-in-the-Fields, London W1 Eric Parry Architects
St Martin-in-the-Fields has always been a church apart. Sacheverell Sitwell said if we look at it 'dispassionately, we may not feel certain there is a finer building in all Rome or Venice'. That can't be said of much else in Trafalgar Square, especially the prim National Gallery with its madly out-of-proportion cupola.
But St Martin-in-the-Fields has a distinguished social as well as architectural character. It is favoured by both royalty and dossers. Indeed, the original St Martin (beatified for a charitable act involving a beggar and a cloak near Amiens), who legend says was a soldier of sweet, unfailing, serious serenity, is the patron saint of drinking and repentant drunkards. Accordingly, it has been a habit of indigents to take a kip in the crypt, encouraged from early on by church officials. Now, more than 6,000 homeless people take refuge here every year.
This sanctuary was poignantly enhanced during the Great War when, under the ministry of HRL 'Dick' Sheppard, troops injured in France would come straight off the boat train at nearby Charing Cross and take succour. Ever since, the church has developed a wide range of community uses, including facilities for local Mandarin speakers (Soho's Chinatown is just up the road).
The site is marvellous, but it was not always so. In the 1720s, when James Gibbs built St Martin, the surroundings were hovels, not improved much since the 16th century when an order was made that 'no man shall cast any urine-boles, or ordure-boles into the streets by night, afore the houre of nine'. In the 19th century, Leicester Square was a dump. As late as the 1880s, as many as 400 people routinely slept rough in Trafalgar Square.
Gibbs's original idea was for a round church. This evolved into the lovely steepled temple, a design which looks as though Wren had been to Italy, according to Sitwell. But Gibbs, an Aberdonian of an 'ancient family and a small fortune', was a product of his own age, not ours. A pioneer of the Grand Tour, he had been a pupil of the Pope's surveyor, Carlo Fontana, in Rome. In his buildings, he was guided by aristocratic taste, not philanthropic principle. But this special church's commitment to combining religious, ceremonial and social roles has left the fine building in a bit of a conceptual muddle. And it was also a mess in terms of health and safety, with failing fabric and backed-up drains. Inside the church proper, the 18th-century original, already compromised by Victorian additions and Luftwaffe depredations, was looking tired.
So to meet the complex needs of a fine English baroque church, Eric Parry Architects have installed a radical underground insertion and reorganised ground level to create clarity, transparency and order. On the surface, there will be a glass pavilion set into Church Walk, an important pedestrian route generously widened by moving John Nash's 19th-century railings closer to the church. Through this pavilion, a staircase will take visitors below ground to a foyer that will include a box office, the London Brass Rubbing Centre, the 'Dick' Sheppard Chapel and an exhibition area. This acts almost as a new cloister.
The subterranean works are vast, ambitious and subtle, running almost the whole length of the original building and a little beyond. Its scale will surprise and delight visitors. A reflection of the circular glass pavilion at the other end of Church Walk is a huge oculus, a horizontal round window, that floods the foyer with light and air. And from underground, beneath the oculus, you get the money shot: a glorious, vertiginous view of Gibbs's spire. Six years ago, when he was working on the original submission, Eric Parry made an imaginative drawing of what the vista might be. Next March, we will all be able to see it.
Back on the surface, new works continue with the creation of a public area at the east end, designed for contemplation, a rarity in Livingstone's London where rap concerts happen before a noble basilica where Handel once played.
St Martin-in-the-Fields is a building of world class. James Gibbs was perhaps, as Sir John Summerson observed, an architect 'of very great ability, but not of genius', yet his 1728 Book of Architecture achieved great influence. It has been argued that the White House was inspired by him. But the great truth about buildings is you do not finish them, you start them. Eric Parry Architects have taken on a vast and sensitive job and handled it with great tact.
Inside, there has been a big clear out. Grubby gilt has gone, there is fresh paint in warm white, new Purbeck stone flooring, new glass, more light, renovated pews. The pulpit (seen in Hogarth's moralistic picture cycle Industry and Idleness) has been moved. The original's theatrical gaiety has been rediscovered with no loss of dignity. The old crypt has been taken back to the brickwork. There are new lights. It is all very beautiful. This is exactly the kind of meticulous, sensitive, responsible, enhancing intervention Eric Parry Architects proposed for Bath's Holburne Museum, the one which was so contumaciously rejected by Somerset's crazed Nimbys.
Project architect Robert Kennett describes it as a 'renewal, not a restoration'. Eric Parry says his firm's role is intended to be understated. The quality of the original building has been treated like a marvellous old text that needs editing. Terry Southern's definition of the editing process was 'brightening and tightening'. That's what has happened here.
After being closed for barely six months, the church reopens for service this morning. The original cost £33,000 (twice as much as Wren's most expensive city church). The renewal has cost £36m. It is money very well spent.
