The London church copied across America was designed by a discreet Catholic
St Martin-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square gave the world a template: a long rectangular hall, a pitched roof, a columned portico and a tall steeple rising from the front. Architect James Gibbs was quietly Catholic, yet his design became shorthand for Protestant churches everywhere, especially in the United States.
The site is far older than the church. Excavations in 2006 found burials from around 350 AD, including a sarcophagus from about 410, unusually far outside Roman London, and Saxons later buried their dead there too. The earliest written mention dates from 1222, when the Abbot of Westminster and the Bishop of London disputed control and the Archbishop of Canterbury sided with Westminster. Henry VIII rebuilt it in 1542 so that plague victims would not pass through his Palace of Whitehall, when it truly stood among fields between Westminster and London. Robert Boyle and Nell Gwyn were buried in that earlier building.
By 1710 the walls and roof were decaying, and an act of Parliament allowed up to £22,000 for a replacement. Gibbs's first idea, a round nave under a dome, was rejected as too costly. His rectangular plan was begun on 19 March 1722, the spire was finished in December 1724, and the bill came to £33,661. He built the tower into the west wall behind a portico of six giant Corinthian columns. Until Trafalgar Square was laid out in the 1820s, sheds and houses crowded against it; one writer in 1807 called the watch-house in front execrable. Glasgow's St Andrew's in the Square and St. Michael's in Charleston, South Carolina, followed its lead.
Thomas Chippendale, whose workshop stood on St Martin's Lane, and the sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac were buried in the new church. It is the parish church of the royal family and is Grade I listed, with Gibbs's walls and railings listed separately.
Vicar Dick Sheppard, who served from 1914 to 1927, called it the Church of the Ever Open Door, and it remains known for work with homeless and young people; its Christmas Appeal dates from 1920. The crypt houses a café with jazz concerts and the London Brass Rubbing Centre. A £36 million renewal began in 2006 and finished in 2008. Twelve bells cast in 1725 now hang in Perth, Australia.
Source: St Martin-in-the-Fields
