This parish is bounded on the north by a large expanse of land known as Wanstead Flats and is part of the Deanery of Redbridge. To the east is the larger parish of All Saints, Forest Gate. Its southern board is the parish of Emmanuel, Forest Gate. To the west is the parish of St Saviour’s, Forest Gate.
It is bounded by a strip of green space called Wanstead Flats and its southern border is the Romford Road, one of the principal arteries into the city. It is almost entirely a residential area with a few shops at the western end, clustered around Forest Gate Station. Although it had always been an area of some deprivation it was also one of the few conservation zones in the borough and in the past decade had experienced gentrification. This was thanks largely to a collection of imposing, for Newham, double fronted houses. It has become a multi-cultural part of the borough with a strong Asian population. St Mark’s is firmly on the Evangelical wing of the Church of England. The origins of the church lay in a cowshed that was donated by a local farmer in the late nineteenth century to be used as a mission chapel by the Church of England. The first service was held there
on 15 May 1886.14 This was replaced by a more permanent structure in 1893 that, gradually was added to when necessity and funding became available, with little regard to an overall plan or impact on its existing buildings (Fig 4.1).15
Figure 4.1 The old St Mark’s, Forest Gate. The author’s collection.
14 London, SMFGCA, The Story of St Mark's 1886-1966: These Fifty Years, p. 5 and p. 7. 15 London, SMFGCA, Welcome to St Mark’s Forest Gate, A parish leaflet, 1987, p. 2.
It was this structure that was to become a source of great concern to the priest and people of the parish by the 1980s.
Writing in 1977 Eddie Gibbs indicated how time consuming and exhausting the repair of buildings was.16 Newham faced a crisis in its church-plants and a report from Barking
Episcopal area in 1985 noted how many churches were ‘burned up’ by internal problems. The Church in East London was at times more worried about maintenance than mission.17 It is significant that almost all the projects examined in this work were
prompted by necessity. The principal cause for concern was the lack of funds inner-city churches had to repair their plant. St Mark’s, Forest Gate, was in a very similar predicament to the one St Bartholomew’s found itself in. St Mark’s, Forest Gate, was told it had to spend at least £150,000 on its building to make it safe from the elements.
Interestingly, St Mark’s is an example of how badly designed a Victorian church could be and how cheaply it was erected. It had been built piecemeal, each section clumsily stacked next to former buildings. This offered no uniform design, poor connections between different parts of the site and by the early 1980s was now physically pulling apart. The abiding memories of those who recall the old building were how poor a state it was in with a roof that leaked incessantly and a whole staff of volunteers coming in to empty buckets.18 The catalyst for change came, as it often did in such situations, with a crisis centred on the building. This was a crisis, in part due to the confluence of dilapidation of buildings, lack of funds and being given the stark choice of preservation or demolition.
Unlike St Bartholomew’s, St Mark’s faced a growing conservation lobby that complicated regeneration. There had been a considerable change in national attitudes to buildings. Authors such as Powell and De Le Hey were lamenting the demise of churches
16 Eddie Gibbs, Urban Church Growth: Clues from South America and Britain (Bramcote: Grove Booklets
on Ministry and Worship, 55, 1977), p. 3.
17 London, Fox Archive, Church and Society in Essex and East London, p. 65. 18 Interview, Palmer, 29 July 2011.
in 1987.19 Certainly, Martin Purdy felt that none of these developments would have been approved by the end of the century and that their protection would have been strenuously called for.20 This meant that these future developments needed to prove why restoration was not an option. First, it was discovered that the bell tower of St Mark’s, Forest Gate, was in a state of collapse, but Forest Gate was in the singular position of being told it could not demolish the dilapidated bell tower because it was an integral feature of the Victorian church. Urgent action was required and then matters came to a head when an architect’s report in 1981 indicated that the church’s roof had reached the end of its life and had to be replaced.21 The only options were to completely re-roof the church or raze
the church to the ground. Demolition was felt to be a more economical option.22 Seeking
funding to preserve these buildings was not thought to be an option by those who used them. There was an added problem in that it was felt that English Heritage, the largest source of funding for such buildings, favoured sites that had a stylistic integrity to them. Few churches in Newham were of such a nature and quality. John Whitwell recalls how easy it was to get funding for the twelfth century gem of St Mary’s, Little Ilford. Grants were rarely forthcoming for churches that were architecturally conventional.23 The Church of England was not willing to preserve these buildings as time capsules. They were still very much working buildings, not historical relics and the Church felt they had an important function for mission. This was despite assumptions, by some, that their role had been reduced to not much more than folk museums.24 The churches of Newham felt they had a real struggle on their hands to justify these developments to forces that seemed oblivious to their needs and limitations.
Maintaining old plant was burdensome and the possibility of a blank canvas persuasive justification for demolition. Just as significantly, it was becoming apparent that these
19 Ken Powell and Celia De La Hay, Churches a Question of Conversion (London: Save Britain’s
Heritage, 1987).
20 Interview, Purdy, 6 April 2010.
21 London, SMFGCA, Martin Wallace, Moving On, p. 36. 22 Interview, Law, 20 June 2011.
23 Living Faith in the City: A Progress report by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Advisory Group on Urban
Priority Area (London: General Synod of the Church of England, 1990), p. 57.
24 St Mark’s, Silverton actually became a folk museum for a brief period in the early 1990s, it is now the
venue for a Music Hall.
cavernous churches were expensive if not impossible to heat. There was a level of comfort that was expected to go hand in hand with church-going now. The nation was used to the luxury of central heating and churches felt obliged to provide rooms heated in the same way that domestic dwellings were. All those interviewed who were involved in their redevelopment remark on cold buildings. St Mark’s, Forest Gate, had problems heating its building and this was now being noted by parishioners.25 Cold rooms became a source of angst as churches tried every way to attract and keep adherents. After the redevelopment, St Mark’s, Forest Gate, could claim that it was cheaper to run the new complex seven days a week than the old one on two days.26 Again like St
Bartholomew’s, St Mark’s had a seating capacity for seven hundred in the 1980s. This was at a stage when less than a hundred worshipped there.27 There is strong evidence that St Mark’s never had the congregation it was planned for. Indeed the Daily News survey of 1902 indicated its morning congregation was ninety-nine, suggesting that, by the late 1980s, its numbers at morning worship had actually grown.28 A more adaptable and modest worship space would makes worship intimate.
Fear of crime was to be an emerging concern for Newham residents from the 1980s. Like St Bartholomew’s, St Mark’s had security issues, but these were now focusing on the safety of people rather than vandalism to the building. Simon Law remembers the old St Mark’s offered opportunities for unsavoury characters to loiter and was a source of unease to neighbours and congregation alike.29 Disaffected youth and a growing drug culture meant unused buildings, like churches, became a locus for societal fears. There was a sense that nowhere was sacrosanct any more.
It was easy to see why rebuilding was favoured, given that repairing old buildings was costly in time and emotion as well as money. All these problems were felt to be solved by the simple expediency of starting afresh and building a new church. St Mark’s, Forest
25 Interview, Law, 20 June 2011.
26 London, Fox Archive, Martin Wallace, Barking Urban Mission Project, p. 64 . 27 Interview, Law, 20 June 2011.
28 Richard Mudie-Smith, Ed. The Religious Life of London, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904), p. 352. 29 Interview, Law, 20 June 2011.
Gate, felt a sense of relief when the centre was completed as they did not need to expend energy on repairs for some time after the opening of their centres (Fig 4.2).30
Figure 4.2 The new St Mark’s, Forest Gate. The author’s collection.
In the struggle for survival, energy that once was put into propping up failing plant could now be expended elsewhere on what were felt to be more positive and relevant activities. Many of those interviewed could not conceive of what the Church of England in Newham would have looked like if these buildings had not been developed, or if indeed the church would have survived at all. Two years on from his Church’s opening, Martin Wallace could write with enthusiasm about how successful St Mark’s building now was in a report to the deanery and diocese.31
Like St Bartholomew’s, the vision and execution of the new St Mark’s fell to one individual, the then Vicar, Martin Wallace. He had come from a fairly conventional churchgoing family. Interestingly, he had ties with the local area. He was born in Walthamstow a few miles from Forest Gate and an uncle had been warden of a church in the deanery.32 In interview he stressed the significance of the social gospel that had shaped his early ministry, serving his title in Sheffield. He recalled that the memory of Edward Wickham and the Sheffield Industrial Mission was still active in his day. It was
30 Interview, Law, 20 June 2011.
31 London, Fox Archive, Martin Wallace, Barking Urban Mission Project, p. 64. 32 Interview, Wallace, 25 July 2011.
his interaction with the laity he met there that he believed shaped the future pattern of his ministry.33 He was keenly aware of the middle class nature of Anglican life and the hurdles this seemed to present to working class people.34 He was to struggle with these restrictions for his entire ministry at St Mark’s.
Much of the responsibility fell to him in guiding the project and, like Lowe before him, Martin Wallace found the experience of redevelopment daunting. Again, like Lowe, he met opposition to the project from his own congregation, although it seemed these objections were always more vocal than numerous. The vast majority of the congregation were supportive of the redevelopment. One surprising area of opposition came from a few neighbours who were fearful of change. They were unhappy that the church might be used more and even complained about the organ music shattering the quiet of their Sundays. Martin reminded them that the church had been there over a hundred years. For some, church life and culture were becoming an alien intrusion. The reality was that many neighbours welcomed the developments as this meant an ill-used and vulnerable building was transformed into a community amenity. Key to the development at St Mark’s was Martin Purdy of whom Wallace spoke highly. Indeed it was the St Mark’s development that formed the basis for Purdy’s work on adapting and redeveloping church buildings, Churches and Chapels: A Design and Development Guide (1991).35 Alongside him, the other key person was yet again Stephen Lowe, who by 1986 was the Diocesan Urban Liaison Officer. With Martin’s appointment as Area Dean in 1982 St Mark’s was in a strategically advantageous position to lobby for funding and support for redevelopment.
How then did St Mark’s, Forest Gate, achieve the goal? St Mark’s was on a much smaller scale than St Bartholomew’s. It was estimated that the entire project would cost half a million pounds, as opposed to a budget of one and a half million that East Ham had to find. Also, significantly, the diocese was now taking the need to rejuvenate Newham
33 Interview, Wallace, 25 July 2011.
34 Interview, Wallace, 25 July 2011. This was a factor that was recognized by the report Faith in the City.
Chaired by O’Brien, p. 31.
35 Martin Purdy, Churches and Chapels: A Design and Development Guide (London: Butterworth
Architects, 1991).
seriously and was willing and able to provide substantial funds towards this aim. Martin Wallace recalled he felt justified in challenging the diocese to support the work of St Mark’s in a frank conversation with the then Bishop of Barking, Jim Roxbourough.36 What was remarkable was the diocese had these resources to outlay and they were willing to invest them in the inner-city. This resulted in the diocese generously agreeing to provide four hundred and fifty thousand pounds towards the cost of the project with St Mark’s having to raise the remaining fifty thousand pounds.37
Paradoxically, it was with the amalgamation of rural benefices in the diocese and the redundancy of their vicarages that inner-city churches like St Mark’s reaped a reward. Their vicarages were sold, enabling their proceeds to be invested in developments such as Forest Gate. Clearly something substantial was occurring at this point. It is no surprise that these initiatives developed in the era of Faith in the City. Newham was itself to make its own contribution to the document, although, it would be later projects that would benefit from the full force of this report.38 It was felt by leaders such as Martin Wallace that attitudes in the diocese were very favourable to urban Newham and the significant resource of the London Over the Border Fund (LOB), and the support of the then Archdeacon, Peter Dawes, crucial.39 This seemed to be a very fitting use of LOB’s funds, established as it was to provide new churches for the growing sprawl of London, east of the river Lea. Far from an irrelevant and draining backwater Newham was felt to be worth fighting for by those who controlled the power in Chelmsford Diocese.
St Mark’s was expected to make a contribution towards the rebuild and Martin Wallace recalled that fifty thousand pounds in the 1980s was a substantial amount of money. Thus, like St Bartholomew’s, the congregation became actively involved in raising funds. St Mark’s sold unwanted church furniture and St Mark’s pews became garden seats in parishioners’ gardens.40 They held stage shows and even ran a street collection.41 The
36 Interview, Wallace, 25 July 2011. 37 Interview, Wallace, 25 July 2011. 38 Interview, Law, 20 June 2011. 39 Interview, Wallace, 25 July 2011. 40 Interview, Palmer, 29 July 2011. 41 Interview, Palmer, 29 July 2011.
task was to raise the funds in three years and they achieved it in two. Again this reflected a substantial commitment by the laity that was indicative of the support for such a project. This suggests a highly organized and motivated congregation that could achieve much with the right leadership and a common goal to work towards.
Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of St Mark’s redevelopment was their temporary accommodation, whilst the church was demolished and rebuilt. Like St Bartholomew’s, which utilized Fellowship House as their base, St Mark’s needed a space to worship in and this came in the form of the local Health Centre. A newly arrived member of the congregation, Ellen Kemp, worked as an administrator to the National Health Service Trust. Thanks largely to her personal connections it was agreed to offer St Mark’s a large room in the local Health Centre as a worship space.42 The blending of a secular Health Centre with an Anglican Congregation would have been inconceivable five years later, yet thanks to one lay person’s connection between both, a temporary partnership was formed with no suggestion that church or doctors felt this was inappropriate.43 Like Fellowship House, the doctor’s surgery became something of a milestone and place of formation for the congregation. Numbers actually grew whilst there and worship was able to become more informal as a prelude to the new worship site. Faith was becoming once again a respected element in peoples’ lives in Newham and one that outside agencies were willing to support or at the very least were finding it difficult to ignore. This altered only when the religious makeup of the borough became so diverse that attempting to accommodate every faith’s needs in such circumstance would have been impractical.
Significantly, perhaps echoing the conservation movement, St Mark’s actively preserved some key elements of the old building. These included a sizeable stained glass window dedicated to the fallen of the First World War. Yet again there was a debate around the function of the church space as holy and Purdy was to recall: ‘Buildings were understood as necessary and important aids to this church’s work, but the need to preserve sacred,
42 Interview, Law, 20 June 2011. 43 Interview, Wallace, 25 July 2011.
cultic space, or to seek a numinous atmosphere for worship, was not considered an essential ingredient.’44 There was to be a compromise in identity which was the more remarkable given the Evangelical leaning of the congregation. No overt Christian image was placed on the new building, only its name and an illustration of two hands, greeting one another with a very discreet cross in the background (Fig 4.3). This presented both
Figure 4.3 The simplest of images of the cross on the main entrance to St Mark’s, Forest Gate. The author’s collection.
the changing nature of Newham as a multi-cultural borough and the growing awareness that there was a sense that much religious iconography and language was felt to be a barrier to engagement. This, as has been noted, was a concern for Martin Wallace since his curacy. Ironically, St Mark’s was willing to sacrifice these elements of identity in the hope that it would breakdown obstacles to those outside the Church.
Forest Gate designed its building with a corridor that reflected the level of commitment people felt towards the Church. All those interviewed who were involved in the redevelopment and the present church spoke of the path way into the church. The
44 Purdy, Churches and Chapels, p. 47.
entrance was a neutral space used for socializing, with a corridor leading off into various community rooms, culminating in the access to the church proper.45 This passageway physically reflected the level of commitment someone might have from open welcoming space, what Purdy called the ‘breathing space’, a neutral area that led through to the actual church and full engagement with all that St Mark’s believed in.46 Clearly, St
Mark’s was willing to adapt its space to offer an enticing building for the community to