The beginning of the church coincided with the outbreak of the English Civil War. The 1640’s was not an auspicious decade for church building: money was in short supply, trade was disrupted, circumstances were uncertain. So too was religion: William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, was beheaded in 1645 and the Head of the Church of England, King Charles I, followed him to the block in 1649. London became a centre for Independent congregations which provided the core of support for Parliament. The Commonwealth may have seen the dismantling of monarchy and episcopacy, but parishes continued to worship and to face dayto-day problems. Poplar and Blackwall remained without a place of worship and once more it was a legacy that made progress possible. Sir John Gayer, a director of the East India Company and Lord Mayor of London in 1646-1647, died in 1649 and left money for the glazing of the Poplar Chapel, so long as it was built within four years of his death.
This legacy, together with more monies from the Company provided a spur for building. A prominent City merchant and resident of Mile End Green, Maurice Thompson, was the prime mover behind the completion of the chapel. In June 1652 the Company made its first payment of £100 to a City bricklayer named John Tanner (Master of the Bricklayers’ Company in 1654) who can be seen as the principal builder of the church. Tanner was subsequently appointed Bricklayer to the Corporation of London. Work was finally under way upon the earlier foundations, and by 1654 the building was completed and ready for worship.
St Matthias, Poplar as we see it today is externally Victorian and internally seventeenth century. It has recently been established by Peter Guillery that the chapel was closely based on an earlier building, the now-demolished Broadway Chapel of 1635-39, which stood on present-day Victoria Street, Westminster. The designer of that building is not known, nor is that of the Poplar Chapel. All that can be said is that John Tanner and his patrons in the East India Company would have been familiar with this, London’s most recently completed church. The Broadway Chapel was an obvious model, and an appropriate one, for the East India Company’s chapel for Poplar: both were built for wealthy congregations of City merchants with leanings towards Puritanism.
The earliest illustration of the building, a primitive ink drawing now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford dates only from 1755. It shows the chapel from the north-east, with walls of brick containing arched and square windows with bizarre mutant Perpendicular tracery within. The triple gabled roof runs east-west and is crossed by a taller north-south pitched roof, and central gable to the west end is surmounted by a weathervane-capped tower. This tower was a later addition: a report of 1718 stated that the lack of a tower on the chapel was an argument against raising it to the status of a parish church. The red brick walls were enhanced with stone quoins at the corners. It can at once be appreciated that the Victorian alterations have fundamentally altered the exterior appearance of the church.
Internally the cross-shaped roof form is immediately apparent. The rows of Tuscan columns supports entablatures, from which rises the elliptically vaulted ceiling. Seven out of eight of these columns are of oak: one has been replaced in stone, but the remainder are original. The story that they were made from ships’ masts is, alas, untrue. The centre of the ceiling sports the only early decorative feature to remain: the carved boss which depicts the original arms of the East India Company, which aptly featured three sailing ships. This was probably installed in 1657, when the Company took over responsibility for the chapel from the financially overstretched populace of Poplar and Blackwall.
The overall impression of the interior is one of breadth, spaciousness and order. The present east end was added in 1875-76. Prior to that the building was severely rectangular, emphasising the lucid central planning of the interior. This was ideal for the sort of worship that stressed the word rather than ceremony, that stressed bible readings and preaching, and played down the celebration of the Eucharist. This was the religion of Calvanism, and thus St Matthias can be said to reflect closely the Puritanism of Interregnum London.
In 1711 the Commissioners for Building Fifty New Churches were informed that the building was worthy of being upgraded to a parish church (the vast parish of Stepney was subsequently divided up into no fewer that sixty-seven lesser parishes by the late nineteenth century). It was not until 1866, however, that the church was finally consecrated, renamed St Matthias and accorded parish status. Poplar itself, and area which was undergoing dramatic commercial and population growth, had been made a parish in 1821, and the large nearby church of All Saints was built in 1821-23.
The eighteenth-century history of the church is one of gradual repair; its nineteenth century history is one of major alteration.
Galleries were first installed in the early i8” century, and the pulpit visible in the earliest photograph of the church shows a tall triple-decker pulpit which was probably installed in 1733. In 1774 the congregation requested the East India Company overhaul the building, which was ‘exceedingly out of repair in the window frames and wall’. Accordingly, in 1775-76, the Company’s surveyor, Richard Jupp (1728-99), oversaw extensive repairs and alterations which included the removal of the mutant Gothic windows and their replacement with more correctly classical arched windows of a similar shape to the present ones. In addition, one of the wooden columns was replaced in stone. He also altered the tower and these changes were recorded in wash drawings of c.1800. The other main change to the building was the application of a coat of cement render to the exterior, over the brick walls of the 1650’s. This occurred in 1803.
At about the same time the chapel received its most distinguished addition: the mural monument to George Steevens, by John Flaxman (1755-1826). Steevens, who died in 1800, belonged to a wealthy merchant family with strong East India Company ties, and thus was buried here. He was best known as a literary controversialist, member of Dr Johnson’s circle and the editor of Shakespeare, and is depicted at work before a bust of the Bard in a pose that Flaxman took from one of the figures on the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo. Removed for safe-keeping from the church by the Diocese of London in the late 1970’s, it is currently on loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. It is among the finest of memorials by Britain’s outstanding neo-classical sculptor.
To midi9th century eyes the Poplar Chapel was a distinctly awkward little building which wholly lacked the time-hallowed gravity that a proper parish church was expected to have.
Funds did not allow for its demolition and replacement, but the parish, led by its dynamic vicar, the Revd John Fenwick Kitto, did the next best thing; it wrapped the building inside a cloak of Kentish ragstone, inserted traceried windows, and added a chance! at the east end and a jaunty bell tower at the west. Gone — externally — was the Puritan preaching box of the Poplar Chapel; the Anglican parish church of St Matthias had arrived. The architect responsible for the alterations was William Milford Teulon (1823-1 900), brother of the better- known Samuel Sanders Teulon (1812-1873). The younger Teulon, together with his partner E. Evans Cronk, carried out the alterations in three phases. The first, in 1867-68, affected the interior with the removal of the box pews and of the north and south galleries, and the installation of modern pulpit, font and organ. The re-facing of the church in ragstone with Bath stone dressings and the addition of porches and the tower took place in 1870-74. The final phase was the addition of a chancel, vestry room and organ chamber at the east end, completed in 1876.
St Matthias survived the Blitz of the Second World War, which brought such devastation to the Docklands, relatively unscathed. In the 1970’s there was a move to merge the congregation of certain churches in Poplar and a decision was taken to close St Matthias. This finally occurred in October 1976, and thus ended three hundred and twenty two years of worship. It was declared redundant in 1977.
Discussions over the re-use of the church were protracted: a number of schemes for conversion (into an arts centre, into a place for musical performances, even into squash courts) came and went. In the mean time, the building fell prey to vandalism and a downward spiral of neglect and decay developed. In 1976, the lead from the roof was stolen; the rain came in; dry rot proliferated and the floor and fixtures were removed. The worse the vandalism, the more inviting further damage and theft became.
English Heritage and the London Docklands Development Corporation became increasingly concerned over the deteriorating condition of this important building. In 1990 they agreed a major restoration scheme which involved a jointly funded programme of repairs costing £700,000. The LDDC negotiated a “Planning Gain” agreement which secured funding of £700,000 from a developer to restore the interior and to landscape the churchyard. Grant aid was also obtained from the Heritage of London Trust and Barclays Bank plc for some of the costs of repairs to the tombs, repair and replacement of the stained glass and the overhaul of the clock mechanism.
The decision was taken not to restore the church to its hypothetical original appearance but rather to conserve the building in the form in which it had come down to the present. Thus the Kentish ragstone cladding was not stripped away to reveal the original brickwork (which might well have been in poor condition), but consolidated. Teulon and Cronk’s quirky bell tower was not removed in favour of a more conventional cupola, but conserved. Their Gothic stone dressings and curvilinear window tracery were also not only retained, but returned to their original condition. The architect responsible for the restoration was Roger Taigel of Peter Codling Architects of Norwich. Bakers of Danbury, Essex were the main contractors.
The bright and broad interior of the original Puritan chapel has returned to its original impressiveness and now lends itself readily to re-use. The LDDC and English Heritage were also instrumental in the negotiations to establish a charitable trust to take on responsibility for the upkeep and operation of the building. The trust — the St Matthias Conservation Trust — came into being in 1992 and has negotiated a long lease from the Diocese of London. The Trust provides for local and national representation and is committed to making thebuilding available for community use. Once more, the oldest building in Docklands will be playing an active part in the lives of the local people.