The church is a Grade II* listed
building and the entry at the English Heritage website [visit
link] tells us:
"Built about 1650-54 on land given
by East India Company and largely rebuilt by them in 1776. Nave arcades formed
with timber posts. Interesting monuments in church and churchyard. Altered and
enlarged in 1875 by Teulon when the exterior was clad with Kentish ragstone.
Wooden cupola (RCHNM). Included for historical associations and
interior."
The St Matthias Community Centre
website [visit
link] carries an extensive history. The following is some of the more
salient points taken from the website:
"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
diswpted, 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 1646-1 647, 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."