St Mary Magdalene Church

Architecture

been troubled by penetrating damp, and needed to be restored in the 1930s and 1960s. It served as the chapel for a small house of the Wantage sisters during the years that they worked in the parish.

In the 1920s fashions had changed in “advanced” Anglo-Catholic circles, and the correct style was felt to be baroque, and so alterations were made to the church by Martin Travers, the leading designer in the style. Travers created the war memorial calvary outside the church, and the Lady Chapel inside the transept porch, an exercise in Spanish baroque, as a memorial to Fr. Bleadon, the second Vicar. Comper had produced a design for this Lady altar before the Great War, but it was never executed. Travers’ most prominent work, however, was to raise the floor of the chancel, and provide an elegant marble balustrade and communion rails. The work in cream and pale green marble fits well with Street’s wall decorations, though the raising of the reredos to overlap the east window is regrettable. Street had given the church a low chancel screen in delicate ironwork, which was preserved and installed in the crypt. The Mary Magdalene altar was also installed in the 1920s in the south aisle, and Travers executed a charming statue of the patron saint holding a model of the church which now stands there, but which originally stood in the south porch.

In the 1960s the community that the church served was swept away in slum clearance after wartime bombing, and the church left marooned, looking like some vast liner moored on the canal, amid the council flats of the Warwick Estate. The crypt Chapel was restored for the centenary of the church, and the north porch was walled up, but otherwise little was done to the building.

The twenty-first century has seen the first successful efforts to restore and regenerate the building after decades of decay. The vast west window was totally repaired, releaded and cleaned  in 2005-6. The roof has been reslated in 2007-8, and all the rainwater goods repaired or replaced, and the clerestory windows repaired. The vestries have been refurbished with a view to opening them up for community use once they have dried out. A major feasibility study has been carried out by architects and consultants for the regeneration of the crypt in partnership with Westminster City Council and the Paddington Development Trust, and it is hoped that this will be going forward in the near future.

The History of the Building

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