From Survey of London: Volume 41, Brompton. Originally published by London County Council, London, 1983:
“Now called St. Peter’s Armenian Church, this is the second of the two churches which were built by (Sir) Charles James Freake to serve the needs of the occupants of the houses he had built or was about to build on the Smith’s Charity estate. St. Peter’s was erected in 1866–7 from designs prepared in Freake’s own office, but much of its architectural interest arises from a number of alterations which were made to the interior during the present century under the direction of W. D. Caroe.
The church was built on ground which Freake held from the Smith’s Charity trustees by virtue of a building agreement of 1862. Early in 1865 he approached Dr. A. C. Tait, then Bishop of London and later Archbishop of Canterbury, with a proposal to build a church at his own expense, and sought Tait’s aid in obtaining a sufficiently large district for the church. By May 1865 he had obtained a promise from the charity’s trustees to convey the site to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners as a free gift, and in June 1866 he made a formal proposal to the Commissioners, through his solicitor Charles Fishlake Cundy, for the erection, endowment and perpetual patronage of a church to seat 1,500 (500 in free seats) which he estimated would cost £7,000 and for which he was prepared to provide an endowment of £1,000. The Commissioners agreed, and the foundation stone was laid by Mrs. Freake on 21 July 1866. After a dispute with the sponsors of the proposed new church of St. Augustine’s, Queen’s Gate, over the size of the respective districts to be allotted to the two churches, which was resolved by the intervention of Bishop Tait, St. Peter’s was consecrated by him on 29 June 1867.
Freake seems to have been at pains to conceal the identity of the actual architect or architects of the building. Some contemporary journals attributed the design to him personally, but The Builder was probably more accurate in stating that the church was built by Freake ‘from drawings prepared in his own office’, with J. Brown as clerk of works and general foreman. A number of fledgling architects are known to have worked under Freake, and his principal executant on work of about this date in Grosvenor Square was William Tasker. If experienced outside advice on church-building was needed, however, Thomas Cundy II, who was the brother of Freake’s solicitor, Charles Fishlake Cundy, and who was involved in the work in Grosvenor Square as the Grosvenor estate surveyor, would have been well qualified to assist.
The first incumbent to be appointed by Freake, the Honourable and Reverend F. C. E. Byng, was a son of the second Earl of Strafford. Some of the cost of the church appears to have been met by him, perhaps merely the interest charges on a loan which Freake had evidently had to take out, as (Sir) Henry Cole recorded in his diary instances when he was called upon to mediate between the two men on monetary matters. Byng resigned the living in 1890 and nine years later succeeded his brother as fifth Earl of Strafford.
St. Peter’s has been described as the High Church equivalent of St. Paul’s, Onslow Square, but its services were never particularly ‘High’. A later vicar said that it has been difficult to define or place from the party, or the theological point of view, except that it has been ‘certainly “Church of England” ’. He characterised the congregation as one that ‘has always been fortunate in its men. Men who are earning their living in London can hardly live in that part of London unless they are efficient, and on the other hand it is not so expensive as to make it impossible for the returned Colonial Governor, the retired Admiral or General, the retired or senior Civil Servant to live there. We always had a large number of knights in the congregation, which indicates the type of men. Not great men perhaps, not of the first rank, but faithful servants of the State, men who had done something.’
The large and prosperous congregation which the church attracted for much of its history provided the means for extensive embellishments to be carried out. The most important of these were undertaken in two schemes of 1907–9 and 1922–3, in both of which most of the cost was defrayed by Percy C. Morris of Elm Park Gardens, Chelsea, a barrister by profession, and members of his family. Morris appears to have been instrumental in obtaining the services of W. D. Caröe as architect for the work, and the latter’s association with the church continued until his death in 1938, when his memorial service was held in St. Peter’s. In the work Caröe was assisted by Herbert Passmore, who later became his partner, and whose connexion with the church as an architect and a member of the congregation (in which he served as both churchwarden and sidesman) continued until his death at the age of ninety-eight in 1966. Alban Caröe, W. D. Caröe’s son, was architect to the fabric during the final period of the church’s history as an Anglican place of worship, having taken over the position in 1958.
The church is basically cruciform on plan with a very broad nave and aisles, wide transepts, a spacious crossing, and a short apsidal chancel. To the north of the chancel is a morning chapel which was added by Caröe in 1907–9, replacing a vestry, and to the south is a large organ chamber which is also principally Caröe’s work of the same date.
The exterior, which is in the Decorated style and faced with Kentish ragstone, has been relatively little altered from the time of first building, apart from the addition of a porch on the north side as part of the alterations of 1907–9, and an untidy jumble of accretions at the east end, visible only from Selwood Place. Only the west front can be seen clearly from a distance and here the architectural effect has been concentrated in the form of a tall gabled front with a five-light window and a large tower with a broach spire rising to a height of 160 feet.
https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol41/plate-58
In the interior the walls of the nave and transepts are faced with brick, which was originally cream-coloured with patterns in red and black, but the intended polychromatic effect was largely obliterated by whitewashing in the 1930’s.
The west end of the nave is dominated by an elegant stone gallery which is supported on four slim clustered columns and decorated with figure sculpture and other carvings. Originally galleries were only provided in the transepts, but that in the south transept had to be reduced in size when the organ chamber was rebuilt in 1907–9, and to compensate Caröe added the present west gallery. Above the gallery the stained glass in the west window is by Ward and Hughes and dates from the establishment of the church, but it was badly damaged during the war of 1939–45 and is no longer complete.
The nave and aisles are separated by simple stone arcades of wide arches carried on clustered columns. The arcades are continued into the crossing in a more complex and unusual arrangement of triple arches, the outer ones narrow and sharply pointed and the inner wide and high and supported by round columns with crocket capitals. The clerestory windows are alternately pairs of trefoilheaded lights and quatrefoils with glass of 1904–6 by the Arts and Crafts stained-glass artist Mary Lowndes. The remaining glass in the nave and transepts is richly varied and includes work by Ward and Hughes, Clayton and Bell, and Heaton, Butler and Bayne. The roof of the nave is of open timberwork.
The constricted nature of the east end apparently caused problems from the beginning, as the large corbels which once supported the chancel arch were attributed in 1872 to an early alteration in which the lower part of the opening had been widened. The choir projects into the crossing, from which it was originally separated by a dwarf stone screen, but in 1900 this was replaced by marble walls and an ornate wrought-iron screen. The latter was removed when the marble walls were advanced by six feet in 1922–3, but parts of it have been re-erected at the sides of the choir.
The apsidal sanctuary itself was much embellished in 1922–3 to Caröe’s design at a cost of over £7,400, partly to remedy its dark and cramped condition and partly to serve as a war memorial. The main structural alteration was the insertion of dormer windows, each consisting of three simple segmental-headed lights filled with stained glass, between the ribs of the roof. A new stone reredos with a sculpture of the Crucifixion was flanked by arcades incorporating a bishop’s seat, sedilia and piscina with richly caned Gothic canopies above, all being the work of the sculptor Nathaniel Hitch. (It should, however, be noted that the fine carvings of angels playing musical instruments in the spandrels above the lancet windows, no doubt inspired by the sculptures in the Angel Choir of Lincoln Cathedral, are earlier work which was retained.) A new altar, altar-rail and choir stalls were made by Dart and Francis of Crediton, Devon, a firm much used by Caröe. The glass was by James Powell and Sons, that in the main lights replacing some ‘excellent stained glass’ by Ward and Hughes, but Powell’s glass in these windows has in turn been so badly damaged by bombing that only fragments remain, re-used as decorative borders to clear glass. The general contractors for the alterations were F. Hitch and Company of Ware, Hertfordshire.
If the present appearance of the chancel is largely due to alterations carried out to Caröe’s designs, the morning chapel to the north, which was formed in 1907–9 and originally called the Chapel of the Holy Spirit, is entirely of his creation. Opening off the north transept through a tall stone arch with a low bronze rail and gates, the chapel is faced with Bath stone and has two bays in its upper part and three in the lower including a deep recess beneath the east window which contains the altar and reredos. The chapel is lierne-vaulted in stone and the springers of the main ribs are decorated with statues of angels, apostles, prophets and other Christian figures including, in the mediaeval tradition, Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had died a short time previously. The main bosses of the vault are carved with the head of Christ and the Holy Dove, while on the subsidiary bosses are angels bearing symbols of the Passion and the insignia of various learned institutions. These include those with which the Morris family were associated, and those of Trinity College, Cambridge, where Caröe studied, and of New College, Oxford, the college of the vicar, the Reverend W. S. Swayne. The lower parts of the walls are arcaded and have sedilia on the north side and a piscina on the south. An opening on the south side of the western bay allows communication with the chancel through an intervening passage.
The stone caning in the chapel, which was carried out by Nathaniel Hitch and his assistant Harold Whitaker, reaches its apogee in the finely detailed reredos which has three niches with lacy canopies above containing figure sculpture, that in the central niche depicting the Crucifixion. The altar beneath is of oak and was made by Dart and Francis to Caröe’s design. The marble floor, which was laid Cosmati fashion, is by Arthur Lee and Brothers of Hayes, and the glass of the six-light east window is by James Powell and Sons. Like much else in the chapel, it is of very high quality and rich in detail while restrained in colouring so as to allow a great deal of light to pass through. The general contractors for the construction of the chapel were Collins and Godfrey of Tewkesbury.
The alterations which were made to the organ chamber on the opposite side of the chancel at the same time as the building of the morning chapel constituted but one stage in the history of the organ, which is almost as complex as that of the church itself. The first organ, by Messrs. Hill and Sons, is famous as the instrument on which (Sir) Arthur Sullivan played from 1867 to 1871 as the church’s first organist. This was replaced in 1893 by a Willis organ which, in turn, was largely rebuilt in 1908 by J. W. Walker and Sons when the organ chamber was much enlarged and new cases were designed by Caröe. Further alterations were made in 1922–3, and after damage during the war of 1939–45 repairs were carried out. Finally a major restoration was undertaken by Hill, Norman and Beard in 1958.
Of the church’s other fixtures and fittings, the present pulpit, which is of wood on a stone base, is the third and dates from 1902; it was designed by John Samuel Alder, architect. An elaborate Gothic wooden canopy at the west end of the north aisle formerly housed the font which is now in the south transept. Another font, which was introduced by the Armenians from a church in Birmingham, is in the morning chapel. A large memorial to Frank Macrae (d. 1915) with an inset painting of St. George, which is in the north aisle, is by Jesse Bayes. At the west end of the nave is a Gothic memorial to Freake similar to that in St. Paul’s, Onslow Square, and a memorial to the war of 1914–18 which was designed by Caröe.
The vicarage to the north of the church was built in 1870 to the designs of Alfred Williams at an estimated cost of £2,570, for which the endowment of £1,000 given by Freake was used in partial payment. Although built before its Italianate neighbours, it now forms an end-of-terrace house in a contrasting Gothic style in red brick and stone. Its principal feature is a tall recessed arch, asymmetrically placed, at second- and third-floor level containing paired window openings which are divided vertically by decorated stone panels. Above the arch is a gable with an iron finial. The house has been much altered and is now divided into flats.
A two-storey building containing vestries on the ground floor and a church hall with an open-timber roof above was erected to Caröe’s designs behind the vicarage as part of the alterations of 1907–9, when the new morning chapel replaced the original vestry.
In January 1973 the last Anglican service was held in the church and its parish was united with that of St. Mary, The Boltons. In June 1975, however, St. Peter’s was re-consecrated by the Supreme Catholicos of all Armenians as the cathedral church of the Armenians in London.”
Julia Upton 