St George's, Hanover Square, is an Anglican church, the parish church of Mayfair in the City of Westminster, central London, built in the early eighteenth century as part of a project to build fifty new churches around London (the Queen Anne Churches). The church was designed by John James; its site was donated by General William Steuart, who laid the first stone in 1721. The building is one small block south of Hanover Square, near Oxford Circus. Because of its location, it has frequently been the venue for society weddings.
Ecclesiastical parish
A civil parish of St George Hanover Square and an ecclesiastical parish were created in 1724 from part of the ancient parish of St Martin in the Fields.[1] The boundaries of the ecclesiastical parish were adjusted in 1830, 1835 and 1865 when other parishes were carved out of it. The ecclesiastical parish still exists today and forms part of the Deanery of Westminster St Margaret in the Diocese of London.
Architecture
Interior of St George'sStreet view of St George's in 1787
The land for the church was donated by General Sir William Steuart.[2] The church was constructed in 1721–1725, funded by the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, and designed by John James,[3] who had been one of the two surveyors to the commission since 1716.[4] Its portico, supported by six Corinthian columns, projects across the pavement. There is a tower just behind the portico, rising from the roof above the west end of the nave.[3]
The interior is divided into nave and aisles by piers, square up to the height of the galleries, then rising to the ceiling in the form of Corinthian columns. The nave has a barrel vault, and the aisles transverse barrel vaults.[3]
St George's was opened in the new residential development of Hanover Square with no attached churchyard. Its first burial ground was sited beside its workhouse at Mount Street. When this filled up a larger burial ground was consecrated at Bayswater in 1765. They were closed for burials in 1854, when London's city churchyards were closed to protect public health. Burials at St George's included Mrs Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), an influential female writer of the "Gothic Novel", the Revd. Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), abolitionist and author of Tristram Shandy, and Francis Nicholson, British military officer and colonial administrator.
The Mount Street ground was later cleared of monuments and turned into a small park. Some of the old tombstones were used for guttering and drainage, and may be seen today. During the First World War the Bayswater ground was covered with 4' of top soil and used for growing vegetables. In 1969 the burial ground was cleared to enable land to be sold off for redevelopment. A skull, part anatomised, was conjectured to be Sterne's and a partial skeleton separated from the other remains to be transferred to Coxwold churchyard by the Laurence Sterne Trust. 11,500 further remains were taken to West Norwood Cemetery and cremated, for burial there.[5][6]
Handel was a regular worshipper at St George's, which is now one of the venues used by the annual London Handel Festival. He used to play the organ, and despite claims that he wrote Messiah in the church[8] it is very likely that it was written a few hundred yards away at his home at 25 Brook Street in summer 1741.[9]
St. George's has a full-time professional choir and a strong choral tradition and is a venue for classical music concerts. A Restoration Fund Appeal was launched on Trinity Sunday 2006 to raise a total of five million pounds, with a target of one and a half million pounds needed for the first phase of essential restoration work to the fabric of the church.
A recent[when?] concert series in support of the Restoration Fund was supported by the William Smith International Performance Programme and featured solo piano performances by students from the Royal College of Music, including Ren Yuan, Ina Charuashvili, Meng Yan Pan and the London debut of Maria Nemtsova of Russia.
The church is one of the two main bases of the Orpheus Sinfonia, an orchestra of players recently graduated from music colleges.[10]
Rectors
The following have served as rector of St George's, Hanover Square:[11]
1725–1759† Andrew Trebeck
1759–1774 Charles Moss (as Bishop of St David's 1766–74, later Bishop of Bath and Wells)
1774–1803† Henry Reginald Courtenay (as Bishop of Bristol 1794–97, Bishop & Archdeacon of Exeter 1797–1803)
1803–1844† Robert Hodgson (as Archdeacon of St Alban's 1814–16, Dean of Chester 1816–20, Dean of Carlisle 1820–44)
From its early days, the church was a fashionable place for weddings,[16] which have included those of:
Sir Francis Dashwood, founder of the second Hellfire Club, later Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Sarah, daughter of George Gould of Iver, Buckinghamshire, and widow of Sir Richard Ellis, Baronet, on 19 December 1745.[17]
Sir John Scott LillieCB (1790-1867), British officer in the Peninsular War, and Louisa Sutherland (1791-1860), daughter of Andrew Sutherland RN and Louisa Colebrooke on 22 January 1820.
High society weddings at St. George's Hanover Square fell in numbers in the late 20th century, a social change discreetly mentioned in the obituary of the Reverend W. M. Atkins, Rector of St George's from 1955 to 2000.[15]
^"Anglo-Colonial Notes", in the Evening Post (Wellington, New Zealand), dated 24 November 1899, p. 5
^Henry James Morgan, Types of Canadian Women and of Women who are or have been Connected with Canada (Williams Briggs, 1903), p. 42
^Mottram, Ralph Hale (1956). For Some We Loved: An intimate portrait of Ada and John Galsworthy. London: Hutchinson. p. 71.
^Henry Hall, Here's to the Next Time (London: Odhams Press, 1955), pp. 56–57; "Hall, Henry R, & Harker Margery" in Register of Marriages for St. George's Hanover Square Registration District, vol. 1a (1924), p. 648
