Now, many is the time that I’ve been to a church or a cathedral and exited via the gift shop. Yet, not one of them has had a sign as blatant as the one it the photo above. My better half had noticed this as we were checking out the various floats parked on Shaftesbury Avenue during Chinese New Year in central London. It was above one of the numerous Londoniana shops that can be found all over the capital.
This particular one was on the north side on Shaftesbury Avenue between Wardour Street and Dean Street on the way out of Chinatown, through theatre land and into Soho. We’d been on both streets during the day and hadn’t noticed any sign of a church, so being curious I decided to look up what I could find about the church.
The original church was built between 1677 and 1686 and is said to be the work of Sir Christopher Wren, although it may have been William Talman. It was built on land that was then fields, and was consecrated on 21 March 1686 by Bishop Henry Compton (after who the nearby Compton Street is named) as the parish church of the new civil and ecclesiastical parish of St Anne, created from part of the parish of St Martin in the Fields. It was dedicated to Saint Anne because Compton had been tutor to Princess Anne before she became Queen.
It was designed as an 80 feet long and 64 feet wide basilican church, with a 70 feet high west end tower. The tower was only completed in 1718, but by 1800 had become unstable. The original tower was demolished and the new brickwork tower was completed in 1803, and kept the one ton clock bell from the original tower.
The church had a famous choir and musical, and it was from St Anne’s that the first ever religious service with music to be broadcast on the radio came in the 1920’s.
When Shaftesbury Avenue was built between 1877 and 1886, it replaced the existing King Street that used to sit as the south west boundary to the consecrated grounds. Now however, the church became hidden away from the main thoroughfare, and a gallery was put in between numbers 65 and 67 Shaftesbury Avenue to lead to the south entrance to the church.
The old church was left burned out by a bombing in the blitz on the night of the 24th September 1940; with all that remained untouched was the tower. Religious services were moved to St Thomas’s on Regent Street (now demolished), and into rooms in St Anne’s House next to the church at number 57 Dean Street.
Apart from the tower, the remains of the rest of the church were demolished in 1953 and the gallery that the flagstone now lies above was converted to be a shop. The tower was used as a chapel during the 1950’s, and partly restored in 1979, before being fully restored and becoming a grade II listed building in 1991. A new complex was built in the space of the old church and was rededicated on St Anne’s day, the 26th July in the same year.
The Church is currently thriving as a church community and as venue for many local community and charitable events and meetings; it also houses the Soho Society, the archives of MoSoho (the Museum of Soho) and anti-homophobic bullying charity Diversity Role Models. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the rebuilding of the church a redesigned entrance on Dean Street was unrevealed on 8 December 2016. The new entrance was designed by Lina Viluma and Sherief al Rifa’i, who were chosen as part of a competition to redesign the entrance of St Anne’s to make it more visible, accessible and welcoming. The new design uses concealed lighting, neon and wooden panelling to create an inviting space that is also eye catching. Push plates on the front doors carry the imprints of the hands of local community members, and the corridor is lined with illuminated display cases.
Parts of its churchyard around the tower and west end are now the public park of St Anne’s Gardens, accessed from the Shaftesbury Avenue end of Wardour Street, whilst the church itself is accessed via a gate at the Shaftesbury Avenue end of Dean Street, as it does not front onto the street.
The Churchyard, St Anne’s Gardens, was closed to burials in 1854. This closure was largely as a result of one Sexton illegally dumping the bodies in the ground having sold their coffins for firewood, and because the churchyards of London were full. It is believed that in addition to the essayist William Hazlitt about 80,000 bodies are buried there. This explains why the ground is so high above the entrance on Wardour St. Something people who lie there eating their sandwiches on sunny summer lunchtime are probably quite unaware of!