Long life | 31 March 2016

The Parish Church of St Luke in Sydney Street, Chelsea, is enormous. Vaguely reminiscent of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, it was built in the 1820s to accommodate a congregation of 2,500 people and was one of the earliest Gothic Revival churches in London, with a higher nave than any church in the capital other than St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. It was built at great expense with the help of a government subsidy as a result of the Church Building Act of 1818, by which Parliament allocated funds for building new churches in the urban areas of Britain where populations had greatly outgrown the facilities for Christian worship.

Chelsea was one such area, and its then rector, the Revd Gerald Valerian Wellesley, brother of the first Duke of Wellington, pressed hard for St Luke’s construction. He considered his existing parish church — now Chelsea Old Church — too small for his purposes; but he might also have been influenced by a then widely held belief that the Church of England should be strengthened as a bulwark against the sort of revolutionary upheavals that France had recently endured.