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St George's Hanover Square Church
View from St George Street
51°30′45″N 0°8′34″W / 51.51250°N 0.14278°W / 51.51250; -0.14278Coordinates: 51°30′45″N 0°8′34″W / 51.51250°N 0.14278°W / 51.51250; -0.14278
Location	City of Westminster, London
Country	United Kingdom
Denomination	Church of England
History
Founded	1725
Architecture
Heritage designation	Grade I
Architect(s)	John James
Years built	1721-1725
Administration
Parish	St. George, Hanover Square with St. Mark
Diocese	London
Clergy
Rector	Rev Roderick Leece
Laity
Organist/Director of music	Simon Williams
Churchwarden(s)	Michael Beckett Mark Hewitt
Verger	Seamus O'Hare

St George's Hanover Square Church is an Anglican church in the City of Westminster, central London, built in the early eighteenth century. The land on which the church stands was donated by General William Steuart, who laid the first stone in 1721. The church was designed by John James and was constructed under a project to build fifty new churches around London (the Queen Anne Churches). The building is one small block south of Hanover Square, near Oxford Circus, in what is now the City of Westminster. Owing to its Mayfair location, it has frequently been the venue for high 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. The land for the church was donated by General Sir William Steuart.^[2]

Architecture

Interior of St George's

The church was constructed in 1721–25, 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]

Weddings

View of St George's, 1787

The church was a fashionable place of worship to have weddings. It was here that Theodore Roosevelt, the future US President, aged 28, married Edith Carow, aged 25, on 2 December 1886. Henry Holland married Capability Brown's daughter Bridget on 11 February 1773 in the church.^[5]John Nash married Mary Ann Bradley on 17 December 1798 in the church.^[6] Simon Peirce married Sarah Douce (1761) one main family members who held a seat on principal manor medieval lord and John Doust and Anna Smith (1758) family member of Douche Family Crest. One famous London marriage involved the architect John Shaw Senior (1776–1832) to Elizabeth Hester Whitfield in 1799. Other notable people married there include the Eccentric Missionary, Joseph Wolff, in 1827. In October 1899, Alfreda Ernestina Albertina Bowen, daughter of Sir George Ferguson Bowen and Contessa Diamantina di Roma, married Robert Lydston Newman.^[7] Elliot Allard, OBE married Pamela Wigan of St. John's Wood, great granddaughter of James Wigan, of Mortlake prior owner and founder of Mortlake Brewery, which latterly became the Stag Brewery. Wealthy gentleman Robert Gunnell Esq. of James Street, Mayfair, a principal clerk at the House of Commons, married the beautiful Anne Rozea (French Huguenot) of Duke's Court, Royal Mews 11 Aug. 1745. After the wedding, they had a reception in Marylebone where her brother Jassintour Rozea, the well-known master chef to Charles Seymor, 6th Duke of Somerset, laid on a luncheon for fifty-five guests. High society weddings at St. George's diminished in the late 20th century, a social change discreetly mentioned in the obituary of Rector W.M. Atkins, incumbent 1955-2000. ^[8]

Burial ground

St George's was opened in the new residential development of Hanover Square with no attached churchyard. Its first burial ground was sited besides 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.^[9][10]

In popular culture

In the musical My Fair Lady, Alfred Doolittle (Stanley Holloway), having just been provided with an inheritance and having to move into "middle-class morality", invites his daughter Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) to his wedding at this church.^[11] Following the invitation, he and his fellows sing "Get Me to the Church on Time".

The church is mentioned as the venue for the forthcoming marriage of Iris Henderson in The Lady Vanishes (1938 film).

In the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor it is the setting of the wedding of the eponymous Lord St Simon and American Hatty Doran, whose disappearance sparks Holmes' investigation.

Music

The organ in 2009 (since rebuilt^[12])

Handel was a regular worshipper at St George's, which is now one of the venues used by the annual London Handel Festival.^[13] 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 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.^[14]

References

External links

• 
  Parish data (Vision of Britain)


• http://www.stgeorgeshanoversquare.org/


• Deanery of Westminster (St Margaret)


• 
  Mystery Worshipper Report at the Ship of Fools website