Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
The Building of and Reactions to the New St. Paul's in the National Press
I found two articles which may bring back memories to some and offer new insights to others:
The Hornsey Journal, a north London advertiser, has not been the staunchest fan of the new Church of St Paul, Harringay. A year ago, as this powerful new building was rising above its architectural congregation of Victorian terraced houses, the paper ran a front-page story ('Unholy Row raging over new church]') in which it solicited views from local people.
'Even builders were dismayed,' the article trumpeted. 'One said: 'I've been in this game since 1947 and helped build hundreds of churches, but this is the worst. It is depressing to come here every day.' '
It is difficult to know where those 'hundreds' of parish churches built gamely since 1947 might be and even more difficult to submit oneself to the authority of a newspaper that, in the same report, describes Alexandra Palace as a 'pseudo-Victorian, neo-Romanesque carbuncle of Corinthian proportions'.
But, more seriously, it is sad to see an important new building - one that will place Harringay firmly on the cultural and spiritual map of London - reviled before its true impact can be measured.
Designed by Peter Inskip and Peter Jenkins, St Paul's is a powerful and moving building. In simple planes and volumes of brick, steel and reconstituted stone, it captures the idea of religious contemplation. It has the elemental qualities of a Greek temple, of a Cistercian abbey, of Shoosmith's church of St Martin's, New Delhi (the recent rebuilding of which has been supported by readers of the Independent), and of Le Corbusier's pilgrim chapel at Ronchamp. It is neither modern nor ancient, but enjoys the timeless appeal of all great religious architecture. Inside, the qualities of proportion, light and sound conspire to quieten and elevate the rowdiest and most worldly spirit.
Perhaps what has upset local papers, planning committees and politically correct residents most about St Paul's is that it was commissioned by a politically incorrect and vertiginously High branch of the Church of England. When the designs were submitted, local planners suggested that the new church should not dominate its surroundings as its Victorian predecessor had done; instead it should rise no higher than the rooftops of the terraced houses that stamp their fanciful facades on the neighbourhood.
St Paul's, however, is far more 'correct' than its detractors would like to think. It might be 'High', but the church attracts a large proportion of black worshippers (two-thirds, says the resident priest, Father John Seeley) and it is a focal point of a disparate community of ethnic minorities. Father Seeley keeps the church open for unusually long hours and, even for those for whom organised religion is an irrelevance, the new building is a place to escape the everyday world. It is also a handsome new monument that gives sprawling Harringay a visual anchor.
The new church replaces old St Paul's - a late Victorian Gothic design - destroyed by fire on Ash Wednesday 1984. Stripped almost bare of superfluous detail, its power to move the spirit to silence derives solely from its basic architecture. On one level the church is no more than four walls topped with a roof in the form of an extruded pediment, through which daylight filters down into a vast and singular white- painted room. The salmon-pink brick walls are punched through with the tiniest square windows; inside, the exposed bricks are painted white and left unadorned. Yet this is no Lego-style box. The way in which Jenkins has arranged his four walls and simple steel roof is extremely subtle.
The church, in Wightman Road, occupies a steeply sloping site but is entered on the level without a single step up from the pavement. Passing under the great projecting pediment, between the massive banded walls and beneath the steel louvres of the belfry, worshippers enter under an organ loft, through a free-standing portal and into a gigantic, light-filled room covered with a lofty ceiling shaped as a cross of Lorraine.
As far as possible, every element is restrained. Yet already - inevitably and perhaps not wrongly - the silence of the architecture is being taken over bit by bit by the familiar accoutrements of parish life. Here are blue candles, statues of St Anthony and St Paul hung around with name tags to remind visitors who they are, leaflets and cushions, incongruous bits and bobs.
On the one hand, the architecture is powerful enough to swamp such venial visual sins; on the other, they irritate in much the same way as a rogue eyelash. But who can afford to be so puritanical in their attitudes towards a church where what matters most is that people are attracted to it, want to attend its services and lean on its priests? St Paul's is as sublime as any pounds 750,000 building can be.
Two artworks have been commissioned by the architects: Stephen Cox's craggy altar, carved from a slab of imperial porphyry brought from the Egyptian desert, and a reredos of travertine, also by Cox, depicting Christ crucified above a map of St Paul's travels.
The church will be visited by students of architecture from as far and as wide as the journeys of the apostle. In time, it will be welcomed by the people of Harringay and even by the Hornsey Journal.
Whenever I hear talk of the 'consolations' of art I begin to smell a phoney. Great works of art never console anybody: religion does and the one is not a substitute for the other. Of course, I am not saying that works of art have no place in worship - rather that aesthetic quality has very little to do with either creating or sustaining faith. You have only to walk into any church in Rome or Florence to prove the point. Tourists crowd around the Masaccio or the Caravaggio but the people actually praying kneel before the plaster saint with the painted face. In the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome, it is not Michelangelo's statue of the Risen Christ that is surrounded by candles and flowers, but a saccharine 19th-century image ofthe Sacred Heart. The last important religious painter was Rouault.
Mark Rothko's non-denominational chapel in Houston may be an artistic triumph, but it subverts the central issue of religious faith, being dedicated not to the contemplation of God's presence, but of His absence.
In terms of its function as sacred art, the 14 canvases which make up Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross in the National Gallery in Washington are more successful. Newman brilliantly used the most minimal means - colours, stripes and the occasional spatter of paint - to evoke the Crowning with Thorns, Mocking of Christ and Crucifixion. Still, consolation? I don't think so.
Here in Britain, Epstein, Sickert, Spencer and Sutherland all tried their hands at religious art, each self consciously trying to breathe new life into an exhausted visual tradition. In the art of our own time, I respect Christian Boltanski's assemblages of photos and lights in church interiors -- but not much else. Recent exhibitions of sacred art in the cathedrals of Lincoln, Worcester and St Paul's merely demonstrate how embarrassing this kind of subject can be when not done well. And, when I hear of an abstract painting byTherese Oulton being hung over the high altar at Tewkesbury Abbey, I leave the room.
That is why a project in a quiet back street in Harringay is so interesting.
St Paul's Church, Harringay, constitutes one of the most original acts of patronage by the Church of England since the Second World War. The architect Peter Jenkins and sculptor Steven Cox worked together to create an interior which invites meditation on the oldest subject In Chiistian art. Christ's Sacrifice on the Cross.
In 1984, the Gothic Revival church of St Paul's burnt to the ground. The commission to design a new church was awarded to the firm of Inskip & Jenkins. Working on a very limited budget, Peter Jenkins designed a modern brick building, based on the plan of an Early Christian basilica, the kind in which St Paul might have preached. Windowless from the outside, the interior is bathed in diffused natural light from huge triangular skylights in the roof. The walls are white, the seating black. The effect is a bit like entering a whitewashed church in Greece.
What pulls the severe interior together is Cox's remarkable sculptural contribution, a monumental altar made of rare Imperial porphyry, above which hangs a jagged sculptural reredos of travertine stone. Blending together the mediums of sculpture and painting, Cox then stained the stone with copper and iron oxides to depict the Crucifixion. Against the simple white background, the resulting blues and rust-browns register with dramatic forte. Cox is one of the most respected sculptors working in Britain today, and one whose art I ardently admire.
But I have to admit I was surprised to find him working in· a specifically Christian context, because he is best known for his stone carvings based on the sensual art of southern India. Typical visual sources range from erotic carved temple reliefs to stone lingams, and he has been known to anoint his own statues with oil and drape them in brightly coloured cloths.
Cox's art deals with eternal themes using conventional stone-carving techniques. But more than this, it is founded on the profound questions he asks about the meanings of the sacred forms that inspire him. The best I can do to describe his work is to say that he has a feeling for the holy. Though at first his sculptures look simple, the more you look at them, the more mysterious they become.
This is particularly true at Harringay. Cox begins by literally turning Christian iconography upside-down. His reredos takes the form of a traditional Italian Renaissance altar-piece, but turned on its head, with the arch at the bottom. The monumental Crucifixion shows Christ from behind as though looking down over the earth, which is depicted in the lower half of the reredos. Were the priest to celebrate mass in the traditional position, with his back to his congregation, the act would take on additional resonance when performed under this haunting image.
An important theme in the reredos is fragmentation. The upper section is divided into four parts, in such a way that the spaces between the stones form three crosses. The broken sections below suggest both the great rivers of the ancient world and a shattered universe. Closer up, one sees that the globe is actually a map of the Roman empire on which appear the names of the cities in which St Paul preached, inscribed in Greek letters. In this way, Cox emphasises the Church's historical origins in the early Christian world.
Equally impressive is the altar. Four rectangles made of breccia, a funeral stone used by the ancient Egyptians, surmounted by three chunky stone crosses, and held together by the great slab of porphyry quarried in Egypt and carved into a magnificent sacrificial table. Cox's sensitivity both to material and form is also evident in the contrasting shape of the baptismal font at the back of the church. Carved from the same stone slab as the altar, it is literally a chip off the old block, but ovoid in shape and exquisitely poised on top ofa black rectangle.
Everything about Cox's work, from the material it is made of to its shape, is laden with symbolic content, both religious and historical. Though consolation is not the right word. i can well imagine that art of this quality has the power to lead the believer to prayer and meditation.
No idea what they're going on about? Have a peek at the interior on this Harringay Online video clip.
A Temple of Simplicity to Soothe the Soul
- a new north London church has been greeted with dismay by local people, but Jonathan Glancey finds it a powerful and moving building
by Jonathan Glancey, Independent on Sunday (Architecture) Wednesday, 4 August 1993
The Hornsey Journal, a north London advertiser, has not been the staunchest fan of the new Church of St Paul, Harringay. A year ago, as this powerful new building was rising above its architectural congregation of Victorian terraced houses, the paper ran a front-page story ('Unholy Row raging over new church]') in which it solicited views from local people.
'Even builders were dismayed,' the article trumpeted. 'One said: 'I've been in this game since 1947 and helped build hundreds of churches, but this is the worst. It is depressing to come here every day.' '
It is difficult to know where those 'hundreds' of parish churches built gamely since 1947 might be and even more difficult to submit oneself to the authority of a newspaper that, in the same report, describes Alexandra Palace as a 'pseudo-Victorian, neo-Romanesque carbuncle of Corinthian proportions'.
But, more seriously, it is sad to see an important new building - one that will place Harringay firmly on the cultural and spiritual map of London - reviled before its true impact can be measured.
Designed by Peter Inskip and Peter Jenkins, St Paul's is a powerful and moving building. In simple planes and volumes of brick, steel and reconstituted stone, it captures the idea of religious contemplation. It has the elemental qualities of a Greek temple, of a Cistercian abbey, of Shoosmith's church of St Martin's, New Delhi (the recent rebuilding of which has been supported by readers of the Independent), and of Le Corbusier's pilgrim chapel at Ronchamp. It is neither modern nor ancient, but enjoys the timeless appeal of all great religious architecture. Inside, the qualities of proportion, light and sound conspire to quieten and elevate the rowdiest and most worldly spirit.
Perhaps what has upset local papers, planning committees and politically correct residents most about St Paul's is that it was commissioned by a politically incorrect and vertiginously High branch of the Church of England. When the designs were submitted, local planners suggested that the new church should not dominate its surroundings as its Victorian predecessor had done; instead it should rise no higher than the rooftops of the terraced houses that stamp their fanciful facades on the neighbourhood.
St Paul's, however, is far more 'correct' than its detractors would like to think. It might be 'High', but the church attracts a large proportion of black worshippers (two-thirds, says the resident priest, Father John Seeley) and it is a focal point of a disparate community of ethnic minorities. Father Seeley keeps the church open for unusually long hours and, even for those for whom organised religion is an irrelevance, the new building is a place to escape the everyday world. It is also a handsome new monument that gives sprawling Harringay a visual anchor.
The new church replaces old St Paul's - a late Victorian Gothic design - destroyed by fire on Ash Wednesday 1984. Stripped almost bare of superfluous detail, its power to move the spirit to silence derives solely from its basic architecture. On one level the church is no more than four walls topped with a roof in the form of an extruded pediment, through which daylight filters down into a vast and singular white- painted room. The salmon-pink brick walls are punched through with the tiniest square windows; inside, the exposed bricks are painted white and left unadorned. Yet this is no Lego-style box. The way in which Jenkins has arranged his four walls and simple steel roof is extremely subtle.
The church, in Wightman Road, occupies a steeply sloping site but is entered on the level without a single step up from the pavement. Passing under the great projecting pediment, between the massive banded walls and beneath the steel louvres of the belfry, worshippers enter under an organ loft, through a free-standing portal and into a gigantic, light-filled room covered with a lofty ceiling shaped as a cross of Lorraine.
As far as possible, every element is restrained. Yet already - inevitably and perhaps not wrongly - the silence of the architecture is being taken over bit by bit by the familiar accoutrements of parish life. Here are blue candles, statues of St Anthony and St Paul hung around with name tags to remind visitors who they are, leaflets and cushions, incongruous bits and bobs.
On the one hand, the architecture is powerful enough to swamp such venial visual sins; on the other, they irritate in much the same way as a rogue eyelash. But who can afford to be so puritanical in their attitudes towards a church where what matters most is that people are attracted to it, want to attend its services and lean on its priests? St Paul's is as sublime as any pounds 750,000 building can be.
Two artworks have been commissioned by the architects: Stephen Cox's craggy altar, carved from a slab of imperial porphyry brought from the Egyptian desert, and a reredos of travertine, also by Cox, depicting Christ crucified above a map of St Paul's travels.
The church will be visited by students of architecture from as far and as wide as the journeys of the apostle. In time, it will be welcomed by the people of Harringay and even by the Hornsey Journal.
Putting High Art above the Altar
by Richard Dormant, The Times, Wednesday 25 August, 1993Whenever I hear talk of the 'consolations' of art I begin to smell a phoney. Great works of art never console anybody: religion does and the one is not a substitute for the other. Of course, I am not saying that works of art have no place in worship - rather that aesthetic quality has very little to do with either creating or sustaining faith. You have only to walk into any church in Rome or Florence to prove the point. Tourists crowd around the Masaccio or the Caravaggio but the people actually praying kneel before the plaster saint with the painted face. In the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome, it is not Michelangelo's statue of the Risen Christ that is surrounded by candles and flowers, but a saccharine 19th-century image ofthe Sacred Heart. The last important religious painter was Rouault.
Mark Rothko's non-denominational chapel in Houston may be an artistic triumph, but it subverts the central issue of religious faith, being dedicated not to the contemplation of God's presence, but of His absence.
In terms of its function as sacred art, the 14 canvases which make up Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross in the National Gallery in Washington are more successful. Newman brilliantly used the most minimal means - colours, stripes and the occasional spatter of paint - to evoke the Crowning with Thorns, Mocking of Christ and Crucifixion. Still, consolation? I don't think so.
Here in Britain, Epstein, Sickert, Spencer and Sutherland all tried their hands at religious art, each self consciously trying to breathe new life into an exhausted visual tradition. In the art of our own time, I respect Christian Boltanski's assemblages of photos and lights in church interiors -- but not much else. Recent exhibitions of sacred art in the cathedrals of Lincoln, Worcester and St Paul's merely demonstrate how embarrassing this kind of subject can be when not done well. And, when I hear of an abstract painting byTherese Oulton being hung over the high altar at Tewkesbury Abbey, I leave the room.
That is why a project in a quiet back street in Harringay is so interesting.
St Paul's Church, Harringay, constitutes one of the most original acts of patronage by the Church of England since the Second World War. The architect Peter Jenkins and sculptor Steven Cox worked together to create an interior which invites meditation on the oldest subject In Chiistian art. Christ's Sacrifice on the Cross.
In 1984, the Gothic Revival church of St Paul's burnt to the ground. The commission to design a new church was awarded to the firm of Inskip & Jenkins. Working on a very limited budget, Peter Jenkins designed a modern brick building, based on the plan of an Early Christian basilica, the kind in which St Paul might have preached. Windowless from the outside, the interior is bathed in diffused natural light from huge triangular skylights in the roof. The walls are white, the seating black. The effect is a bit like entering a whitewashed church in Greece.
What pulls the severe interior together is Cox's remarkable sculptural contribution, a monumental altar made of rare Imperial porphyry, above which hangs a jagged sculptural reredos of travertine stone. Blending together the mediums of sculpture and painting, Cox then stained the stone with copper and iron oxides to depict the Crucifixion. Against the simple white background, the resulting blues and rust-browns register with dramatic forte. Cox is one of the most respected sculptors working in Britain today, and one whose art I ardently admire.
But I have to admit I was surprised to find him working in· a specifically Christian context, because he is best known for his stone carvings based on the sensual art of southern India. Typical visual sources range from erotic carved temple reliefs to stone lingams, and he has been known to anoint his own statues with oil and drape them in brightly coloured cloths.
Cox's art deals with eternal themes using conventional stone-carving techniques. But more than this, it is founded on the profound questions he asks about the meanings of the sacred forms that inspire him. The best I can do to describe his work is to say that he has a feeling for the holy. Though at first his sculptures look simple, the more you look at them, the more mysterious they become.
This is particularly true at Harringay. Cox begins by literally turning Christian iconography upside-down. His reredos takes the form of a traditional Italian Renaissance altar-piece, but turned on its head, with the arch at the bottom. The monumental Crucifixion shows Christ from behind as though looking down over the earth, which is depicted in the lower half of the reredos. Were the priest to celebrate mass in the traditional position, with his back to his congregation, the act would take on additional resonance when performed under this haunting image.
An important theme in the reredos is fragmentation. The upper section is divided into four parts, in such a way that the spaces between the stones form three crosses. The broken sections below suggest both the great rivers of the ancient world and a shattered universe. Closer up, one sees that the globe is actually a map of the Roman empire on which appear the names of the cities in which St Paul preached, inscribed in Greek letters. In this way, Cox emphasises the Church's historical origins in the early Christian world.
Equally impressive is the altar. Four rectangles made of breccia, a funeral stone used by the ancient Egyptians, surmounted by three chunky stone crosses, and held together by the great slab of porphyry quarried in Egypt and carved into a magnificent sacrificial table. Cox's sensitivity both to material and form is also evident in the contrasting shape of the baptismal font at the back of the church. Carved from the same stone slab as the altar, it is literally a chip off the old block, but ovoid in shape and exquisitely poised on top ofa black rectangle.
Everything about Cox's work, from the material it is made of to its shape, is laden with symbolic content, both religious and historical. Though consolation is not the right word. i can well imagine that art of this quality has the power to lead the believer to prayer and meditation.
No idea what they're going on about? Have a peek at the interior on this Harringay Online video clip.
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