St Stephen's Church

Welcome from the Vicar, Father Reginald Bushau

The arts and faith are closely linked and it is often through the arts that faith is most powerfully conveyed.

In 1860 the parish of Kensington covered an area from Bayswater Road in the North to Brompton Road in the South, and from Shepherd’s Bush in the West to Park Lane and Sloane Street in the East. The entire parish with a growing population was served by one church, Saint Mary Abbots.

By 1863, the area around Cromwell Road and Gloucester Road was burgeoning with new terraces and mews. The then Vicar of Kensington, John Sinclair, decided that the time had come to divide the parish into smaller areas, and built the first St Stephen’s - a small iron mission church opposite what is now Gloucester Road underground station.

Although intended to be a typical parish church of the Church of England, St Stephen’s was soon caught up in the Tractarian movement which sought to restore to the Church of England a sense of its Catholic identity and the centrality of the Eucharist to its worship.

All the subsequent changes to the church have been in the spirit of that movement. A magnificent altar-piece by Bodley was added and the sanctuary and chancel re-ordered to give the altar greater importance. Balconies were added to the chancel to house the organ and choir, as music as well as colour and ceremonial was seen as a vital part of worship.

A new chapel was dedicated to St Stephen on the north side of the sanctuary. At the same time a renewed interest in the importance of the Virgin Mary and the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ led to the creation of a Lady Chapel on the south side. A striking carved wood statue was added as a shrine to Our Lady where, to this day, visitors pray and give thanks. Near to this shrine is the memorial to TS Eliot, a long serving churchwarden of St Stephen’s who was, and in a sense always will be, our ‘poet-in-residence’.