Foundation /
Introduction
S. Michael, Camden Town

Parliament in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century attached great importance to churchgoing, but here just as in the rest of Britain the main population centres had shifted away from their parish churches, meaning parishioners faced a long journey to worship there. Instead, chapels-of-ease were built so that parishioners could attend somewhere closer. For example, a medieval chapel of ease in Kentish Town was demolished in 1784 and replaced by a new chapel on Highgate Road. However, finding funding for these chapels could prove difficult and – since the Church of England was the state church – the creation of every new parish church required an Act of Parliament. This all delayed the construction of an Anglican place of worship near Camden Town, let alone within it.

Public concern continued to grow in this period about the rapidly-growing and often poverty-afflicted urban populations ². That concern combined with the shift in population centres and official fears of losing people to the non-conformist churches all eventually proved sufficient to pass an Act of Parliament in 1818, known as “An Act for the Building and Promotion of Building Additional Churches in Populous Parishes” (58 Geo III, Caput 45). This Act and its six its six subsequent amendments enabled the Government to set apart a fund of one million pounds for the particular purpose of building new Anglican churches.

That fund was drawn from the 100,000 francs of reparations which France had been forced to pay Britain after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. It was administered by a Commission, whose members were known as Commissioners. Not everyone was pleased by this prospect: the legal philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote crossly in a manuscript that Lord Liverpool, then Home Secretary, could find money to build churches but not his Panopticon Prison.

The Commissioners’ remit was to locate communities of more than four thousand people who lived more than two miles from their parish church, and had the ability to fund a new church. Once these conditions were satisfied the Commission approved an architect and funded the construction of a new church. The geographical area became a legal entity by an Order in Council. Six hundred of these new ‘Commissioners’ churches’ were built in the nineteenth century, including thirty-three in the ancient parish of St Pancras. ³

Between 1822 and 1824 two architecturally significant new Church of England churches were built, finally taking the pressure off Old St Pancras church. They were both designed by architects W. and H. Inwood and both in the neo-Greek style. The first was the new St. Pancras on Euston Road, replacing its ancient namesake as the main parish church, with the earlier building becoming a chapel-of-ease. The second was Camden Chapel on Camden Street, another of the parish’s chapels-of-ease. It was assigned a district and a perpetual curate, the first holder of which office was the Rev. Alex D’Arblay, son of the novelist Frances Burney – she attended the chapel’s consecration and noted how he was almost late to give the inaugural sermon. His timekeeping did not improve and he was finally sacked in 1836. ⁴ Inwood also designed a third chapel-of-ease for the parish, St Mary’s Somers Town, completed in the Gothic style in 1827. This phase of the church-building boom ended with Christ Church Albany Street in the southwest corner of the ancient parish, completed in 1837.

The churches founded under the Act were usually set up as District Chapels. These were ‘daughter churches’ of the main parish church, from 1824 new St. Pancras. Such ‘daughter churches’ were allowed to hold services, but not perform baptisms, marriages or funerals, which had to take place at the parish church, so that the parish church did not suddenly lose the income from these rites of passage, nor the locally levied tithes and bequests, sometimes ancient. Usually sited in newly-urbanised areas without such tithes and bequests, the Act allowed ‘daughter churches’ to charge for pews to raise income until other sources could be found. That other source usually came when the parish church’s existing priest died or moved away and a proportion of local tithe payments could be assigned to the ‘daughter church’, turning it into a parish church in its own right. However, some ‘daughter churches’ refused to charge for pews, since a large proportion of their local inhabitants would be too poor to pay – St. Michael’s would be one of these churches that were free to all right from their foundation.

The London and Birmingham Railway was followed in 1850 by the viaducts of the East and West India Docks and Birmingham Junction Railway (later renamed the North London Railway and now part of the Overground network) and by the Midland Railway in the 1860s. The Great Exhibition Map of 1851 shows St. Pancras Old Church now surrounded by the streets of Somers Town, and many new streets in Camden Town. ⁵ In the triangle formed by the junction of Kentish Town Road with the new Camden Road, where St. Michael’s church now stands, there were instead three large houses with very long gardens sited next to Kentish Town Wharf and saw mills and printing works. Two of these houses were later demolished to make way for St. Michael’s.

Later maps of 1863 and 1870 show Camden Town now completely laid out with streets, while further north Kentish Town was no longer a village surrounded by fields but a dense urban area and to the south the streets of Somers Town surrounded St. Pancras Church. Agar Town was a large unplanned urban sprawl soon to more or less disappear under the lines and Goods Yards of the Midland Railway – the first church was begun there in 1860 before being abandoned for another site on Elm Road, completed in 1864, whose parish was merged into St Michael’s in 1953.

This new, densely populated urban area was a source of concern to many. The large number of fine new middle class houses built in the new suburb between 1800 and 1830 began to be affected by the construction of railway lines, bridges and goods yards, demolishing many homes and displacing large numbers of people. The future novelist Charles Dickens lived on Bayham Street as a child in 1823 and his Dombey and Son (1848) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) describe the terrible mess and dirt in Camden Town that resulted from railway building, and the immense dust heaps on Battle Bridge Road (now roughly Pancras Square).

Canon Thomas Dale (1797–1870) was appointed Vicar of St Pancras in August 1846. He, the newspapers and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners all denounced the poverty and squalor of Camden Town. Even worse was the notorious Agar Town, said to present the most appalling spectacle of temporal and spiritual destitution in the whole diocese of London. Concerned, the Government of the day took action, demolishing the slums known as rookeries and planning new homes, only to be overtaken by yet more railway building and chaos until what was left of Agar Town merged with Camden New Town around Camden Square. ⁶

The Roman Catholic church and the non-conformist churches continued their expansion in the area, with the Congregationalists moving to a new building in Kentish Town in 1848, the Primitive Methodists converting a former paint shop in Camden Town into a worship space in 1851, and the Roman Catholics running missions in the area from Kentish Town and then from the new St Dominic’s Priory. This competition as much as the urban planning and railway building led to a revival in Anglican church-building in the area between the late 1840s and the 1860s. This was funded through the St Pancras Church Building Fund, founded in 1842 to create further district chapels and created in response to rising opposition to charging for pews.

In 1846 the Fund was used to build the temporary church which became the district and later parish of St Paul’s Camden Square. Canon Dale pushed for the Fund to ensure the ancient parish had ten district churches and so it held an extraordinary meeting on 18 March 1847 to set up four districts, each of which was to have its own priest – these later evolved into the parishes of Holy Trinity Haverstock Hill (permanent nave completed 1850), St Luke King’s Cross, St Jude’s Grays Inn Road and St Matthew Oakley Square. A fourth district (the future St Mark Albany Street or St Mark Regent’s Park) was decided upon in 1848, though its permanent nave took until 1850 to complete. 

1849 saw the formal division of the ancient parish of St Pancras into sixteen districts, each with a temporary or permanent church, and the completion of a  permanent district church on Camden Square. That church’s site and part of its building costs was given by its developer the Marquess Camden – that philanthrophic move would be mirrored by the Duke of Bedford when he created Bedford New Town and donated land and money for a permanent building for St Matthew Oakley Square (completed 1856). 

In 1863 one of the sixteen new districts was assigned St Stephen’s Church (formerly known as the Camden Chapel and now All Saints’ Greek Orthodox Cathedral). ⁷ However, often the Church of England’s church-building and re-organisation within the ancient parish could not keep pace with the area’s urban development – by the time St Thomas opened in the Agar Town area in 1864, the slum there was already being demolished for the tracks and goods yards running into St Pancras Station. The Fund was wound up in 1865.

A decisive move for the Church of England in Camden Town was the Saint Pancras Ecclesiastical Regulation Act, passed in 1868. It turned all the district parishes within the ancient parish into vicarages, each of which was a “benefice with cure of souls”. The Act divided the ancient parish into twenty-two of these vicarages, each with all the rights and privileges of a parish. It also separated St Stephen’s and the other Commissioners’ Churches in the ancient parish from the control of the St. Pancras Trustees. Those trustees would apply the trust fund from burial fees and the rent of the former site of the chapel of ease in Kentish Town and divide the first £200 from it equally between old and new St Pancras and St Stephen’s, before dividing anything above that equally between all the churches in the boundaries of the ancient parish to spend on worship or repairs. ⁸

The philanthropist Charles Booth’s survey into life and labour in London c. 1898-9 included colour coded maps to indicate relative wealth or poverty. Sheet 4 shows that by the end of the nineteenth century Camden had become poorer and more overcrowded. Nearly every house was in multiple occupation. ⁹

Booth also sent out a team of researchers, one of whom interviewed St Michael’s first vicar Edward Bainbridge Penfold in 1896, showing changes and continuities in the parish’s housing and poverty levels in its first twenty years:

As regards the district, the general tendency has been down in his time. Union Terrace when he came was a very respectable place, for instance, but went down with a run on getting into the hands of its late owner, Mr. Bridgeman, who built it up at the back in a disgraceful way, and let it out on conditions that ensured rapid decline. But, like Mr. Connan, he denied that the houses had ever been brothels, as Tomkin told me. On the contrary, the people had been simply very poor and low class casual labour. He ran over some of the families that had lived there in a way that seemed to make out his case. The top part of Albert St. in his parish, is now almost entirely let out in apartments, respectable, and it is quite the exception to find a house in the hands of a single occupant. In Arlington St. he said, to my surprise, that there had been no great change in his time. The poorest bits in the parish now are Stuckley Place and Pleasant Row and Passage. Stanmore Place is now poor, but “not very poor”. In his classification of his people (see form) he gives no place to ordinary middle class private occupants, who would have figured considerably when he came [in 1876]. He was severe on the buildings that Bridgeman, already mentioned, put up in the Kentish Town Road, W. side S. end, between Brown’s Dairy and Union Terrace….

Charitable relief averages about £45. Tickets, of which one is inserted [on page 122], are only given to the sick and aged. A counterfoil has to be filled up by the Visitor who gives them away. They do not have much to do with the C.O.S., but the Vicar spoke well of their work.

In an attached questionnaire, Penfold noted that 60% of the housing in the parish was then “Poor”, 20% “Tradesmen” and 20% “Apartments”. He added that there was a “growth of rough loafing class” of criminal and that the parish’s attitudes to marriage were “Lax. Probably great many unmarried / or living with other men.”. He stated its overall health to be “Not good [due to] … unhealthy condition of life /and drinking habits” and the general condition of its housing to be “Deteriorating. Overcrowded. / Immense diff[iculty] to get house – but no marked rise in rentals.” ¹⁰

Many in what would become the parish of St Michael’s were illiterate, as shown by its first Register of Marriages and of Baptisms, in which several men signed X instead of their name. These also give an indication of male employment in the area – variously described as being in occupations such as printing, making books and horse harness, and builders. There were also many labourers who probably worked on building the new railway. Together these pieces of evidence from the early decades of St Michael’s demonstrate the difficult social conditions in which it had been created in 1876.

A religious revival in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century in England saw the beginnings of Methodism, of the Clapham Sect and of the Evangelical movement within the Church of England. Roman Catholics were re-admitted to Parliament in 1829, leading to concerns that a no-longer-exclusively-Anglican Parliament would now be legislating on purely Anglican matters. Those concerns came to a head in an 1833 sermon by the Revd John Keble, Professor of Poetry in Oxford University and Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. It argued that the Church was a divine society, founded by Jesus Christ himself and his authority was held by his Apostles and their successors, the bishops of the Church in direct line from those in the Upper Room at Pentecost. 

There were also other problems. Over the centuries churches were funded by gifts and endowments made by individuals. Now the population had grown hugely but ancient Anglican endowments for the upkeep of churches were not in the places with the greatest population growth or ‘greatest pastoral need’. ¹¹ New towns and cities appeared yet the system of church administration was still based on that formed when most people lived on the land rather than in towns. The rights to present to wealthy benefices were bought and sold on the open market, and plural livings, even for bishops, were not uncommon in poorly endowed parishes. ¹² Within the established Church, opinions on whether and what reform was need differed between Evangelicals, Broad-churchmen, and High-Churchmen. No forum existed for discussing these differences because Convocation, the traditional meeting of the church, had been suppressed in the eighteenth century.

John Henry Newman and other clerical Oxford dons such as Richard Hurrell Froude and Edward Bouverie Pusey began to publish and disseminate numerous ‘Tracts’ drawing attention to these problems and offering theologically-rooted solutions. As a result they became known as ‘Tractarians’. They asked if church and state should be separate as in America, and whether bishops should continue to be regarded as just functionaries of the state and administrators, or instead seen as the inheritors of the apostolic tradition as the Tractarians believed. Their aim was not to split the established Church of England or re-unite it with the Roman Catholic Church, but to bring about a Catholic revival within the Church of England. 

Tractarians laid stress on that church’s  essentially Catholic nature and placed a renewed emphasis on the significance for all mankind of the Doctrine of the Incarnation: Christ on earth among us, and the ‘indwelling’ of Christ within us. ¹³ Baptism, the Eucharist and the other sacraments were ‘all God’s gifts’. The Tractarians wanted Anglicanism to represent a Catholic theology, but not a Roman Catholic theology. This became known as the Oxford Movement, but it soon moved beyond the University to the whole country. Its priests also made a concerted response to urban expansion and rising poverty, leading to many of them becoming known as ‘slum priests’, a group of whom formed the Society of the Holy Cross in 1855. ¹⁴ Our first vicar Edward Penfold was also firmly in that tradition.

By the later part of the 19th century Tractarian practices were often referred to as ‘ritualism’ because the Oxford Movement priests adopted Catholic vestments and ceremonies. Ritualist churches were distinguishable from others within the Church of England by six points in their liturgy: facing east during the Eucharist; wearing full Eucharistic vestments; mixing water with wine in the chalice; using lighted candles on the altar; using unleavened or ‘wafer’ bread during the Eucharist; and the use of incense. ¹⁵ St. Michael’s was founded within this Anglo-Catholic tradition and even today remains firmly within it.

19th century ritualism caused controversy and divided public opinion. Some believed ‘ritualistic practices’ were not authorized by the Book of Common Prayer. Strong feelings led to the disruption of Anglo-Catholic services with abuse and cat-calling. The English Church Union defended ritualists, while the Church Association was the rival Evangelical body. The Earl of Shaftsbury, a leading Evangelical, even tried to introduce a bill into parliament to restrain ritualism, and the Government set up a Royal Commission in 1867 to look into the controversies. The Royal Commission reported in 1868 and 1869, deciding against the total prohibition of vestments. Instead the use of vestments, lighted candles and incense should be ‘restrained’. 

The subsequent Public Worship Regulation Act 1874 was first brought as a Private Member’s Bill by Archibald Campbell Tait (Archbishop of Canterbury since 1868). He and the bishops ensured it was passed in an attempt to recover some authority and credibility and set in place a universally acceptable system. Its officially avowed intention was to rationalise the ecclesiastical position, to make it more efficient and better able to respond swiftly to demands placed upon it. However during its passage through the House of Commons, debates indicate the Bill’s opponents saw the real aim quite differently. The Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli declared the aim was to “put down ritualism” and to put and end to the “Mass in masquerade.” High churchmen had relentlessly opposed the Bill, with Gladstone leading the parliamentary rearguard action. ¹⁶

The Church of England had previously regulated its worship via its own two ecclesiastical courts, the Court of the Arches for the Province of Canterbury and the Chancery Court for the Province of York. They had both been presided over by a lay Dean and Auditor respectively since the 16th century. The 1874 Act provided for the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to appoint a lay Anglican barrister or judge specifically to preside over ritualist cases and that – when the posts of Dean and Auditor next came vacant – that judge would take on both posts and pass judgment on matters of ecclesiastical ritual and ceremonial practices in the Anglican Church. Both posts did become vacant in 1875 and James Plaisted Wilde, 1st Baron Penzance was appointed to them both – he had previously presided over the Probate and Divorce Court, but the appointment was unpopular with High Churchmen. Cases could only be brought with the consent of the diocesan bishop, whose right of veto was absolute. The new Court could make orders including monition, meaning formally ordering defendants not to do something. Failure to comply with a court order was contempt of court punished by imprisonment.