St Luke's Church, Chelsea
| St Luke's Church, Chelsea | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Location | Sydney Street, Chelsea, London, SW3 6NH |
| Country | England |
| Denomination | Church of England |
| Churchmanship | Modern Catholic |
| Website | www |
| Architecture | |
| Status | Active |
| Functional status | Parish church |
| Heritage designation | Grade I listed |
| Architect(s) | James Savage |
| Completed | 1824 |
| Administration | |
| Parish | Chelsea St Luke and Christ Church |
| Deanery | Chelsea |
| Archdeaconry | Archdeaconry of Middlesex |
| Diocese | Diocese of London |
| Clergy | |
| Rector | The Revd Preb Brian Leathard |
| Assistant priest(s) | The Revd Emma Smith |
| Laity | |
| Director of music | Jeremy Summerly |
| Churchwarden(s) | Greg Lim and Charles Combe |
| Verger | Sue Buchan |
The Parish Church of St Luke, Chelsea, is an Anglican church, on Sydney Street, Chelsea, London SW3, just off the King's Road. Ecclesiastically it is in the Deanery of Chelsea, part of the Diocese of London. It was designed by James Savage in 1819 and is of architectural significance as one of the earliest Gothic Revival churches in London, perhaps the earliest to be a complete new construction. St Luke's is one of the first group of Commissioners' churches, having received a grant of £8,333 towards its construction with money voted by Parliament as a result of the Church Building Act of 1818. The church is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade I listed building.
In the early 19th century Chelsea was in the process of expanding from a village to an area of London. St Luke's was built as a new, more centrally located replacement for the existing parish church, now known as Chelsea Old Church, which until then was also known, though unofficially, as St Luke's. This was initially a chapel of ease to the new building following its opening. The new church was the idea of the rector of Chelsea, the Hon. and Revd Gerald Wellesley, brother of the 1st Duke of Wellington, who held his office from 1805 to 1832, seeing the consecration of the church in 1824.
In 1819 Savage's plans for the church were chosen from among more than forty submissions. Designed in imitation of the Gothic churches of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the church is built of Bath stone and has a stone vault supported externally by flying buttresses. It was, according to Charles Locke Eastlake "probably the only church of its time in which the main roof was groined throughout in stone". Sir John Summerson notes similarities to Bath Abbey, King's College Chapel, Cambridge, and the tower at Magdalen College, Oxford, all masterpieces of the Perpendicular style, although some of the detailing refers to earlier Gothic styles. Savage originally intended the tower to have an open spire, like that of Wren's St Dunstan-in-the-East, but this was forbidden by the Board of Trade. Summerson praises "an air of competence and consequence about the design which makes one respect its architect very much. The interior has real dignity and the fittings are carefully detailed". Eastlake, writing in the 1870s, by which time Gothic Revival architects had developed a far better grasp of the historical styles, criticised the building for its "machine made look" and "the cold formality of its arrangement".
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