St. Nicholas Church, Chiswick: A Historic Church of England Parish Church
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.7
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Primary era
- Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Modern
- Civilizations
- English
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page11 sections
History
St. Nicholas Church, Chiswick, is a Church of England parish church in the United Kingdom, serving the parish of St Nicholas with St Mary Magdalene in the Diocese of London. A church has stood at the Chiswick site since at least 1181, during the Norman period, and Old Chiswick developed as a village around it from approximately that time.
Medieval parish church
A formal visitation and inventory on 26 June 1252 recorded the church’s furnishings and condition. Among its possessions were a missal from the treasury of St Paul’s, two graduals, a poorly bound tropary, an old lectionary, an anthem book, and a psalter. The inventory also listed a small silver chalice, a red velvet chasuble, two vestments, three corporals, five altar cloths, an arras cloth, an old chrismatory for sacred oils, two brass and two tin candlesticks, and a font without a lock. The chancel roof needed repair, and the church had not been dedicated at that time. Further visitations took place in 1297 and 1458.
The west tower was built between 1416 and 1435 for William Bordall, who was vicar during those years. It became the principal surviving medieval part of the church and remains central to the building’s historical character.
Rebuilding and later history
Most of the church was demolished and rebuilt between 1882 and 1884 to designs by John Loughborough Pearson, a prominent nineteenth-century British Gothic Revival architect who designed and restored Anglican churches. The medieval west tower was retained. The Duke of Devonshire contributed £1,000, while most of the rebuilding cost was paid by the brewer Henry Smith of the nearby Griffin Brewery company, Fuller, Smith & Turner.
The church continued to serve as a setting for parish and public memory. Mary Cromwell, Countess Fauconberg and daughter of Oliver Cromwell, the seventeenth-century military and political leader who became Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, was buried here on 24 March 1713. Major Bernard Montgomery, later Field Marshal and 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, married Betty Carver at the church on 27 July 1927.
St. Nicholas Church has been a Grade II* listed building since 11 July 1951. This status recognizes the importance of the surviving medieval tower, the nineteenth-century rebuilding, and the church’s collection of monuments and memorials.
Remains
St. Nicholas Church stands on Church Street near the River Thames. Its rebuilt body is arranged around the medieval west tower, whose position close to the street led Pearson to design a short, wide nave with an almost square plan. The building is formed from courses of squared Kentish ragstone masonry in the Perpendicular style, the late-medieval English Gothic manner known for strong vertical lines, large windows, and panel-like tracery. Stone coping and a copper roof complete the exterior.
Medieval tower and porch
The fifteenth-century west tower preserves a tall archway leading into it and a hood-mould above the window over the west door. These features belong to the medieval phase associated with William Bordall and remain integrated into Pearson’s later church. The porch also preserves an early English foliated cross gravemarker.
Interior memorials
Early and eighteenth-century monuments
The interior contains memorials spanning several centuries. A heraldic monument commemorates Sir Thomas Chaloner, who died in 1615, and his two wives, who died in 1603 and 1615. It includes a baldachino, a canopy or architectural shelter, with stone curtains held open by figures and kneeling figures of Sir Thomas and his wife. Other early memorials include a brass for Mary Litcott, who died in 1599, and a flaming urn on an Ionic frame for James Howard, who died in 1669.
Several eighteenth-century memorials use elaborate classical designs. An urn on a tasselled swag held by cherubs commemorates Richard Taylor, who died in 1698. Richard Tayler, who died in 1716, is remembered by a Corinthian aedicule, a small architectural frame with columns and a pediment, containing a heraldic cartouche, Father Time, and the Angel of Death. Thomas Plucknett’s monument, from 1721, has a broken pediment and Ionic frame, while John Taylor’s monument, from 1729, has an open pediment with a heraldic achievement in its central field.
Nineteenth-century memorials
Later memorials include a wall tablet in a swag surround for Ralph Wenwood, who died in 1799, and a wall tablet with an urn for Charlotte Seymour, Duchess of Somerset, who died in 1773. A sarcophagus representation by Thomas Scheemakers commemorates Thomas Bentley, who died in 1780. The actor Charles Holland, who died in 1769, is represented by a bust mounted on an obelisk with an epitaph by the actor and theatre manager David Garrick.
The interior also contains a tablet with a medallion portrait of Thomas Tomkins, who died in 1816, a pedimented wall tablet for Charles Barnevett, who died in 1695, and a rectangular fluted tablet for John Beckwith, who died in 1815.
Churchyard and burial ground
Literary and artistic memorials
The churchyard and adjacent burial ground contain a monument to Ugo Foscolo, the Italian writer, poet, and patriot associated with modern Italian national identity and literature. Foscolo died in 1812, and his remains were taken to Italy in 1871. The Italian government later added an inscription to the Chiswick monument as part of its glorification of the new Italian state.
A nearby monument commemorates the painter and engraver William Hogarth, who died in 1764, together with members of his family. It bears an epitaph poem by David Garrick. The burial ground also contains a mausoleum for the landscape painter Philip James de Loutherbourg, who died in 1812, designed by Sir John Soane, and a classical bronze tomb for the artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who died in 1903.
Political and military memorials
The burial ground contains a Grade II* listed monument to Percy Harris, a Liberal Party politician who lived from 1876 to 1952. Its relief carving by Edward Bainbridge Copnall depicts the resurrection of the dead. Harris acquired the carving for display in the garden of Morton House on Chiswick Mall in the late 1920s.
Other commemorations include a memorial to Charles Holland and one to Henry Joy, who died in 1893 and had been a trumpeter in the Charge of the Light Brigade, the unsuccessful British cavalry assault during the Crimean War in 1854. The grave of Frederick Hitch, who died in 1913, marks the burial place of a Victoria Cross recipient and veteran of the defence of Rorke’s Drift, a British military outpost during the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879. The grounds also contain the grave of Richard Wright, a bricklayer to Lord Burlington, owner of Chiswick House.
