Country England Consecrated 24 July 1928 Phone +44 20 7734 9313 | Denomination Catholic Heritage designation Grade II* Architect Joseph Bonomi the Elder | |
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Location Soho, Westminster, London Website Church of our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory, Westminster Address Warwick St, Soho, London W1B 5LZ, UK Diocese Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster Metropolis Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham Similar St John's Wood Road Ba, Notre Dame de France, Church of the Immacula, St Patrick's Church - Soho Squ, St Matthew's - Bayswater | ||
The Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St. Gregory is a Roman Catholic church on Warwick Street, Westminster. It was built between 1789 and 1790 to the designs of Joseph Bonomi the Elder. The only surviving eighteenth century Roman Catholic chapel in London, it is a Grade II* listed building.
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History
The origins of the church lie in the chapel established in the 1730s at the Portuguese Embassy on Golden Square. At this time, with the English Penal Laws in force, most Roman Catholic chapels existed under the protection, and within the precincts, of foreign embassies. Responsibility for the chapel passed to the Bavarian embassy in 1747 but it was destroyed in the Gordon Riots in 1780. The replacement church was designed by Joseph Bonomi the Elder, an Italian architect and draughtsman, who had moved to London in 1767 to work in the practice of Robert and James Adam.
The church has attracted many prominent Catholic worshippers, including Mrs Fitzherbert, who was sacramentally, but not civilly married to George IV, and the young Cardinal Newman. The novelist Evelyn Waugh had his second wedding here in 1937. In 1983, the funeral mass for Ralph Richardson, a regular worshipper, was held at the church.
For six years it hosted what became known as the "Soho masses", twice-monthly events “particularly welcoming to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered Catholics, their parents, friends and families” until Archbishop Vincent Nichols ended them in 2013.
Exterior
The exterior is of plain brick, stained red in 1952. The brick facade was deliberately "unassuming", in response to the destruction of the earlier chapel, and the gilded stars and angels which now decorate the facade date from the 1950s. It is of three bays and two storeys.
Interior
The interior retains some of its Georgian decoration, but the church was restored and altered in the Victorian period, firstly in renovations carried out by John Erlam, in 1853, which also saw the installation, over the altar, of the bas-relief of the Assumption, by John Edward Carew. A second period of restoration took place from 1874, under the direction of John Francis Bentley, the architect of Westminster Cathedral.