St George's, Hanover Square

Ecclesiastical parish

A civil parish of St George Hanover Square, and an ecclesiastical parish, were created in 1724 from part of the ancient parish of St Martin in the Fields. The boundaries of the ecclesiastical parish were adjusted in 1830, 1835 and 1865 when other parishes were carved out of it. The ecclesiastical parish still exists today and forms part of the Deanery of Westminster St Margaret in the Diocese of London. The land for the church was donated by General Sir William Steuart.

Architecture

The church was constructed in 1721–25, funded by the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, and designed by John James, who had been one of the two surveyors to the commission since 1716. Its portico, supported by six Corinthian columns, projects across the pavement. There is a tower just behind the portico, rising from the roof above the west end of the nave.

The interior is divided into nave and aisles by piers, square up to the height of the galleries, then rising to the ceiling in the form of Corinthian columns. The nave has a barrel vault, and the aisles transverse barrel vaults.

Weddings

The church was a fashionable place of worship to have weddings. It was here that Theodore Roosevelt, the future US President, aged 28, married Edith Carow, aged 25, on 2 December 1886. Henry Holland (architect) married Capability Brown's daughter Bridget on 11 February 1773 in the church. John Nash (architect) married Mary Ann Bradley on 17 December 1798 in the church. One famous London marriage involved the architect John Shaw Senior (1776–1832) to Elizabeth Hester Whitfield in 1799. Other notable people married there include the Eccentric Missionary, Joseph Wolff, in 1827. In October 1899, Alfreda Ernestina Albertina Bowen, daughter of Sir George Ferguson Bowen and Contessa Diamantina di Roma, married Robert Lydston Newman. Elliot Allard, OBE married Pamela Wigan of St. John's Wood, great granddaughter of James Wigan, of Mortlake prior owner and founder of Mortlake Brewery, which latterly became the Stag Brewery.

Burial ground

St George's was opened in the new residential development of Hanover Square with no attached churchyard. Its first burial ground was sited besides its workhouse at Mount Street. When this filled up a larger burial ground was consecrated at Bayswater in 1765. They were closed for burials in 1854, when London's city churchyards were closed to protect public health. Burials at St George's included Mrs Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), an influential female writer of the "Gothic Novel", the Revd. Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), abolitionist and author of Tristram Shandy, and Francis Nicholson, British military officer and colonial administrator.

The Mount Street ground was later cleared of monuments and turned into a small park. Some of the old tombstones were used for guttering and drainage, and may be seen today. During the First World War the Bayswater ground was covered with 4' of top soil and used for growing vegetables. In 1969 the burial ground was cleared to enable land to be sold off for redevelopment. A skull, part anatomised, was conjectured to be Sterne's and a partial skeleton separated from the other remains to be transferred to Coxwold churchyard by the Laurence Sterne Trust. 11,500 further remains were taken to West Norwood Cemetery and cremated, for burial there.

In popular culture

In the musical My Fair Lady, Alfred Doolittle (Stanley Holloway), having just been provided with an inheritance and having to move into "middle-class morality", invites his daughter Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) to his wedding at this church. Following the invitation, he and his fellows sing "Get Me to the Church on Time".

The church is mentioned as the venue for the forthcoming marriage of Iris Henderson in The Lady Vanishes (1938 film).

In the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor it is the setting of the wedding of the eponymous Lord St Simon and American Hatty Doran, whose disappearance sparks Holmes' investigation.

Music

Handel was a regular worshipper at St George's, which is now one of the venues used by the annual London Handel Festival. St. George's has a full-time professional choir and a strong choral tradition and is a venue for classical music concerts. A Restoration Fund Appeal was launched on Trinity Sunday 2006 to raise a total of five million pounds, with a target of one and a half million pounds needed for the first phase of essential restoration work to the fabric of the church. A recent concert series in support of the Restoration Fund was supported by the William Smith International Performance Programme and featured solo piano performances by students from the Royal College of Music, including Ren Yuan, Ina Charuashvili, Meng Yan Pan and the London debut of Maria Nemtsova of Russia.

The church is one of the two main bases of the Orpheus Sinfonia, an orchestra of players recently graduated from music colleges.