Views of the building inside and out
Plan of the church
Brief History of the Parish and building

Walsham How’s East London Churches Fund provided some of the support, but the parish was set up as the Marlborough College Mission. The boys and masters of the Wiltshire public school undertook to fund for five years a stipend for a Missioner of £150 per annum.

The Mission Priest appointed was E. F. Noel Smith. He began by hiring the newly built board school in Coleraine Park (today Coleraine Park School) for services. The work took off and Smith, joined by two curates and large numbers of lay workers, built over the next ten years a chuch and hall, a vicarage and a Church Lads’ Brigade drill hall. He also established a Mission Church and Sunday School hall, which was enlarged and finished after Smith died of appendicitis while in office in 1908.

The link with Marlborough continued, especially through donations from old boys, well into the 1930s. The second Vicar of the parish was Arthur Anderson. He had been Smith’s curate since 1886, and when he finally retired in 1940 aged over 80, had seen both the great days of initial success when there had been regularly 900 Easter communicants, and the decline which followed the First World War. Even so in 1940 there were still well over 200 communicants at Easter. Anderson’s sinal sermon, after more than fifty years’ ministry in the parish was taken from a text in 1 Corinthians: “And so, brethren, finally, farewell.”

Two relatively short incumbencies during and after the second world war (W. Howes Morris 1940 – 1946; J. G. Jeffreys 1946 – 1953) had to deal with the damage (the church suffered a near-miss from a flying bomb) and the fact that the parochial halls and mission church were requisitioned for war use. Although there were grants for their repair after the war, they have not been used again for the Sunday schools, and services at the Mission Church ceased.

In 1953 Fr. David Evans was appointed to the parish. He built the congregation up to the level at which it had been during the years just before the war, and established a bedrock from which the parish was enabled to continue to work through the following three decades. He died, in post, in 1985, by which time the congregations had again begun to dwindle, as the buildings fell into some disrepair. There was some doubt over the future of the parish, but the appointment of a new Bishop to the Episcopal Area of Edmonton gave a reprieve, and a new appointment was made.

Fr. Christopher Tuckwell had experience as a parish priest in the West Indies, and was able to build on work Evans had already been doing to widen the appeal of the parish church to all parishioners. He introduced a Nave Altar and his pastoral gifts bore fruit in renewed growth. The parish was once again given staff, and when Tuckwell resigned in 1994 he was succeeded by his curate, Fr. L. Miller, who is in post today.

The work of the last few years has involved renovation of the church and other parish buildings, and their use for mission and work, while maintaining and expanding the large congregation and vigorous parish life established by Tuckwell.

While we do not (yet) see 900 Easter Communicants, the parish looks forward with confidence and hope to the future.

A full detailed parish history is in preparation from the extensive archives maintained in Tottenham and at Marlborough. For more information e-mail or write to Fr. Miller, s. Mary’s Vicarage, Lansdowne Road N17 9XE