19/09/2011 by Emma Jolly.

This continues the description of Camden parishes not found on www.ancestry.co.uk To help visualise where in London these are, take a look at the outline map of St Pancras parishes in 1903 at http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/genuki/MDX/StPancras/outline.htm

Walk from St Mary Brookfield downhill into Kentish Town and you will find St Benet & All Saints in Lupton Street, towering over the backstreets. Like St Mary’s and St Anne’s Brookfield it is a High Victorian church with a High Anglican heritage. Situated at the north end of Kentish Town, bordering the modern borough of Islington, the church was originally part of the civil parish of St Pancras and the Pancras registration district. At the front of the church is a small raised garden, which is open for public use. The church is also referred to as St. Benet and All Saints Lady Margaret Road, Kentish Town. [1881/85] but it is not included in London Metropolitan Archives’ (LMA) records.

The reason for the confused date of 1881/85 is that the parish has its origins in a mission church built on a small field given by St. John’s College, Cambridge “near a pond just off the Brecknock Road”. Father Frank Rowland opened the original church on 17^th July 1881, but it was soon outgrown by its congregation. Eventually, this chapel became the church hall.

The main church was designed by Joseph Peacock of Bloomsbury in 1884 and built quickly, with the foundation stone being laid on 13^th June 1885. The saint’s name was chosen with reference to the Church of St. Benet’s, Paul’s Wharf, Queen Victoria Street – itself a corruption of St Benedict. The then vicar, Frank Oakley Rowland, consecrated the church only months later on All Saints’ Eve. Within a few years, the church’s hastily constructed foundations and a spring under the church, were creating several structural problems.

In October 1908, the architects, Bodley and Hare, built a permanent chancel. But by 1925, the foundations of the whole were so unstable that the decision was made to take down the nave and rebuild it. London County Council condemned the old nave in November 1927. However, thanks to a legacy from a rich investor, Jeannette Elizabeth Crossthwaite (1845-1923), and “gifts of the faithful”, a new nave, with no aisles, was built in 1928 – again by Cecil G Hare. This was consecrated in November of that year by the Bishop of Willesden.  By the time of her death, Miss Crossthwaite was living at 51 St Charles Square, Notting Hill, but in 1871 she had been living at 106 Brecknock Road – not far from the site of St Benet.

Today St Benet’s is the parish church of Kentish Town. Kentish Town CofE Primary School in Islip Street (originally Kentish Town National School) is connected, and there are some records relating to this school at LMA http://search.lma.gov.uk The parish registers for St Benet and All Saints continue to be retained by the church. The church’s own website http://www.saintbenets.org.uk/ contains further details.

For more on the social classes of the parish in 1898-9, see the following page from Charles Booth’s Archive is at http://booth.lse.ac.uk/cgi-bin/do.pl?sub=view_booth_only&args=528970,185490,2,large,1 

Vicars:

1881 Frank Oakley Rowland (perpetual curate)

1887 Herbert Edward Hall

1901 George Villiers Briscoe

1906 Henry Tristram Valentine

1913 Robert Caledon Ross

1925 Harry Herbert Coleman Richardson

1947 Cecil Eskholme Charlton

Sources: the history section on http://www.saintbenets.org.uk/; Survey of London: volume 24: The parish of St Pancras part 4: King’s Cross Neighbourhood , Walter H. Godfrey and W. McB. Marcham (editors), 1952; John Richardson, A History of Camden: Hampstead, Holborn and St Pancras (Historical Publications Ltd, 1999); Bridget Cherry & Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London 4: North (Penguin) 1998; Camden Listed Buildings website; http://www.londongardensonline.org.uk

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Posted in Lupton Street, Brecknock Road, Pancras, St Pancras, Islip Street, Joseph Peacock, Frank Oakley Rowland, Kentish Town National School, Charles Booth Archive, Cecil G Hare, Jeannette Elizabeth Crossthwaite, Bodley & Hare, St Benet, St Benet & All Saints, London, social history, Emma Jolly, Genealogic, Genealogy, Camden Local Studies, LMA, Census, Kentish Town, Camden Council, London Metropolitan Archives, John Richardson, Family History | No Comments »

19/12/2010 by Emma Jolly.

 In Highgate days that gap was yawning wide,

But awe and mystery were everywhere,

Most in the purple dark of thin St. Anne’s

John Betjeman

St Anne Brookfield is a parish in the north of the modern borough of Camden, and formally in the civil parish of St Pancras, and the old Pancras registration district. Originally stretching into Kentish Town, the estate of Brookfield bordered Hampstead Heath and Highgate, where its heights and rural air refreshed those emerging from the miasma of inner London.

The site of the church on the steep hill of Highgate Rise (now Highgate West Hill) was originally home to the Cow and Hare. This was conveyed to Richard Barnett Esq. by Harry Chester and his wife in 1838. After Richard’s death in 1851, his sister, Anne Barnett, erected the church of St Anne, Brookfield. The church was built in the Early English style and dedicated in 1853, just a few years before Anne’s own death in 1858.

St Anne’s peal of bells was given by the parish’s most famous resident, of the enormously rich Angela Burdett Coutts (1814-1906). Believed to be the richest woman in England, Baroness Burdett Coutts (as she later became) was a close friend of Charles Dickens and the inheritress of the fortune of bank owner, Thomas Coutts (her grandfather). On the death of her grandfather’s wife, she inherited all the land between Swain’s Lane and Highgate West Hill (except the Cow and Hare) in 1837, and bought the remaining land in the parish from the Chester Trustees in 1856. Her rural home, The Holly Lodge, lay just behind the church, but was demolished in the 1920s when it was replaced with the current Holly Lodge Estate.

Other notable features of the area are Highgate Cemetery and Holly Village (featured on the gothic episode of Grand Designs).

Transcriptions of monumental inscriptions for other churches in St Pancras, compiled Frederick Teague Cansick (1889), can be consulted at Camden Local Studies and Archives. LMA hold Bishops’ Transcripts for the church in reference DL/T/064, and London diocesan visitation returns for 1858 and 1862 are held at Lambeth Palace Library in references Tait 440/128 and Tait 441/237. Latter-Day Saints information on this parish can be found at https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Brookfield_St_Anne,_Middlesex

Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman (1906-84), who was baptised at the church on 25 November 1906, lived for the first three years of his life at nearby Parliament Hill Mansions. The former ‘John Betjemann’ (his family changed their name in the Great War) referred to the church in his poem, NW5 & N6.

Whilst Betjeman was educated at the prestigious Highgate School, poorer parish children attended the National School of St Ann(e) Brookfield, built in 1870. Some pupils of this school lived in the parish of St Mary Brookfield - the next parish in the ‘Not on ancestry’ blog series.

Sources: ‘Additional Churches’, Survey of London: volume 24: The parish of St Pancras part 4: King’s Cross Neighbourhood (1952), pp. 140-146; ‘Nos 45 and 46 West Hill’, Survey of London: volume 17: The parish of St Pancras part 1: The village of Highgate (1936), pp. 67-68; John Betjeman, Summoned By Bells (1960)

Gate of Highgate East Cemetery, Chester Road

 A gate at Holly Village showing gothic detail

Posted in LMA, Lambeth Palace Library, Camden Local Studies, social history, Genealogy, London, Family History | No Comments »