SURVEY 49.3 - ST MARK'S CHURCH AND SCHOOL
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St Mark’s Church and School, Battersea Rise
St Mark’s Church, among Battersea’s foremost buildings, was erected to designs by William White in 1873–4. Though planned before the Rev. J. Erskine Clarke was Battersea’s vicar, it became the first fruit of his local campaign for church-extension and his long partnership with White. It was preceded by a school, empty at the time of writing, tucked into a corner of the church site. This was built in 1866–7 as St Mary’s Infant School and designed by Benjamin Ferrey.
In 1865 J. S. Jenkinson, then Vicar of Battersea, consulted the 5th Earl Spencer about how his growing parish might be subdivided. Jenkinson preferred a new chapel of ease for St Mary’s to a separate district church, and mentioned a site ‘near the cemetery’ which he asked Spencer to come and consider with him. As Jenkinson noted that those who were ‘very tenacious of common rights’ would need placating, the site was probably the present one, then common land.192 For the time being, however, this proposal took a back seat in favour of a school.
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The pressure for school accommodation in St Mary’s parish prompted Jenkinson to procure from Spencer in 1866 the gift of a triangle of land on the edge of Battersea West Common. Its 285ft frontage to Battersea Rise comprised more than was immediately needed, so the church was evidently in mind. But the deed of transfer mentions only a school, to be erected for teaching the poor children of Battersea.193
By February 1867 the school was complete. It was designed by Benjamin Ferrey, built by Charles Jarrett and mostly paid for by the local philanthropic stockbroker, Philip Cazenove. It consisted of one large schoolroom with a single classroom attached.194 The school is a pretty miniature in stock brick with red brick bands, a tiled roof and half-hipped gables; a hexagonal bell turret disappeared long ago (Ill. 3.47a). It was at first called St Mary’s School, but because of confusion with the parish school in Vicarage Crescent (page xxx) this was soon changed to St Mark’s. According to Erskine Clarke, the name was chosen for the pragmatic reason that only one letter had to be changed in the inscription over the principal window.195 Sunday services were held here when the building was new. It ceased use as a school in the 1960s.
Early in 1868 Jenkinson and his ally Cazenove were ready to go on with the church project. An appeal was issued, but Earl Spencer prevaricated, as a report had been commissioned on Battersea’s ecclesiastical needs and he was awaiting the verdict of Bishop Sumner of Winchester, then, as it proved, irrecoverably ill. Spencer therefore sanctioned only a temporary church.196 In May accordingly Francis Morton, a civil engineer, supplied an iron church beside the school.197 This temporary St Mark’s, as it was called, flourished and soon outdid the parish church in number of baptisms.198
When Erskine Clarke succeeded Jenkinson in 1872, turning the temporary St Mark’s into a permanent church was the obvious project to
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begin with; Earl Spencer did not demur. How Clarke came to select William White as his architect is obscure, but it inaugurated a long partnership. ‘I have a scheme afloat for a Church in my great Parish of Battersea’, he announced in July 1873, while White scrabbled to get his drawings together before taking his annual continental tour.199 To Spencer, Clarke advocated the design as both ‘as simple as it can be’ yet having ‘features that make it an effective and Church-like interior’.200 Thomas Gregory of Clapham Junction, chosen as builder without competition, was on site by September. He ‘has already beleaguered the Iron Church with scaffold-poles and hoarding’, Clarke told his parishioners, ‘which makes it look very small and rather forlorn.’ It was re-erected on the future church hall site, ‘shorn of its pinnacle and some ornamentation’, to be taken down anew once the church was completed.201 After its second dismantling it served as the temporary church for the future St Luke’s, Ramsden Road (page xxx).
A building committee on which Cazenove was joint treasurer with Clarke, soon found the money.202 The foundation stone was laid in November 1873, the consecration following in September 1874 despite technical difficulties. Clarke wanted most of his Battersea churches fast and cheaply built. At St Mark’s, partly for economy, partly because settlement was feared on suspect ground, White opted to construct not just the foundations but also the wall-cores from poured concrete, the latter within a double skin of brickwork. There was much experimentation in concrete construction around this time; and White doubtless knew about the concrete-walled St Barnabas’s, Oxford (1868–72), built by his fellow-ecclesiologist Arthur Blomfield. But he had not bargained for the authorities’ caution. The Metropolitan Board of Works insisted that the wall thicknesses be equal to those prescribed for brickwork, so obviating one advantage of building in concrete with a brick skin. It was also stipulated that the brickwork be laid up in Portland cement, not ordinary mortar.203
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Asked for a grant towards St Mark’s, the Incorporated Church Building Society consulted its Committee of Architects, which prevaricated until it had digested G. E. Street’s report on a parallel application to the Surrey Church Association. Street was himself building concrete boarding houses at Marlborough School just then, but thought St Mark’s too ambitious for the sum assigned. White replied that there was ‘no superficial display about the treatment of the building. It is massive in its parts and … simple in its arrangements and details’. After a visit by its Committee of Architects well on in the building process, the ICBS followed the Surrey Church Association and offered a modest grant.204
The Architectural Association too visited during construction,205 and White later read a paper to that body setting out his experiences. He reported success with the cement-concrete filling, despite its tendency to swell when poured. But he admitted that it had not saved money and did not repeat the method. ‘A deduction was made from the estimate in consideration of using concrete instead of brick for the filling of the walls…but it appears that there ought to have been an addition instead of a deduction to pay for the extra labour’.206 In structural terms the wide but shallow foundations may have counted for more than the concrete walls. Underpinning became necessary after cracks appeared in the west wall and the tower in 1933–4, and further strengthening to the tower took place in 1989. There is no written evidence for severe settlement to the tower during construction, as was claimed on the latter occasion.207
Among St Mark’s unusual features was an asymmetrical western narthex-porch. At the east end, the altar stood free within a five-sided apse, but the ambulatory behind it housed a stairway down to a groined crypt beneath the sanctuary and choir. This was the first and most logical of three vestry-crypts White built in his Battersea churches, as the land fell away to the east. Though planned as a schoolroom, it was appropriated for the choir,
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Clarke remarking that ‘in these days, when so much was thought of histrionic worship, the effect of the choir, ascending as it were from the subterranean regions, was very interesting’.208 The plan (Ill. 3.48) incorporated touches of asymmetry. The south aisle was longer than the north, since it extended into the base of the south-west tower; the north chancel aisle or transept, destined for the organ and a vestry, was wider than its southern equivalent, which provided children’s seats with a doorway out to the school next door.
In style St Mark’s adopts an early French Gothic, freely treated. The exterior (Ills 3.49, 50) is faced in stocks with dressings and patterns of the same red Aylesbury bricks used by White at St Saviour’s, Aberdeen Park, plus a modicum of Bath stone. It offers several picturesque viewpoints. Specially incisive is the flat west end, with two long lancets under the gable, the narthex-porch beneath, and the square tower shouldering up from the corner, set back only by the depth of a plinth, then rising to a corbelled-out belfry hutch and shingled broach. This hint of rusticity is confirmed by overhanging tile roofs throughout. At the east end, the stepping-down of the ambulatory windows undermines the apse’s formality.
The interior is more conventional, though the tall clerestory and open king-post roof give the four-and-a-half-bay nave surprising height. Some critics disliked the difference between the rhythm of the clerestory and roof trusses and that of the arcade below; White responded that ‘breadth and repose’ had been aimed at through enlarging the bay-widths of the roof. The wall surfaces are plastered, but the arches and inside faces of the windows are of brick, while the nave piers are of Pennant stone. Originally these were of Coalville brick, like the drum piers round the apse. Following signs of distress when the clerestory was superimposed, the bricks were tested at Kirkaldy’s testing works and Pennant stone was substituted.209 There was also trouble with the crypt, where the original ‘beautiful groined roof’ springing from a single central pier collapsed from the weight of wet gravel heaped on it while
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the nave was being constructed, and had to be replaced with a multi- columned arrangement.210 The choir, placed between the transepts, is only slightly above the nave, but steps rise sharply to the high altar, set against a French backdrop of arches and two-light geometrical windows with cinquefoiled heads (Ill. 3.52).
The decoration of St Mark’s was tackled methodically. At the time of consecration it was confined to figures in the three eastern apsidal windows by Lavers, Barraud and Westlake; pretty tiles on the sanctuary floor (from a design by J. R. Clayton for Lichfield Cathedral); the font and font-cover; the altar-table; and the cross or reredos upon it. These three last were all designed by White. The font, made by H. Faulkner of Exeter, consists of a bowl of Devonshire marble resting on stubby granite columns and with pebbles gathered by Clarke from the River Jordan embedded in its base. The altar- table is still in position, but the eccentric oak reredos, consisting of a plain cross against a lozenged frame with crocketed borders, disappeared in 1928.211 In 1875 the organ (by Lewis of Brixton) was installed, and carving the church’s capitals began according to Clarke’s programme of symbolism.
Those in the chancel and under the chancel arch were said to be the work of Mr Broomfield (perhaps the carver Thomas Bromfield).212 Next year the nave capitals (Ill. 3.53) were tackled by Harry Hems, who excused tardiness by explaining that there were only some ‘200 men who are experts in the beautiful art of stone-carving, and that some 70 or 80 of these are employed in the new Law Courts’; and Lavers, Barraud and Westlake painted the spandrels in the apse with angels playing music, after White’s sketch (later replaced by a heraldic scheme).213 The same firm gradually added stained glass in the aisles and west window.214 When in 1883 the partnership undertook mural work at the west end, it was noted that Francis Barraud had been sacristan and choirmaster at St Ma
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The pulpit, transferred from the temporary church, was never replaced, but a lectern was installed in 1880 to commemorate the Rev. H. B. Verdon.216 It was to Verdon, curate and secretary to the building committee, that Clarke hoped to entrust St Mark’s when it acquired its own parish, but he died in 1879. Only in 1883 was the first independent vicar appointed.217 An early addition was the hall, built in 1887 to William White’s designs and placed parallel to the church, with an elevation and quirkily projecting porch towards Boutflower Road, and a rear gable with west windows echoing those of St Mark’s.218 A sanctuary rail was installed in 1896, a larger organ, again by Lewis’s firm, in 1912, and a war memorial at the west end, by Thomas Rudge of Clapham Common, in 1920.219
In 1925 W. H. Randoll Blacking was invited to beautify St Mark’s. An all-white project was deemed too radical, but in 1928 he raised a Renaissance- style tabernacle over the altar, with angel figures surmounting the riddle posts.220 Bomb damage on 17 October 1940 destroyed much of the stained glass.221 The central window in the apse was replaced in 1946 with war memorial glass by Wainwright and Waring.222
By 1987 St Mark’s was in low water and close to redundancy. In that year a robust approach to its life and fabric asserted itself under the evangelical ministry of the Rev. Paul Perkin, who brought with him helpers from Holy Trinity, Brompton. Under the architects Russell Hanslip Associates, the tower was underpinned and the crypt refurbished before the shell and roof of the church were restored in 1989–90, with substantial grant- aid. New railings round the perimeter replaced those removed during the Second World War, and in about 1991 makeshift additions north of the hall were cleared away for new offices. Within the church, some reordering and carpeting also took place, including the removal of the Randoll Blacking tabernacle and the creation of a forward stage in the nave.223
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By 2000 the parish sought better accommodation for its activities, claiming that the congregation had increased more than tenfold. The architects Timpson Manley brought forward a scheme proposing new buildings south and north of the church. White’s church hall was to be replaced by a larger building abutting against the north aisle and transept, while Ferrey’s redundant school was also to be cleared away in favour of a ‘lighthouse’ building at the angle of Battersea Rise and Boutflower Road, and a glass link into the south transept. The northern element proved less controversial, though details were contested by the planning authorities and amenity societies. The southern building proved contentious; the listing of the old school in 2001 scuppered that element of the scheme. Timpson Manley’s revised project incorporating the school was not proceeded with. The north- side building was finally carried out to fresh designs by BCP Architects in 2005–7. It includes ample open space at the level of the church, and a glass- clad front towards Boutflower Road.224 The southern element has not been pursued further at the time of writing, and the school building remains derelict.
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