Church Heritage Record id19641

West tower (unfinished) forming a baptistery at the base, with porches to north and south; nave of four bays with double aisles, triforium passage and clerestory; crossing with north and south transepts, that on the south with an eastern aisle leading into the sacristy. The sanctuary is a three-sided apse with ambulatory; eastwards the ambulatory opens into a morning chapel, an elongated octagon on plan with a central pillar. From the north side of the ambulatory a door loads to a passage connected to the private wing of the hospital to the east.

The present church of St. Philip was designed by Arthur Cawston and the foundation stone was laid by Mrs. Vacher, wife of the incumbent, on 18th July 1888. The nave was first used for divine worship on 5 January 1890 and the whole church was ready for consecration by October 1892. It had cost over £40,000.

Although much crowded now by the buildings of the London Hospital, the sheer bulk of St. Philip's still holds its own amongst its surroundings. If the west tower has been finished with an octagonal top as shown on the model in the sacristy, the effect would have been immensely impressive. The two lower stages of the tower exist, with plain and massive angle buttresses between which on the west face runs a narrow projection under a stone pent roof. Here in the wall is the foundation stone with details of the building and its originators. The lower stage is screened by subsidiary parts of the building on the north and south save for a small area which allows little windows in each of these directions; the upper stage has three thin lancets in the west and south walls. Between the buttresses at the north-west corner a small staircase is corbelled but this of course goes no further than the flat roof. 

The nave is of four bays with a variety of designs of tracery in the aisle windows. This is partly the result of changes of plan while the church was being built, so that the second bay on the south and the fourth bay on the north have small cross-gables indicating that they were intended to have been porches. There is indeed almost a wilful disregard for symmetry in the arrangement of lights, and no two windows are the same. Designs range from simple two lights with Y tracery to two separate lights with a vesica above and three lights with intersecting tracery. The common characteristic of an absence of cusping is rather reminiscent of the great churches by Brooks in the East End. The bays are divided by buttresses with gablets and the clerestory above has tall two-light windows in each bay with Y tracery. The north aisle embraces the tower and at this point is divided into two stages, the lower leading to a gabled porch (now arranged internally as a chapel) and the upper with a small room lit only by a roundel of three whirling mouchettes in the west wall. West of the south aisle is a passage of three bays which now forms the main entrance to the church opening from the garden on the south side. Against the south wall of the tower this is attached to a small semi-circular projection of rather French character housing the stair down to the crypt below.

The embattled appearance of the west tower is even more pronounced on the transepts. These rise sheer from the ground, the expanse of brickwork broken only by buttresses at the corners and a pair of slender buttresses up the middle of the wall, to a series of three lancets at the same level as the nave clerestory. At this point the buttresses end in small stone gablets attached to the continuous hoodmould which links the three lancets and above this, along the lower edge of the triangle which makes the gable, is a stone parapet pierced with plain arches. The gables themselves have niches for statues between square blocks of stone evidently meant to contain some carved decoration which, like the statues, has never been provided. The angles buttresses terminate in short pinnacles with four gablets which again are rather reminiscent of the style of James Brooks. The crossing is crowned by a slender octagonal fleche.

The chancel apse is very plain with single lancets both to the ambulatory and the clerestory above, each with buttresses at the angles. On the north side a passage leads to Stepney Way and also into the private wing of the hospital; on the south the vestry, of slightly later date, projects to the edge of the site also. This, externally a rectangle under a hipped roof, has four small windows set high in the south wall (again giving a defensive appearance) and a small porch added at the south-east corner. The door is carefully placed opposite the door of the Vicarage and there was intended to be another door within an arch opening westward onto the small garden. The eastern bay of the ambulatory round the apse opens into the morning chapel which is externally of little interest save that the strange angles of the walls give an indication of the peculiar elongated octagon which forms the ground plan and which is more clearly defined as part of the interior. Two small square turrets (actually of solid brickwork) with stone pyramidal caps immediately suggest the influence of J.L. Pearson.

The church is normally entered by a passage from the south garden. This has groups of three lancets in the west wall and in the outer part a scissor-braced timber foof. The inner two bays are roofed with a brick barrel vault articulated by closely-set stone ribs.

At the north end, a recess on the left houses the stair to the crypt with its semi-spiral staircase; ahead a glazed door within an arch leads into the baptistery in the base of the tower and a door on the right into the south aisle of the church. The baptistery, which is closed from the church by an iron screen within the east tower arch which has since also been glazed, is of two bays with vaulting throughout carried on semi-octagonal responds against the walls and free-standing cylindrical piers in the middle of each side. The vaults have plain and moulded stone ribs, and the responds and piers simply moulded capitals and bases. The eastern bay has a doorway north and south, and the western bay has wall arcading of our bays with moulded trefoiled arches above stone benches. The design of the windows above this is different from north to south. The font stands in the centre of this western bay on octagonal steps. To left and right beyond the arch are small recesses, typical of the architect's peculiar and apparently inexplicable planning. The windows have attached shafts and some of the columns have capitals decorated with bands of nail-head.

The door on the north side of the baptistery opens into the Chapel of All Souls which was intended to be a north-west entrance and indeed still has a long-disused doorway on the east side. This intention is borne out by the rich shafting and moulding on the cuter face of the door leading from the baptistery which has, moreover, a blind tympanum against which is a trefoil arch enclosing a vesica, probably intended to take a small relief or statue. The chapel is of two bays, the inner vaulted and the outer with a ribbed tunnel vault and a passage aisle of two bays on the east. The vaulting, as usual, has stone ribs and rests on shafts at each corner and the outer bay terminates in an arch which frames the altar.

The four bay nave is not long, but it is very tall in relation of its area and it is provided with double aisles which create an ever changing play of light and shade, distance and nearness as the visitor movos slowly round the building. The piers of the main arcades are in the shape of a central drum surrounded by four thinner shafts, those to the east and west half-sunk in the drum and those to north and south virtually free-standing so that they can rise either to the springing of the nave vault or to the springing of the aisle vault without being interrupted by the moulded capitals of the main piers. The arches have an inner moulded order of stone and then an outer order of two small chamfers cutlined with a stone hood. The arch to the baptistery at the west end has clustered shafts and a more ambitiously moulded arch and above this a large, almost round, arch opens into a gallery at the first-floor level of the tower.

This gallery is roofed with a semi-circular barrel vault of brick with stone ribs and it is reached by a newel stair squeezed into the south-west angle of the nave. This, with its purpose directly stated by stepped lancets, is perhaps the most typically French motif of the whole building. It also leads to the narrow passage which circumambulates the whole church at triforium level, opening to the nave through piers of double arches in each bay. The outer arches are brick and the inner arches are of stone on a short central shaft with moulded capital. 

The view towards the east from the west end of the nave shows that the original plan allowed for the choir to be placed under the crossing which, in view of the position of the organ in a lofty gallery against the north side of the north transept, was probably the best that could be devised. The sanctuary then occupies the single apsidal bay to the east of this. The elevations of this bay, while similar to those of the nave bays, is slightly different in detail with a pierced trefoil in the spandrel of the arches of the triforium (and also in having single pairs of arches to each bay) and, above then, a tall single lancet light for the clerestory. Through the large arches of the lowest stage more complexities of plan may be glimpsed resulting from the interplay of vaults and wall surfaces in the ambulatory and the morning chapel.

The double aisles open through pairs of arches into the transepts, whose north and south walls are blind up to clerestory level where the embrasures of the triple lancets come down to the level of the triforium passage, thus creating an interesting spatial effect as the passage cuts through the three embrasures. From the east side of each transept a single arch opens into the ambulatory round the apse, leaving space for a small altar on the north and south. East of that on the south side is a passage leading to the door of the sacristy with, in the wall between it and the transept, a peculiar recess with an ogee glazed arch one side and an iron grille the other, for no very clear purpose. On the north side at this point is a door which communicated with the private wing of the hospital and again an inexplicable feature, though of rather different nature. It consists of a vaulted wall passage behind arcading, now boarded over about three feet above ground level. Set low in the further wall, and now almost entirely concealed by the boarding, is a retaining arch. It is possible that the boarding covers a staircase leading down to a room at a lower level and any suggestion that the recess is connected with funeral services, such as being a receptacle for the coffin over-night, seems to be denied by the difficulty of access. The remarkable feature is that it is vaulted throughout.

The ambulatory passes round the apse at the same level as the floor of the nave, with two shallow steps communicating with the sanctuary in the east bay, and it is concealed from the sanctuary by stone walls which in the canted bays house under trefoil arches a credence and piscina on the south and a stall and a stone shelf on the north.

The most complex part of the building, however, and architecturally the culminating point, is the morning chapel (now, since it contains the Bodley reredos from that church, called St. Augustine's Chapel). In plan it is an elongated octagon with the three western bays opening into the sanctuary of the main church and, on each side of that, the ambulatory. Then the middle bays on north and south are blind, the next pair have single lancets and finally the east wall has three lancets within several plain brick reveals.

The sacristy is rectangular, of two bays separated by a central cluster of four shafts, very tall and elegant, supporting two arches which cross the room from north to south. The north-western quarter of the space is taken up by a wide flight of steps leading up to the church and a further flight leading down to the crypt.