Church Heritage Record 623343

Nave of four bays with aisles and clerestory and two porches; chancel with tower above and south chapel, north organ chamber; apsidal sanctuary with vestry on the south side.

The church was designed by Basil Champneys and was consecrated on 4 December 1869 by the Bishop of London. The previous history of church buildings in the parish had been complicated. St. Luke's, King's Cross was the second district to be carved out of the large cld parish of St. Pancras, which was done in 1849. The first had been St. Paul, Camden Square, and upon the erection of a permanent church there the iron temporary church which had served that parish at first was taken down and re-erected, with the permission of the Directors of the Great Northern Railway, on the ground next to the Small Pox Hospital, subject to removal at any time at short notice. The hospital shortly became the site for the new King's Cross terminus, and a site further west for a permanent church was given by the Skinners Company. This building was designed by John Johnson and was built in 1856-61, with frequent delays from want of funds. Within six years this site in turn was wanted by the Midland Railway Company for building the St. Pancras Terminus, and so the church was taken down and re-erected as a Congregational Chapel in Wanstead. The £12,000 which the Railway Company paid in compensation was used to build the present church of St. Luke, on a site in Oseney Crescent given by Christ Chunch, Oxford.

The characteristic blunt, geometrical tower of this church is an immediately recognisable feature of this church, and on closer inspection it may be seen that the whole church shares its blunt, French-inspired geometrical details. The west end, for example, is broad, with a sheer unbuttressed wall, battered between the ground and the window sills, pierced only by three stark lancets with a big wheel window with stone plate tracery with eight large and eight small circular lights round the central eight-lobed motif. The only decoration is the necessary variation in the bond of brickwork to accommodate these features and two bands of stone across the gable.

The aisle walls are divided into bays by the shallowest of buttresses, and each bay has two simple pointed windows with a linking band of stone, flush with the wall, at the springing of the arches. The clerestory windows, though slightly larger, are similar in design. In the western bays of the aisles are vaulted porches under cross gables with moulded arches of three recessed orders on three pairs of nook-shafts. The aisles continue past the base of the tower, the only change being that the bays north and south of the tower are slightly wider and have room for three windows instead of two.

The tower stands on a substructure which shows clearly the buttresses to the two chancel arches (between nave and chancel and between chancel and sanctuary) by means of extensions of the east and west walls with steeply sloping stone capping. Between these buttresses there is one stage (below the vault within) with arcading of three bays, two blind and the middle one pierced, and above the vault is a plainer stage with three severe loops in the north and south faces.

The uppermost stage of the tower, which houses the bell, has three tall louvred openings in each face with stone sills above a stone stringcourse, and with a stone course at the springing of the arches which reappears each time as blockish capitals to the pilasters between the openings. The variation in width between the east and west faces and the north and south faces is to a great extent concealed by the repetition of the same design on each face. Above the louvred openings come gables, each pierced with recessed stone roundels having eight circular lights round a central circle on the east and west sides and roven on the slightly narrower north and south sides. At the angles are projecting stone water-shoots not carved as gargoyles. The game of unequal gables is finally given away by the roof structure, for the east-west gables are joined by a ridge into which the other two gables abut at a slightly lower level. Access to the tower is by a spiral staircase within a turret at the north-east corner.

The apse is taller than the nave roof ridge, and is polygonal with five faces, the north and south blind but the other three with large two-light windows with sexfoils above of strongly French derivation which take up the whole wall space between the buttresses. Below their sills the walls, like the west nave wall, are steeply battered, and the tiled roof is steeply pitched, both of which features increase the apparent height of the building.

The interior of the church is less austere than the exterior since, although there is almost no foliate carving, there are more shafts, moulded stringcourses and ribs to articulate the various surfaces. The nave arcades are of four bays with cylindrical pillars of uniform design with moulded bases and capitals carrying moulded arches. Between the arches shafts on corbels rise to the wall plates and carry the principal roof timbers. The roof is ceiled with panels of timber boarding divided by moulded ribs. The clerestory windows are set within plain reveals with a central detached shaft and the west windows are united into one composition by a shafted arch. The floor is paved with red and black tiles in the alleys and made of wooden boards under the pews. The aisles are quite broad, and also filled with pews, and have moulded brick and stone surrounds to the windows with a central shaft like those of the clerestory. All the wall surfaces are of exposed red brick with one band of stone in the aisles and another in the clerestory, both at the level of the springing of the window arches.

Further east the church becomes richer, and the architectural expression yet more powerful and impressive. The crossing, with a floor three steps above the level of the nave, has a tall arch to east and west with a plain chamfered outer order reaching to the floor and an inner moulded order supported on paired colonettes with moulded capitals and bases about ten feet from the floor. The crossing and the sanctuary are ceiled with brick vaults with moulded ribs carried by shafts in the angles, the former with a circular bellway in the centre. The ribs and the bellway are all of stone. Arches on the north and south of the crossing open into the organ chamber and a vestry (formerly a chapel) respectively, though the arch on the south has been boarded up. At a higher level the walls are enriched by blind arcading with the middle arch pierced to form a window, thus repeating the external pattern. This chapel has a Caernarvon-headed door with good ironwork on the east wall opening into the sacristy, and the roof is embellished with chevron painted decoration along the beams.

The sanctuary is relatively plain, with exposed brick walls like the rest of the church and a simple reredos. The altar is six stops above the level of the chancel, and the floor is paved with red and buff tiles with excellent mediaevalistic patterns in groups of four or sixteen on the different levels. The steps are of stone, and there are also some bands between the sets of patterned tiles. In the cantod wall on the south side is a credence of alabaster under a trefoiled arch, and in the straight south wall are sedilia stepping up towards the east with small vaults within triangular arches.