History
There has been a church on Crooms Hill for over 170 years. The creation of the church site was achieved by determined clergy, patrons and designers.
Our Catholic Mission
The Catholic Mission at Greenwich was established in 1793. It was the third oldest in South London, after Dockhead Mission chapel in Bermondsey (1773), and the Catholic Mission at St George’s Fields (1788), which was replaced by St George’s Cathedral.
The chapel in Greenwich, dedicated to St Mary, principally served the Irish Catholic naval pensioners at the Royal Hospital, which became the Royal Naval College. Designed by the architect James Taylor, it was built in the back garden of his house, (16-18 Park Vista). Access was via a covered walkway between numbers 12-13 Clark’s Buildings, with 13 Clark’s Buildings initially serving as the presbytery.
In 1795, Taylor granted a 999-year lease to the bishop for the chapel site and building. In 1824, he granted a 960-year lease on the two Clark’s Buildings. A school had been established at No.8 a year earlier.
Fr Richard Michael North (1800 - 1860), who trained at the English College in Lisbon, was appointed priest to the Greenwich Mission at the age of 28, and went on to serve the parish for 32 years until his death.
Creating a new church
North started a funding appeal for the new church in 1839, given the growth of the Catholic community. A year later £900 had been raised, but this was lost in the bankruptcy of Wright’s Bank. Undeterred, fundraising continued. In 1845, the North family purchased number 68 Crooms Hill with the intention of it serving as a presbytery and the adjacent garden for the site of a new church.
Given a significant constituency of the parish was the Catholic sailors at the Royal Hospital, North secured a grant of £200 from the Admiralty, towards the budgeted construction costs of £8,000 for the new church.
The church was designed by Gothic Revival architect William Wilkinson Wardell, and was his first work of any importance. It was built in an environment of anti-Catholic and anti-papacy sentiment. Indeed, the night before the opening of Our Ladye Star of the Sea, there was a gathering on Blackheath, protesting against the building of the "new church" in Greenwich, at which effigies of Cardinal Wiseman and The Pope were burned, as was reported in local press at the time.
Pugin takes over
But Wardell did not remain until the church was completed internally. In the summer of 1850, Stuart Knill, the second Catholic Lord Mayor of London since the Reformation, and a significant benefactor of the church, offered to gift Fr Richard North the altar and reredos for the Blessed Sacrament chapel. However, it was conditional upon it being designed by Augustus Pugin - Pugin’s third wife, Jane, was Knill’s step-sister.
The involvement of Pugin was the catalyst for Wardell having no further involvement with the building of the church. In a letter to John Hardman, of 29 July 1850, Fr North wrote of the gift: “I am of course grateful to receive such a present on any terms. By this however I shall be brought into collision with Wardell who shall be down upon me with all his steam.” In North’s subsequent letter to Hardman of 24 October 1850: “Mr Wardell has now nothing further to do with our church - He cast me adrift because I accepted of an altar for B.S. chapel of Pugin’s design”.
When Wardell left, and at the point of Pugin taking over, the church was undecorated and unglazed, but with funds exhausted, North had welcomed the patronage of the Knills who were connected to Pugin by marriage.
North tells Hardman in a letter, dated 19 November 1850, that Wardell left him no designs for the ceilings. Pugin’s ceiling designs did not arrive in Greenwich until May 1851.
When Pugin took over responsibility for the church, the windows had not yet been installed and was open to the elements, with little more than calico covering the openings.
‘You ought to go to Greenwich’
Pugin was proud of his efforts in Greenwich and particularly the Blessed Sacrament Chapel. In a letter of 15 September 1851 to Jean-Baptiste Bethune, a Belgian Gothic Revival architect described by some as “the Belgian Pugin”, Pugin said: “You ought to go to Greenwich to see my painted glass & decoration ….. (and of the Blessed Sacrament Chapel) I think you will like the ceilings, it is worth your seeing.”
On 6 October 1851, two months before the church opened, Fr North wrote to John Hardman, who manufactured windows and metal gates for church: “What priest can expect to be well after building a church? And yet it was not so much the church as those first employed in building it that did for me. “C’est le premier pas qui coute” (it is only the first step that costs) – if ever I build another – of which in a certain event I dream Pugin shall build and you shall decorate”.
Our Ladye Star of the Sea opened on 9 December 1851 and was consecrated on 16 September 1852. Pugin died two days before the consecration and both Pugin’s funeral on 21 September and the consecration were reported next to each other in the Catholic newspaper The Tablet on 25 September.
