IN-PERSON London Heritages. Section A

Abstract

In 1941, incendiary devices landed on the roof of St Alfege Church in Greenwich. The resulting fire destroyed the roof and most of the church interior. Our paper will chart the restoration and reinvention of this church in the following years and then lead into discussion and analysis of the church’s current heritage orientated activities and policies. We will address the unusual cultural position of a local parish church within a world heritage site. Professor Albert Richardson (1880-1964) led the restoration of St Alfege Church after the Second World War. He was a prestigious architect and, with material from the Richardson Archive, we will examine how he remodelled the church and its position within the larger debate surrounding the restoration of bombed churches in London. His focus on Nicholas Hawksmoor’s authorship and the eighteenth-century church design conveyed his conservation ideology and anticipated the church building’s heritage appeal. The restoration project took over four years to complete during a time of shortages and political change; we will show how it transformed the church and its heritage status. Nowadays, St Alfege Church is a striking architectural presence in both Greenwich town centre and the UNESCO Maritime World Heritage site. In 2016, the most recent project “Heart of Greenwich, Place and People” won a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund (NHLF) and we will examine how the resulting project highlighted new aspects of the church’s rich heritage. Exploration of the church archive has produced new research into the 1718 Pew List and the roles of women at St Alfege Church. We will discuss the impact of the NHLF involvement and show how our recent social history projects have continued these heritage processes. St Alfege Church is a place where spiritual, cultural and heritage activities coexist and we will discuss how the church is valued by a variety of different communities.