What has unfolded at St Martin-in-the-Fields is not a renovation in the conventional sense. It is a calibrated act of renewal, both architectural and civic, in which the layered identities of a complex site have been brought into focus without diminishing its depth. Eric Parry Architects have not overwritten Gibbs; they have read him attentively, translated him where necessary, and extended his logic into the 21st century with a rigorous clarity.
The challenge was to reorder the church and its associated buildings without compromising either the sacred calm of the interior or the hard-won informality of its public mission. Few places in London are as seamlessly sacred and social.
Parry’s scheme begins, appropriately, not at the altar but at street level. The masterstroke is the redefinition of Church Path: the pedestrian route that slips, almost unnoticed, between the north flank of the church and the bounding street railings. Previously a kind of passageway, it is now a civic promenade. The 19th-century railings have been carefully drawn back to widen the walk, and a circular glass pavilion has been inserted.
From here, visitors descend into a new subterranean world: not a basement, but an armature for the church’s dispersed programmes. Beneath Gibbs’ steeple, a new foyer unfurls, open, fluid, illuminated from above by a monumental oculus that aligns precisely with the spire’s axis.
The geometry is measured, even revelatory.
It is underground that the ambitions of the Renewal Project are fully realised. The programme includes spaces for community services, music rehearsal, exhibition, and reflection. The architecture is measured and spare, cut stone, exposed brick, carefully modulated light, allowing the deeper identity of the place to resonate. It is here, not in the nave, that the church’s radical social legacy is most palpable. The poor have always been welcomed here. That invitation is now architecturally embedded.
Above, the restoration of the church interior was as much a process of removal as of addition. Centuries of compromise have been stripped away to rediscover the spatial clarity and compositional poise of Gibbs’ original. The nave glows. A pulpit once immortalised by Hogarth has been repositioned to recover the visual rhythm of the sanctuary. The mood is not one of reverence but of release.
Nowhere is this renewal more quietly potent than in the East Window. Designed by Shirazeh Houshiary with Pip Horne Studio, it is an intervention that aligns, somehow, with both the physical structure of the church and its metaphysical purpose. Houshiary’s design accepts the conditions of its host, material, scale, history, and still manages to speak with a voice entirely of its time.
This is how cities are made meaningful: not by spectacle, but by careful attention, by generosity of intent, in the cultural and spiritual capital it has honoured, opened and returned to its public.
