Gresham Kirby
It’s quite a journey from Cornish Methodism to Anglo-Catholicism (a ‘higher’ church tradition within the Church of England, bringing in much of the ritual of the Roman Catholic church). Father Gresham Kirkby (who died earlier this month) achieved it, along with a synthesis of his anarchist and pacifist beliefs. He also became one of the East End’s longest serving priests, one of the best known, and was the driving force behind the building of one of the borough’s most-recognisable church buildings.
You’ll recognise St Paul’s, Bow Common as you drive west along St Paul’s Way, crossing Burdett Road. There on your right is a petrol station, on your left a shimmering ‘mural’ of metal discs decking the church’s west wall. ‘Angel’ with its ‘O’, colon, dash and a bracket is, in fact, a smiley face (on its side) with a halo. It’s maybe not what you’d expect on the side of a church - but St Paul’s is no ordinary church.
When Gresham Kirkby became vicar of St Paul’s in 1951, he had very little church to be vicar of. Like so much of the surrounding area it had been largely destroyed by German bombing in World War II. His first job was to rebuild it. He chose the architects (Keith Murray and Robert Maguire) and the trio looked resolutely forward not back in their planning.
Murray and Maguire had already worked on the new chapel for the Royal Foundation of St Katherine in Stepney, alongside letter carver Ralph Beyer. St Paul’s was their first church, and it turned conventional design on its head. Asking ‘What will Christian worship be like in the year 2000, and how do we build a church to reflect this,’ they put the altar in the centre of the church, rather than facing a long aisle flanked by pews. They used new, industrial materials (as much from necessity, as these were years of austerity), making a font of concrete, inlaid with copper. A central glass roof flooded the building with light. The partnership of Murray and Maguire would go on to design many more churches (and schools) but Bow was the testing bed for their new ideas. In the late fifties they would return to build the church school at Bow Common. On that occasion, a tight budget would see them using portal frames (adapted from barns) to give space and light.
The new church at Bow Common was consecrated in 1960, Architectural Review dubbing it ‘the important church built in the 20th century’ - largely because it pointed the way forward. Maguire and Murray were only too aware of that. They viewed another project of the time, the new Coventry Cathedral by Basil Spence, (another building necessitated by enemy bombing), and which employed a more conventional church design, as essentially a ‘medieval building’.
And so Father Gresham Kirkby took charge of his new church, and was to stay there until 1994. Kirkby had been born in Cornwall, the son of a Methodist mother, though he moved swiftly to the Anglican church, and to the Catholic tradition within it. Leaving Leeds University in the early 1940s, he went on to study with the Community of the Resurrection in Yorkshire, an Anglican religious group which to this day aims to foster individual’s talents within a communal life, while propounding chasity, poverty and obedience. The Community gained a reputation for encouraging strong personalities. A contemporary and friend of the young Kirkby was Trevor (later Archbishop) Huddleston, who was to play such a key role in the fight against apartheid in South Africa.
Kirkby had strong views too. Moving through a succession of curacies in the North of England, he described himself as an ‘anarchist communist’. He joined the (anti-nuclear weapons) marches to the Aldermaston air base, and was imprisoned for his pains, in 1961. Throughout his career, Kirkby maintained his concern with the world, and how the Church and politics was serving it and its people - he was a confirmed ’socialist anarchist’ on his death bed. But he combined this world view with the hard work of a parish priest. He died a day before his ninetieth birthday, on 10 August. St Paul’s, of course, lives on.