© John Aron
ARCHITECTURE
Mass in the restored interior
The Church of Corpus Christi Maiden Lane M
y first encounter with Corpus Christi Church in Maiden Lane was on 15 August 1953. I was aged four, but still remember the occasion well. In those days, my family lived in Surrey, and we took our summer holidays at Southwold in Suffolk. The 140-mile journey used to take most of the day in our elderly Austin car, which rarely completed the journey without breaking down. This particular year, our holiday started on the Feast of the Assumption, so we set off fairly early in the morning, expecting to find a Mass in London, which we did at Maiden Lane. It was a Sung Mass, a completely new experience for me. Even as a four-yearold, I was stunned by the beauty of the polyphonic music, which may well have been Palestrina. The choir was in a gallery to the right of the High Altar, and I remember that, although I could just see the conductor waving his arms, the singers were completely out of sight.
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By Paul Waddington Shafts of Coloured Light I also remember the shafts of coloured light emanating from the stained glass windows above the sanctuary. These were constantly changing, and frequently dulled by clouds of incense smoke, which, from time to time, billowed up from below. Also new to me was seeing rack upon rack of votive candles, all ablaze, and generating light that was almost dazzling. All this was 65 years ago, but the experience made such an impression on me that it remains one of my most vivid childhood memories. I can remember nothing of the remainder of the journey to Southwold, or indeed of the subsequent holiday. At the age of four, I was too young to notice the architectural features of the church. To get an appreciation of these I had to wait more than 60 years till the next time I visited Corpus Christi Church.
Covent Garden In 1872, at the behest of Cardinal Manning, Fr Cornelius Keens set about establishing a church that would serve the numerous, but generally poor, Catholics living and working around Covent Garden. There had been no Catholic church in the area since 1854, when Fr Faber moved his Oratorian community from their temporary premises in King William Street to Brompton. Fr Keens was something of a specialist in creating new parishes in London. He had been responsible for the building of the Sacred Heart Church in Holloway which had opened in 1870, and later went on to open more London churches. For his Maiden Lane church, Fr Keens chose as his architect Frederick Hyde Pownall (1792-1880), the same architect as had designed the Holloway church. It seems that Frederick Pownall designed churches in his spare time, as his day job was County Surveyor for Middlesex, which required that he design
WINTER 2018
