Church of Our Lady of The Assumption and St Gregory ( formerly The Royal Bavarian Chapel )

I find it very hard to switch off. Not to be on 'guard'. Even to sit still. I think since the first time I stood on the toilet lid to reach the toilet rolls on a Sunday morning and found a regiment of empty and full cans of stella, tucked behind the pack at the back of the shelf and in mid-tiptoe-stretch realised in a wash, a wave, a flood of stark understanding exactly what was happening within our family I have found it difficult not to concentrate on life with an almost magnified watchfulness. I was busy already with two young children, a long commute and a nearly full time job - but in that chilly downstairs toilet I stood aghast but alert, hyper-aware listening to the children playing with their seemingly exuberant but erratic dad.
That home was in a coastal town on the mouth of an estuary, a cowboy town with one road in and a lot of people who never left, never moved from it. I would hear the clunk of pile-driving on and on as the foundations of a big seafront development were attempted but they just couldn't reach solid ground on the estuary mud. It took months to get the foundations in and the austere, ugly flats with the beautiful view missed the certaintity of that seemingly never ending property boom just as I did.

Though I imagine that having lost my job and with weeks to spare I would be able to sit and write a blog a week, wrestle the first novel into a publishable package ( I even have an idea - ding! - how to do it!) then make sense of my ideas for the second. But I don't. I go ( slightly unsuccesfully ) homemaker crazy. I fill every second with manic effort - cleaning all the cupboards, driving to ikea twice ( boys beds, a wardrobe for me, underbed drawers ( more later) ), pasting a forest photo mural on a wall in the boys room, buying storage on ebay and nice sheets for all. I have a plan that if I can hold back the tide of dressing up box, airfix, lego. that we will all feel well, and that with a mere flick of my wrist I will scoot the vacuum cleaner/ duster around and then sit to read a book/ write. And yet all this unceasing effort creates a tidal scurf - there is a dismantled platform bed in the hall, child stained mattresses, jigsaws for charity shops, even a playmobil ark ( though I am too fond of the animals to give them away, so it is a shell of a toy, almost useless) and all this tidying feels like it has created only more havoc. I need Exh to move the stuff, need him to help me. But ( and this is indeed a celebration ) Exh has a new home too. He is moving from the hostel on our street to a live/work unit in nearby south london with some friends. The boys are so excited. Though exh has always struggled with change ( as perhaps I do ) so he dips badly before getting back into his stride but a little bit edgy and anxious.


I think when I am lost on one of these lone, obsessive trips to Ikea, this time to the Edmonton one which I have never been to before, because it is the only branch that says underbed storage is 'instock', though because I have left the directions on the kitchen table and then confused right and left from the snatched instructions my kind brother relays over the mobile phone in a layby, I am parked up off a dimly lit roundabout - this is a fantasy - I am chasing something impossible to obtain from flat pack furniture. Can enough Billy bookshelves, a Pax wardrobe and some brightly coloured children's bedroom accessories give peace? And yet the boys new room coincides with many things to achieve it. Though the anger has already mainly blown out of my eldest son - and if this is a brief boast I will still thank every day it is true. Often he puts his hand in mine to walk to school and conceals blown kisses behind his hand in the school line. A boy who used to wake and shout 'Mum! I hate you! The grave things he has had to face in his 9 years make him thoughtful, passionate and generous. In an argument with his brother he occasionally shouts 'I want to hurt you' but he keeps his hands by his side. We have come a long way.
Though I am writing all this late at night and then start to look up on the internet about Nietzsche. I can't remember now the path of this thought though I know it went via Foucault's sado masochism at one point. I start copying and pasting details of Nietzsche's ideas to use later. Only in the morning do I discover a part has been pasted in the middle of my description of the journey to ikea:
I think when I am lost "Alternatively, the death of God may lead beyond bare perspectivism to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing has any inherent importance and that life lacks purpose. As Heidegger put the problem, "If God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the suprasensory world of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself." I am sure you think I am staging this but I am not - it has made me laugh so much for somehow there is something hilarious or true there. Myself parked just off the north circular pondering the lack of god. Though I think I almost did feel that, I just couldn't have said it. I felt spectacularly bleak. Once a long time ago I wrote a story about myself - like a detective story about a teenage romance I had ( though it included an erotic tale of shaving ul's head) the nearest thing to this scrapbook style of confessional writing that I seem to employ now - and in the relatively early days of home computers and temperamental printers it once chewed a whole page spitting out a short piece of text "!@£E$%^^&make a point to all this me me me !@£$TGJNBjnc". I kept it for ages because I thought it was so funny. ( though I have lost that story somehow - though oh, I wish hadn't.)

I wonder too if I need to keep so busy as ul and I have finished our relationship. We intend to see each other but not attempt a reunion. I wish wish wish this wasn't true but it seems necessary. He is a drowned man, though still kicking, white flesh submerged in murky water, too far to get to, his stored anger like heavy stones stiched into his pockets, a current dragging him distorted and grey too far away. I wait in the few quiet, still moments of the day to be hit by grief. But it doesn't come. I am not sure if I am hiding out treading water in my homemaking or nearing dry land. Though I am back to a life alone without the cheer of a supporter.

The Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory formerly The Bavarian Chapel is a flat-faced dark brick building on a dark back street behind Regent St with an open side door. I find later a description - 'In its humble guise of eighteenth-century domesticity (it) seems to shrink from attracting the notice of the passers-by' W.de l'Hopital. Then I read more and more and see it was hiding out. As indeed it feels this day as I go through the dark rather depressing door a bit reluctantly and then open another side door into the body of the church discovering a wonderful place, small and elegant, almost like a private chapel . Oh I think. This peaceful space has just been sat here as if waiting. I feel I can breathe for the first time in weeks. I am always rushing to get to a church, always rushing to find the scrap of time to write and here I am, here where I rushed to be and just for a few minutes I can enjoy it. There are a couple of people devoutly praying and a few people moving round. I stand at the back and think anxiously - I am going to end up needing this. This feeling of the devout. I pause writing this and look up the word - it means a pious regard of religion but also geniune and sincere.

The Church was initially a Catholic chapel attached to the Portugese embassy on Golden Square, though there is a whiff of an idea it may even have existed as a clandestine chapel for secret worship prior to the Embassy's cloak of permitted Catholicism. I grasp fully from the 'Warwick Street Church' A short history and guide' what the historic restrictions on Catholics were in the 18th century:
'The penal laws by excluding Catholics from both houses of Parliament made it impossible for them to take part in public life. If a catholic was a land-owner he was threatened with financial ruin, for not only was he subject to the double land tax, but his family estates might pass to his Protestant next-of-kin should they choose to dispossess him. He was forbidden to keep arms and was liable to be deprived of any horse above the value of five pounds. He was incapable of holding any office in the army or navy , or practising as barrister, doctor or school-master. He could not send his children to be educated abroad without a fine and in order that due check might be kept on him and his property he was bound to register his name and estate under penalty of forfeiture, and to enrol all deeds. Some of these laws were, it is true, rarely enforced, but on occasion the individual Catholic was made to bear the full force of them so that the threat of their being put into operation still had to be reckoned with.'
Only in these chapels of diplomatic immunity could mass be heard and here in an invisible and probably smaller building than the present one, squeezed between 23 and 24 Golden Square with an entrance through the stables at the back on Warwick St the Catholics of London could make their furtive worship. Golden Square itself had been developed from 1670 on land where horses grazed. Warwick St was then the highway to Tyburn ( a tiny village at Marble Arch, a place where criminals were hung/there was no Regent Street then ) and particular attention had to be taken of the drainage because the route became impassable in winter when market people travelling that way were in danger of being lost in 'the great waters perpetually lying there all the Winter Season.' Though the development, surrounded by the land of former plague pits and the stench of breweries was only fashionable for a short time. By 1747 the Portugese embassy had moved west to a grander location and the Bavarian embassy moved in keeping the chapel's immunity.

In 1778 the necessity of finding extra men to fight in The American War of Independence ( soldiers had not been allowed to join the armed forces without taking an oath of being a Protestant) meant Parliament passed a piecmeal Catholic Relief Bill. But anti catholic feeling was high in England and Scotland and Protestant Associations were formed nationwide to defend the heritage of Englishmen. The Pope was seen as the bogeyman, Catholic France the enemy, Papists themselves disloyal and dangerous. 'Wild stories began to circulate as, for example, that twenty thousand Jesuits were concealed a network of underground tunnels near the Thames, waiting for orders from Rome to blow up the banks and so flood London.' Lord George Gordon fanned this hatred with speeches in parliament attempting to have the Bill repealed. As the leader of London Protestant Association he presented the Protestant Petition on 2nd June 1780 with a big demonstration gathered outside Parliament. By early evening the petition was turned down because of the circumstances of it's presentation, and the mob grew restless. Troops were called out to move the people from the vicinity of Parliament. Once dispersed, groups of men, some of them drunk, armed with lighted torches and weapons began to move against known Catholic targets - chapels and the residences of well known Catholics. One group burned down the chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador in Lincoln's Inn Fields while another set upon The Bavarian Chapel. The rioters broke in, windows were smashed, and the contents of the chapel burnt in the street - books, the altar piece, the organ, balastrades and pews. An old German blacksmith called Bund saved what valuables he could including discovering the Bavarian minister's stash of contraband tea and commodities that he sold to supplement his income. The military arrived and stayed to protect the chapel, sleeping out on straw in the shell of the building. The riots went on for a week, gathering momentum until the anti catholic sentiments were replaced by anti authority of any sort. Prisons were broken into, prisoners released and gaols burnt down.

A subscription was launched in 1788 to rebuild the damaged Warwick St Chapel under the control of the Vicar Apostolic of the London District whilst preserving its links with the Bavarian Legation. Indeed memories of the Gordon Riots inform their decision to build on the same site and the design of the church too:
'It will be in every respect more eligible than to build in another place as it will probably pass unobserved by the Public in general".
'The walls of the new chapel were made of great solidity, being almost a yard thick; there were no windows at all at ground level in Warwick Street and the solid wooden doors were lined with sheet metal on the inside.'

Though despite the riots many Catholics began to push for increased freedom - for it was seen that the reform bill of 1778 had been passed easily by Parliament. There was division within the church as this second relief bill was prepared, even talk of a schism between more conservative and liberal elements of the Church about the oath that must be taken to receive these new privileges - but in June 1791 the Catholic Relief Act was passed allowing Catholics to live without persecution and to be able to worship freely and to be able to build their own churches or chapels. ( Though without bells or steeples)

The Warwick St chapel was opened on 12th March 1790, the feast of St Gregory the Great, to whom it was dedicated. It was the first church erected by native-born Catholics to take advantage of the new liberty accorded to them a few months later by the Relief Act of 1791 whilst keeping its heritage in the penal times of Catholic history and the umbrella of an embassy.

The French revolution which started in 1789 brought large numbers of the French clergy and aristocracy to London where they were well received. The Bavarian Chapel became one of the most fashionable of the Catholic Chapels and it is even believed that a Requiem for Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette may have been sung there in 1793.

Though by 1840 Charles Dickens described Golden Square in Nicholas Nickleby:

'Although a few members of the graver professions live about Golden Square, it is not exactly in anybody's way to or from anywhere. It is one of the squares that have been; a quarter of the town that has gone down in the world, and taken to letting lodgings. Many of its first and second floors are let, furnished, to single gentlemen; and it takes boarders besides. It is a great resort of foreigners. The dark-complexioned men who wear large rings, and heavy watch-guards, and bushy whiskers, and who congregate under the Opera Colonnade, and about the box-office in the season, between four and five in the afternoon, when they give away the orders,--all live in Golden Square, or within a street of it. Two or three violins and a wind instrument from the Opera band reside within its precincts. Its boarding-houses are musical, and the notes of pianos and harps float in the evening time round the head of the mournful statue, the guardian genius of a little wilderness of shrubs, in the centre of the square. On a summer's night, windows are thrown open, and groups of swarthy moustached men are seen by the passer-by, lounging at the casements, and smoking fearfully. Sounds of gruff voices practising vocal music invade the evening's silence; and the fumes of choice tobacco scent the air. There, snuff and cigars, and German pipes and flutes, and violins and violoncellos, divide the supremacy between them. It is the region of song and smoke. Street bands are on their mettle in Golden Square; and itinerant glee- singers quaver involuntarily as they raise their voices within its boundaries.'


Here in the church it is quiet. I sit for a minute in a simple wooden pew. Then walk around the small church. Above is the gallery, an intimate audience to the chapel. There are beautiful things - a shrine to Our Lady Immaculate with columns of silver hearts and charms behind glass. I am not sure what these are but discover they were medals brought in thanksgiving for favours received by prayer and that the walls of Warwick St had in previous times been covered by them. A custom brought from the continent they were derided by the architect John Francis Bentley who had been given the task to restore the now unfashionable church 'It is a poor, shapeless and unsightly edifice built after the commonest type of non-Conformist chapels of the time with heavy galleries'. But the priest Monsignor Talbot remonstrated for the practice to continue and here, they are combined in the altarpice. Though the architect ( who later designed Westminster Cathedral) did not succeed in many of his plans - he intended to build a Minor Roman basilica of marble and mosaic which he started with the present apse behind the altar - which would have have left nothing of the old church except the four walls - though money ran out preserving most of the rest of the only remaining Embassy chapel of the 18th century. I discover later I miss the jewel of the church - The Assumption that brought the chapel it's name in 1854 - a bas-relief by the sculptor John Edwards Carew. It has been placed high up somewhere that I didn't see. As the guide says 'Its position over the door is unworthy of it but no better site is now possible.'

At the side just before I leave I see a door ajar to a cupboard like confessional. I am not completely certain you are going to stay with me on this but I have had a thing about small cupboards for as long as I can remember. I always want to know if they will 'fit'. I have scared boyfriends in European cities, not being able to resist just climbing into check a hotel wardrobe, thinking they will be a while in a shower down a creaky lino floored halls. Forgotten soap finds me curled up in the thin floored space, the door pulled to. In my novel I have the heroine crying in such a cupbord in a hut in the middle of a forest:

'The cupboard is somewhere between a wardrobe and a chest and I open the door to find one tweed jacket hanging from a rail. I step inside. My scalp pressing to the splinters of the roof, my back curved, the thin floor bending at the unexpected weight. I pull the door to. I am in the dark, in warm still air and the scratchy smell of male and tweed. Amazed by my own actions I just sit there listening to my breath fill the shape. Sat quiet, it is a surprise to hear crying. Gulping, rattling sobs. The sound comes from a very long way a way and when I hold my breath to listen to them they stop. I touch my face in the pitch black and find tears. Wet and salt like blood. Shocked. I haven't cried like this since I was a little girl and it feels like discovering an unknown muscle, somethin flexing its strength. I don't immediately hear the door of the hut open but I become aware of footfalls and the slam of it close. I am squatting in a shut cupboard in a stranger's place.'

Here in the church I am tempted by this dark and secret space just to try. But I pull myself together and leave the church.

On a boris bike in Piccadilly circus I look up to the neon to see a huge hand play repeated and random rock, paper, scissors. It is a Macdonalds ad. It seems like a big, gaudy, lonely thing. I imagine a lost place late at night, a face lit by a computer screen swaying, gulping another drink, repeatedly counting one two, three, a hand making simple shapes in rhythm, the nearest thing to companionship. Like the touch of a hairdresser when you have been single for a long time, a guilt that this is the nearest thing to intimacy or human warmth. a simple child's game taken over by a computer.

I discover too on the internet 'The Soho Masses Pastoral Council welcomes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered Catholics, their parents, families and friends to Masses at 5.00 pm, on the 1st & 3rd Sundays of every month, at the Church of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, London'. Though I also find some internet outrage to this. I think this church has been brave in the 'home' it has made, it's plain facade, still hiding its worshippers.