Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Oh, oh there doesn't seem to have been time for an xmas special this year ( though I sandwiched the trip to the Bloomsbury Baptist church in a present buying dash to Forbidden Planet before work believing that there would be. )

Unexpectedly seeing the church - a  faux Notre Dame frontage, big but almost invisible in that funny back corner of Covent Garden / New Oxford St /Holborn where the rates must still be low enough for specialised shops to exist and the chiefly male enclaves of Models Zone and Forbidden Planet mean that my sons will cheerfully visit the British Museum if they can go at least window shopping afterwards - I thought as if in a trance - I CAN DO IT - I can get into a church AND write an xmas special - though there were only 4 more days until christmas and nothing was wrapped or cooked and I had a full day of work infront of me.  That morning I was making a dash for a gift for PSM's sons's birthday present for a party that afternoon.  Despite an almost official rumour early in December that payday would be brought forward my calculations for Christmas had come to a grinding standstill when it wasn't.  Though just in the nick of time the wages had cleared the night before and I had chanced final stocking filler purchases online despite Amazon no longer guaranteeing their delivery.   Later when I got to work I rang numbers I found on google to chivy the gifts in time for christmas. A kind but weary sounding man on a Scottish Industrial estate said 'We are working flat out to get everything out' about a life-sized gorilla puppet I had bought for my younger son. Then there is a long pause as he goes to check.   'Yes', he says - 'it is packaged ready to go - with luck on your side it will be there.'  then a pause,  'It's big' he drawls.   I feel I have a direct number to Polar Express HQ.

I have only visited a Baptist church once before
http://i-sit-in-churches-to-think-amen.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/baptist-church-horseferry-road.html
and I still walk past that odd and shuttered building,  It was in the early days of the blog when I managed to write a post almost once a week though I found my own project daunting.  Just finding the confidence to get into a church at all was hard - I remember being terrified this one would smell ( though it did ) and terrified I would walk in on a full submerged baptism ( I didn't).

A sandwich board says the church is open and I push open the glass door - to find three awkward but smiley youngish people at an over manned welcoming desk, I realise I haven't even had time to worry about the submersion.  Though it is just past 10 am in the morning so it seems unlikely.   Can I quickly have a look at your church I ask, yes, they wave me in - smiling and nodding encouragingly.   It is a large, light auditorium, with a curved balcony above and a flower-shaped window high up behind.  But and I have found this before in the non conformist churches - there seems something completely missing - it is almost like a lecture theatre, there is no sound, no shade or dark, no secret corners  - it is just a big, clean, well-vacuumed space.   I try to write about what it is that is missing.  I think of the carpet and how it almost hushes the presence of my own step from the church,  the sound of myself in a holy space.  I have a book about shadows in art and it is a very favourite photograph - a black and white photograph taken by Monet at Giverny with his own shadow falling across the foreground of the lake for  recorded is his own presence with the thing that fascinates and absorbs him.

 I think of my own home and despite my despair sometimes at our tiny space, the small rooms and the seemingly endless shift of small pieces of plastic, papers, books and folded clothes from one room to another there is sometimes a pause when everything is tidied and clean when I see the beauty of the home we live in, the home I have made.  I think of our lives and the fun and activity and thoughts and shouting and the carefully picked beauty of our things, cups and pictures, the drawings and postcards, colours and lampshades and our lives together.  I think you would feel it when you walked in, the richness of our lives despite the cramp of the space.

I do not sit, though I think I should, I am worried about being late for work.  It is the last day today before christmas and there is still so much to do - we are attempting to complete three newspapers in a week - two are finished but the third needs to be or we will have to go into work over the holiday.   'Happy Christmas' I say to the slightly nerdy and startled trio at the desk.  There is a small nativity behind them and some tension as if perhaps the girl used to go out with one of the men and now goes out with the other.  Though they are of a wholesome, indeterminate knitting pattern age and time.   'Happy Christmas' they say.

Afterwards cycling to work I think I have squandered the Christmas Special for there was so little  Christmas or anything at all much in the church.   Perhaps I can pretend I never went I think - perhaps I can get into another Church, a more beautiful one and say that it is the Xmas one.

Though of course I don't.  Christmas takes over like a cocoa cola truck driven at top speed by a smiling  yet manic faced santa who cooks and vacuums and wraps.   On Christmas day we dance Gangnam Style to a new Wii game and play Scrabble.

Before Christmas I had seen on the step of an office on the mini roundabout corner of Artillery Row and Great Peter St that I have described before for the sunlight hits and warms the space and the homeless know to sun themselves there like cats on a favourite wall.  In the littered debris of bottles and cans was an order early for  Christmas supermarket brochure splayed like porn.  Images of plentiful Christmas food and treats spread wide on bright lit pages.  I thought it is a dream we are all chasing - all salivating for and there is something repugnant to the greed of it and yet I wouldn't know how to stop.  When the boys shout on Christmas morning 'Everything is Brilliant.'  I am happy.

The church opened in December 1848 as a showcase for the Baptist faith in London and was funded and built by Sir Samuel Morton Peto MP.  He had made his money as a building contractor involved in the building of many London landmarks including Nelson's Column, the Houses of Parliament and the infrastructure of London's brick sewers but then moved his interests to the railways.    He built railways here and abroad  - including Canada, Norway and Algeria ( accompanying Napoleon III in the late 1850s to open this line.)   Until then religious intolerance and financial restraints had meant meeting houses were lowly, hidden places - rooms above shops and  tucked down alleyways.   When the Baptist Church was proposed on this site there was reluctance to lease the land to nonconformists with their dull spire-less architecture.   Peto is said to have exclaimed ' A spire my Lord?  We shall have two!' And the  twin spires graced the towers until 1951 when they were deemed unsafe and brought down.


The first preacher Revd William Brock claimed 'the Bible and The Times newspaper are the best materials for the preacher', for the God of the Bible was also the God of everyday life.


Cycling over Westminster Bridge I see a man dressed in tight jeans with pink frilly knickers over them navigating the pedestrians and traffic on a skateboard.    Wow I think he has sorted out what he needs from life and gone for it.
I have printed a calendar of the washing up pictures I have taken.   I love the compositions of colour and the celebration of everyday.


And then Christmas over I just run out of steam.   My friend said I didn't get to the heart of the knights templar - and I knew she was right - I could just about hear horses hooves on cobbles in the alleys around the church but I never got to the beard and hair and spit of big fighting men praying.  And now I spend evening after evening infront of the computer a bit knackered and a bit glum in January edging into February like a teenager revising, clicking yahoo news, desultorily reading about weather and murders and debt  thinking I don't really want to write about this church - then inching another tiny piece of history


I find a submerged baptism from the Bloomsbury Central Church on youtube!  Fascinatingly the CARPET ROLLS BACK at the altar and sections come away to reveal a pool - men in baggy gym wear stand lowering a woman backwards into the water which she comes out of shuddering with joy.   At Blackpool Circus when I was a little girl the grand finale of the show was the ring filling with water and a silvery swan with dancers floating in it.  Two years ago I went back with the boys and their cousins to find the vast room with trapezes strung to the heavens reduced to a beautiful, gilded trinket-sized theatre.  As  the musicians started  their helter skelter tunes I held my breath that the range of ages 6 - 16 could be entertained, then watched them roar with laughter, doubled up with mirth as the slapstick clown trapped light then flung it from a bucket as the lights came up.  The finale creaked into action as the floor lowered and a swan was raised, the water filled the floor - oooh I cooed.

Another friend emails kindly to say - just write - you are funny - don't worry about the research and the churches.  But I love the churches I want to say - I think there should be more churches and less me.  Though also I realise that when I first started writing this blog I wanted to show I could be funny and real and now I have become only earnest.   My over worked, slightly put on, brave heroine voice has become mannered - I use words and expressions over and over - 'slightly', 'weary', 'held my breath'.   It seems to be the narrative I tell.   I wonder if it has become embarrassing.   I feel have lost confidence in the project and my own writing, though I don't want to give up.   Perhaps it will get easier I think when spring comes, when I get to the City churches, relieved to have finally finished this one.


Amen.