St George's, Hanover Square
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- For the constituency, see Westminster St George's (UK Parliament constituency).
| St George's Church, Hanover Square | |
 View from St George Street
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| 51°30′45″N 0°8′33″W / 51.5125°N 0.1425°WCoordinates: 51°30′45″N 0°8′33″W / 51.5125°N 0.1425°W | |
| Country | United Kingdom |
|---|---|
| Denomination | Church of England |
| Architecture | |
| Architect(s) | John James |
St George's, Hanover Square, is an Anglican church in central London, built in the early 18th century. The church was designed by John James and was constructed under a project to build fifty new churches around London (the Queen Anne Churches). It is situated on Hanover Square, near Oxford Circus, in what is now the City of Westminster. Due to its Mayfair location, it has been a frequent venue of high society weddings.
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[edit] Origins
St George's was also the name of its parish, which covered Mayfair, Belgravia, and Pimlico; it was formed in 1724 from part of the ancient parish of St Martin in the Fields. In the ancient county of Middlesex but within the Liberty of Westminster, the parish was included in the area of the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855 and the County of London in 1889. The vestry administered local government in the area until the civil parish of St George Hanover Square became part of the Metropolitan Borough of Westminster in 1899. Its burial ground was located off between Connaught Street and Bayswater Road.
The parish formed the parliamentary borough of St George Hanover Square from 1885 to 1918. The ecclesiastical parish still exists today and forms part of the Deanery of Westminster St. Margaret in the Diocese of London.
[edit] Weddings
The church was a fashionable place of worship to have weddings. It was here that Theodore Roosevelt, the future US President, aged 28, married Edith Carow, aged 25, on 2 December 1886. One famous London marriage involved the architect John Shaw Senior (1776–1832) to Elizabeth Hester Whitfield in 1799. Other notable people married there include the Eccentric Missionary, Joseph Wolff, in 1827. 2 February 1858 saw the marriage of Ann Jeffrey and Samuel Parkes who won the Victoria Cross in the Charge of the Light Brigade for saving the life of Trumpeter Hugh Crawford.[citation needed] In October 1899, Alfreda Ernestina Albertina Bowen, daughter of Sir George Ferguson Bowen and Contessa Diamantina di Roma, married Robert Lydston Newman[1][2].
[edit] In popular culture
In the movie My Fair Lady, Eliza's father (played by Stanley Holloway), having just been provided with an inheritance and having to move into "middle-class morality", invites her (Audrey Hepburn) to his wedding at this church. Following the invitation, he and his fellows sing "Get Me To The Church On Time".
[edit] Music
George Frederick Handel was a regular worshipper at St George's, which is now home to the annual Handel Festival. St. George's has a full time professional choir and a strong choral tradition and is an outstanding venue for classical music concerts. A Restoration Fund Appeal was launched on Trinity Sunday 2006 to raise a total of five million pounds, with a target of one and a half million pounds needed for the first phase of essential restoration work to the fabric of the church. A recent concert series in support of the Restoration Fund was supported by the William Smith International Performance Programme and featured solo piano performances by students from the Royal College of Music, including Ren Yuan, Ina Charuashvili, Meng Yan Pan and the London debut of Maria Nemtsova of Russia.
[edit] References
- Parish data (Vision of Britain)
- ^ Anglo-Colonial Notes, Evening Post (Wellington, New Zealand), 24 November 1899, page 5
- ^ www.freebmd.org
