The parish of South Hackney is 200 years old this year, and for much of that time its baptisms, weddings and funerals have taken place at St John of Jerusalem on Lauriston Road.
Now the Grade II-listed church has been awarded £192,647 by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, to be spent on refurbishing the building and on a year of community activities.
Its rector, the Rev Andrew Wilson, said he hoped the money would fund “a range of projects that might be of interest to people of different ages” — and, in particular, to people with no reason to come to a service.
He said: “Particularly people who wouldn’t necessarily be coming to visit the church, so that the heritage is shared more widely in the community. When you make these bids, you have to have all the partnership conversations beforehand, so you don’t promise something that you’re not going to deliver.”
Upkeep
Wilson, who has been rector since January 2009, said a listed building of this size left the parish reliant on outside funders for anything substantial.
He told the East End Review: “We are very grateful to the lottery and to their heritage department.
“Caring for a Grade II listed building is challenging, and so for these big bits of investment, we really do look to grant-making bodies.”
Parish life
The building matters, he said, to two overlapping groups: the congregation who use it week to week, and the far larger number of people who have marked a family occasion there.
“There is a congregational role the church plays in terms of people who are worshipping all the time, so it’s certainly very important to them,” he said.
“There’s another tier of involvement, which is that, because it’s been around for so long, it’s been a place where people’s baptisms and weddings and funerals have taken place, so that’s the slightly wider role that the church plays in parish life.”
T-shirts
The first of the funded projects will be run with Hackney Quest, a local charity that organises activities for young people, and which was brought into the conversation while the bid was still being written.
“We worked with Hackney Quest at the stage when we were making the bid,” Wilson said. “We’re going to do a T-shirt making project with them, where their young people come into the building, look at some of the imagery, the architecture, the interior, and then use some of those shapes and imagery and turn it into a T-shirt.”
A concert for older people is also planned, though Wilson said he was not aiming the programme at any single group.
“We’d just like it to [cater to everyone in] our neighbourhood, and of course, South Hackney is just hugely varied,” he said.
