When William Blake married his dear wife Catherine in 1782 at St Mary’s, Battersea, it was brand new, finished five years earlier, its 130ft copper spire painted a “warm stone colour”.
This steeple, on a bend of the river, is the most striking of the parish churches along the banks of the Thames in London. A friend of mine used to live in a houseboat moored by the church, once set in a metropolitan parish of 2,164 acres, later broken up into 17 smaller ones.
St Mary’s rightly figures on the cover of a marvellous new book. Or rather, two books, for these are volumes 49 and 50 of the monumental Survey of London, which began 113 years ago with the parish of Bromley by Bow. To have reached Volume 50 (Yale, £135 for the two volumes) is astonishing. The editors, Andrew Saint and Colin Thom, should be made dukes, at the least.
Interesting the association with his marriage. I wonder if it is Blake’s Chapel on the Green? He wasn’t always entirely enthusiastic about the established church.
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires
-‘The Garden of Love’