St John Horsleydown

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Engraving of St John Horsleydown by John Buckler

St John Horsleydown was the Anglican parish church of Horsleydown in Bermondsey, Southwark.

It was built between June 1727 and 1733 (beside the road now known as Tower Bridge Road, just south of the junction with Tooley Street), as one of the last churches built for the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches. (The parish had been created by splitting St Olave's Parish in 1640, and land for St John's and its parsonage had already been bought from St Olave's Parish in 1718.) Its design was a collaboration between Nicholas Hawksmoor and John James, who were in June 1727 commanded to stop pursuing their separate designs and "jointly prepare a model of the Church by the next meeting that may be built as cheap as possible".

Its parish was merged into that of St Mary Magdalen Bermondsey in 1904, and the church-building remained in use within that parish until it was severely damaged by a bomb on September 20th 1940 during the Blitz (though when it went out of use and was demolished is unclear, since weddings there were recorded as late as 1965). The London City Mission acquired the site from the Church Commissioners on 26 November 1971 and opened its Nasmith House there in 1975, though the church's plinth is Grade II listed and may still be seen from the churchyard (surviving up to 10ft in places).