The area of this church north of Marylebone Road was divided off as a parish in 1866 through the efforts of Charles Gutch. It being a poor part of London at the time, Gutch felt called to minister there even though no church building existed. His place of worship for many years was a structure created out of two houses with a coal shed in between. A building site was obtained shortly after Gutch’s death in 1896. The resulting building, designed primarily by Sir Ninian Comper, is plain on the outside but richly decorated and furnished, within its ‘twentiethcentury- medieval’ style. This is in keeping with Gutch’s deep interest in the Oxford Movement and his desire to return Protestant worship to medieval ornateness. Comper himself described it as ‘the last development of a purely English parish church with lofty aisles and clerestory’.