Old Street St Luke Middlesex Family History Guide
Old Street St Luke is an Ecclesiastical Parish in the county of Middlesex, created in 1733 from St Giles without Cripplegate Ancient Parish in the county of London; located on Old Street.
Other places in the parish include: Whitecross Street, Old Street, Golden Lane, City Road West, City Road East, and City Road.
Alternative names: St Luke
Parish church: St Luke
Parish registers begin:
- Parish registers: 1733
- Bishop’s Transcripts: 1813 and 1816
Nonconformists include: Baptist, French Church, General Baptist, Independent/Congregational, Primitive Methodist, Protestant Dissenters, Roman Catholic, Wesleyan Methodist, Wesleyan Methodist Association, and Wesleyan Methodist Reform.
Table of Contents
Adjacent Parishes
- Charterhouse
- Hoxton Holy Trinity
- Clerkenwell St John
- St Botolph Aldersgate, Middlesex
- St Botolph Aldersgate, London
- Clerkenwell St James
- St Giles without Cripplegate, London
- Hoxton St John
- Charterhouse St Thomas
- Finsbury St Paul
- King Square
Parish History
The Imperial Gazetteer of England & Wales 1870
LUKE (ST.), a parish and a district in Middlesex. The parish forms all a compact portion of the metropolis; lies averagely about 1¼ mile NNE of St. Paul’s; is intersected by the line of the Roman road to Old Ford; contains Finsbury-square, Bartholomew-square, King-square, New Artillery Grounds, Bunhill-fields cemetery, and the City basin of Regent’s canal; stands, to a considerable extent, on the site of the quondam Moorfields; is divided, for local purposes, into the six liberties of City-road, East Finsbury, West Finsbury, Golden-lane, Old-street, and Whitecross-street; has postal receiving-offices and postal pillar boxes under London E.C; and enjoys facilities of railway communication, by ready access to stations of the Metropolitan railway, and to the railway termini at Finsbury-circus and Liverpool-street. Acres, 220. Real property, £214,425; of which £10,722 are in gas-works. Pop. in 1851,54,055; in 1861, 57,073. Houses, 6,356.
The parish was originally a part of St. Giles-Cripplegate; and is now ecclesiastically divided into St. Luke-Old-street, St. Barnabas-Kingsquare, St. Matthew-City-road, St. Paul-Bunhill-row, St. Thomas-Charterhouse, St. Mary-Charterhouse, and part of St. Mark-Old-street-road. St. Barnabas and St. Paul were made separate charges in 1841; St. Thomas, in 1842; St. Matthew and St. Mark, in 1848; St. Mary, in 1862. Pop. in 1861, of St. Barnabas, 9,125; of St. Matthew, 3,561; of St. Paul, 5,896; of St. Thomas, 10,840; of the part of St. Mark, 2,392. The rest of St. Mark is in Shoreditch parish; and had, in 1861, a pop. of 3,087. The section for St. Mary was formed out of portions of the previous sections.
The living of St. Luke is a rectory, St. Thomas’ a p. curacy, the others vicarages, in the dio. of London. Value of St. Luke, £578; of St. Barnabas, St. Paul, and St. Mark, each £400; of St. Thomas, £400; of St. Matthew, £300; of St. Mary, £200. Patrons of St. Luke, the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s; of St. Barnabas and St. Paul, the Rector of St. Luke; of St. Matthew, St. Thomas and St Mark, the Bishop of London; of St. Mary, alternately the Crown and the Bishop.
St. Luke’s church was one of Queen Anne’s fifty churches; and has a front in the Doric style, with a curious pyramidal tower. St. Barnabas’ church was built in 1823, at a cost of £12,853; and has an Ionic porch, and a slender spire. St. Matthew’s church was of later erection, and has a very good spire.
The Tabernacle is an Independent chapel; and was built, in 1735, by the celebrated preacher Whitfield. The Wesleyan chapel, in City-road, was founded in 1777, by John Wesley, who often preached in it; and it contains a tablet to Charles Wesley, “the first who received the name of Methodist. ”The grave of John Wesley is behind the chapel; and a tomb covers the grave, was originally erected in 1791, and was reconstructed and enlarged in 1840.
The Roman Catholic chapel in Bloomfield-street was regarded as the Roman Catholic cathedral of London, prior to the erection of St. George’s Southwark; and the remains of Weber were buried in it till their removal, in 1844, to Dresden. St. Luke’s hospital for lunatics dates from 1732; was built in 1751, at a cost of £55,000; consists of brick, trimmed with stone; comprises centre and wings, aggregately 493 feet long; contains accommodation for about 200 patients; and has an income of about £8,000.
The City of London lying-in hospital was founded in 1750 in Aldersgate; and was built on its present site in 1770-3. The French Protestant hospital was founded in 1708, by M. de Gastigny, and has capacity for 54 inmates. The parochial school has an endowed income of £195; Worral’s free school has £301; Fuller’s school has £60; Amyas’s alms houses have £224; and Alleyn’s almshouses have £59. The asylum for the houseless poor had 703 inmates at the census of 1861; St. Mark’s hospital for fistula had 32; and the militia barracks, in City-road, had 89. The total of endowed charities is about £1,680. A vestry hall was built in 1867; is 50 feet long, 25 wide, and 25 high; and has a neat Italian front.
Source: The Imperial Gazetteer of England & Wales [Wilson, John M]. A. Fullarton & Co. N. d. c. [1870-72].
St Luke Old Street
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The church is sited on Old Street, north of the City of London. It was built to relieve the City church of St Giles-without-Cripplegate, Cripplegate, under the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, an attempt to meet the religious needs of London’s burgeoning 18th-century population. The ancient parish of St Giles lay partly within the City and partly outside its boundaries in Middlesex: under the Commissioners’ scheme these two parts were to be separated, with the Middlesex portion (historically the Manor of Finsbury, becoming a new parish of St Luke’s. Construction began in 1727 and was completed in 1733, when the church was consecrated on 18 October (St Luke’s day), and the parish detached from that of St Giles.
The architects were the joint salaried surveyors to the Commission, John James and Nicholas Hawksmoor. James is thought to have been responsible for the body of the church, and Hawksmoor for the west tower, the flanking staircase wings, and the obelisk spire (a most unusual feature for an Anglican church). The spire was topped by an unusual weather vane depicting the head of a dragon with a fiery comet-like tail: this was misinterpreted locally as a louse, and by the mid-20th century had gained the church the nickname “lousy St Luke’s”.
The church stood on often waterlogged ground, near the (historically) notoriously marshy Moorfields area, and from an early date (but particularly from the beginning of the 20th century) suffered from problems of subsidence. The effects of the subsidence remain visible in the distorted shapes of the windows on the north side of the building.
In 1959, in response to structural problems at the church resulting from subsidence, and to a declining inner-city population, the Diocese of London closed St Luke’s and the parish was re-absorbed into that of St Giles-without-Cripplegate. The following year the font and organ case were moved to St Giles’ church, the reredos and altar rails to St Andrew Holborn, and the roof was removed for safety reasons. The crypt was bricked up in 1964. The empty shell of St Luke’s became a dramatic ruin for some 40 years, overgrown with trees, despite being a Grade I listed building.
After several controversial proposals to redevelop offices inside the retained walls, it was converted by the St Luke Centre Management Company Ltd for the London Symphony Orchestra as a concert hall, rehearsal and recording space, and educational resource.
In preparation for the conversion of the church into a music centre, the crypt was cleared of burials in the year 2000. A total of 1053 burials were archaeologically recorded, removed, and reburied at Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey. A television documentary, “Changing Tombs” (2001), recorded the process.
Parish Records
FamilySearch
Administration
- County: Middlesex
- Civil Registration District: St Luke
- Probate Court: Court of the Peculiar of the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral
- Diocese: London
- Rural Deanery: Not created until 1858
- Poor Law Union: St Luke
- Hundred: Ossulstone (Finsbury Division)
- Province: Canterbury