About St Peter's Square
St Peter's Church, the oldest church in Hammersmith and the only loveable one, although cheaply built and shabby.’ Nikolaus Pevsner.
These days it is hard to imagine, but back in 1829 St Peter’s Church stood in solitary splendour, surrounded on all sides by meadows, market gardens and smallholdings. The new church faced out upon a T-junction formed by Black Lion Lane, which ran south until it reached the Upper Mall and an
unfinished road leading west into St Peter’s Square. Residential dwellings and commercial buildings were gradually to replace the fields and farms as Hammersmith flourished during the rest of the nineteenth century.
On 8 November 1836 the ‘London Gazette’ defined the boundaries of the St Peter’s District as follows:
‘It is bounded on the west by the Parish of Chiswick; on the south by the River Thames, the Creek and the High Bridge. Worple Way is towards the southern extremity of Waterloo Street; on the east northwardly Waterloo Street, including the west side of that street; then westward, by King’s Street, that is the Turnpike Road leading from London to Brentford, as far as Webb’s Lane, as far as Gould Hawke Road; and on the north by Gould Hawke Road until the said ancient road terminates in Chiswick parish at Stamford Brook.’
Although some of the names have changed or disappeared, the parish boundaries remain the same today, some 173 years after the foundation stone of St Peter’s Church was laid on 16 May 1827.
The village of Hammersmith had been in existence for some hundred years by the seventeenth century, and was steadily increasing in size and prosperity. The River Thames was a great source of trade and income. Bakers, potters, chandlers and taverns dotted the banks of the river, while the main western coaching road ran out of London through Hammersmith and onwards to Bath and Bristol.
Hammersmith riverside now lies in two separate parishes – St Peter’s and St Paul’s. In the early seventeenth century the nearest place of worship available to the residents of Hammersmith was All Saints’ Church in Fulham. Without a horse it was difficult to reach, particularly in winter. In 1631 St Paul’s Church in Hammersmith was built to ease the problem.
Meanwhile, London continued to expand westwards, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century a significant housing development in the south-west corner of Hammersmith led to the need for another place of worship. In 1821 the population of Hammersmith was given as 15,301, but the accommodation in the local churches was only enough for 3,158 parishioners.
A large fund (in the region of one million pounds) had been raised to celebrate the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the Victory of Waterloo in June 1815. During the reign of King George IV, Parliament passed the ‘Church Building Act’, which established a body of commissioners with powers to contribute to acceptable schemes from the fund.
The first application for a ‘chapel of ease’ for Hammersmith was refused. However, in June 1824 a second round of grants provided a further £500,000, and permission to build St Peter’s Church was finally given. St Peter’s is known as a ‘ Waterloo Church’, one of several built at the time.
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