St Christopher's Chapel

To say that London is full of churches is like stating that the ocean is filled with plankton.  I know some people would have been quite happy to visit each and every one, but I feel as though those people would have then been very unhappy to have visited each and every one.  Honestly there are a lot of churches, how many? This many.  Not a good idea.

And so, instead of Westminster Abbey I found my way into the crowded foyer of the Great Ormond Childrens Hospital.  If you've ever been unfortunate enough to visit a childrens hospital, then you can imagine the decor, pleasant anthropomorphic characters splayed across the walls with alarmingly incongruent warnings about the dangers of infection and emergency procedures.  To find what I was looking for I had to go down a lift (with disco lighting) to the basement floor and then up another (sadly lacking in funk) to the first, after being turned around in the maze of wards for a few minutes I stepped into a very different sort of room.

What strikes you first about St Christopher's Chapel is how quiet it is, even surrounded by a hospital ward with the surgical hush of medicine and loving care, stepping into the chapel is akin to plunging ones head into water after a dive, noise ceases immediatley, you can hear your own blood.

The incredible and intricate details of the chapel, worked upon in 1875 by Edward. M. Barry an English architect of some note (no relation to J.M. Barrie the author of Peter Pan, though coincidentally he left all rights to that famous work to the hospital and they continue to draw funding from the royalties, there is a statue of Peter in the garden courtyard) were in their time criticised for their richness and beauty, the childrens hospital originally catoring to the poorest of London's children.  However much the hospital at large has modernised itself, the chapel has remained as a symbol from a more tender time.

Alongside the intense beauty of the place, it is also at once both remarkably small and intensley sad.  Barely eight meters squared it is so perfectly suited to its infant charges, and while the grand churches of London like St Pauls house the heroes of the nation, and have served to direct men in exhortation towards their worship of God for hundreds of years this tiny, beautiful chapel exists as a testament to the most earnest of prayers and saddest of losses.  A line of childrens toys line the mantle of the altar, as clear a depiction as any of the frescoes of the importance of hope in the darkest of times and in memory of the many praises given for life anew.

It is truly a beautiful place, and as I wandered out over the wonderful Florentine reproduction tiles the vicar smiled, and offered me a biscuit.