Search...
We offer daily services and a cultural programme of talks, events and concerts. We seek to be a welcoming space for people to reflect, create and debate
World cuisine, served fresh – Every weekday lunchtime
From local and traditional specialities, to international delights, our market proudly showcases a distinct selection of the capital’s small businesses offering the finest street food.
St James’s hosts inclusive services and a cultural programme. We seek to be a welcoming space for people to reflect, create and debate.
St James’s is a place to explore, reflect, pray, and support all who are in need. We are a Church of England parish in the Anglican Communion.
We host a year-round creative programme encompassing music, visual art and spoken word.
We offer hospitality to people going through homelessness and speak out on issues of injustice, especially concerning refugees, asylum, racial justice, and LGBTQ+ issues.
St James’s strives to advocate for earth justice and to develop deeper connections with nature.
We aspire to be a home where everyone can belong. We’re known locally and globally for our unique history and beauty, as well as faith in action, creativity and the arts, and a commitment to social and environmental justice.
We strive to be a Eucharist-centred, diverse and inclusive Christian community promoting life in abundance, wellbeing and dignity for all.
St James’s Piccadilly has been at the heart of its community since 1684. We invite you to play your part in securing this historic place for generations to come.
The work of St James’s, it costs us £5,000 per day to enable us to keep our doors open to all who need us.
A reimagined St James’s realised. A redesigned garden, courtyard and new building capacity—all fully accessible— will provide beautiful spaces for all as well as improving our environmental performance.
Whether shooting a blockbuster TV series or creating a unique corporate event, every hire at St James’s helps our works within the community.
St James's Church 197 Piccadilly London W1J 9LL
Directions on Google Maps
As St Pancras Church prepares to celebrate its patronal festival, Revd. Jonathan Lee reflects on the joyful presence of children, the legacy of St Pancras, and the hopeful renewal of faith through embodied community.
Among the joys and highlights of my months at St Pancras Church, since last September, have been the occasions when we have had children in church. This has sometimes been in ones and twos, when we have celebrated with a family the baptism or dedication of their child. Sometimes it has been with a large group of young people who have filled the church with the sound of their music making, their orchestra or their choir. Sometimes it has been with class of school aged children who have visited for a service or to explore our building or – more recently under the guidance of Revd Sarah and with the help of St James’s own Revd Mariama Ifode-Blease and Revd Brian Curnew – to explore Easter: to experience through touch, taste, smell, sound and sight, to imagine, to discuss, to question and to wonder.
So, it should be. Especially for a church whose patron saint is St Pancras, who is often styled, the patron saint of children. Born, it is believed, to a wealthy noble couple in Synnada in Phrygia in about 289CE, Pancratius (Pancras) was orphaned by the age of 12, and then taken by his uncle Dionysius to live in Rome. There it seems the then Bishop of Rome, Marcellinus, devoted some of his time and attention to the young Pancras as well as his, sadly short-lived, uncle. By the age of 14 Pancras had been baptised and, under the Diocletian persecution, he was denounced as a Christian. He was supposedly interviewed by the emperor himself and, refusing to denounce his faith, he was beheaded on 12 May, 304CE.
We, at St Pancras Church, are therefore approaching our patronal festival weekend (this year 10 and 11 May, with the 12 May falling on a Monday). On Saturday 10 May, St Pancras Church is hosting a conference, ‘Women’s Voices’, with several notable visiting speakers (and partnership participation from Revd Lucy, Revd Sarah, Revd Mariama and Revd Ayla). Then on Sunday, 11 May, St Pancras congregation is hoping that many from St James’s Picadilly, will join us, after your own morning service, for lunch at St Pancras church. Hopefully we will be able to relax together in the garden before joining together for a service of evensong. Do come and join in as our two churches seek to get to know each other better and as we mark our partnership.
I wish that I could, promise you a welcome at St Pancras from a truly intergenerational congregation, but while we are, as I have said, celebrating frequent contact with school aged youngsters; we have a way to go before we are likely to count among our regular congregation, many children at all. What I can promise you is a warm welcome from our small, but forward looking and faithful congregation. They are, we are, committed to a process of re-opening the church and re-establishing it as a place of life for all at the heart of this parish and the communities around it.
I am writing, in the days immediately after Pope Francis’ death and recent funeral. I have been struck by how many people I have heard interviewed on the media over the last week, for whom faith had been made possible again by his open hearted and non-judgemental approach, by his focus on every person being a child of God.
Faith was, in Francis, embodied; and in this season of Easter that is a phrase which provides room for contemplation. An unjustly tortured body; a missing body; the glorious mystery of Christ’s resurrection body; and the new embodiment of Christ seeded within the sad, dejected, fearful, ordinary and diverse bodies of his few remaining disciples.
The joyous hope of Easter was not found in the strength or confidence of the disciples nor in the size of their group; but in faith becoming possible again for them through presence: – present with a personal word to the grieving, present in lively conversation during a walk, present over a shared meal, present to breathe new life and present eternally within the breaking of bread.
We are keeping ourselves busy as we seek to open up this place with a programme of services, conferences, concerts, school visits, a food market, and growing links into our community. Yet, however busy our churches are or may become, Christian community will grow and lives will be renewed only through the presence of the God of love – embodied, as Francis reminds us, in us, in friends and in strangers.
Revd. Jonathan Lee
Associate Priest at St Pancras Church, Euston Road
