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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
We’re marking Black History Month with a very special concert series, offering a curated journey across genres, from classical and Latin music to spoken word.
Tuesday 27 October 7pm
World renowned choir The Sixteen perform some of the finest choral music of the Portuguese and English Renaissance.
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 aim to be a place where you can belong. We have a unique history, and the beauty of our building is widely known. Our community commits to faith in action: social and environmental justice; creativity. and the arts
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.
It costs £5,000 each day to keep the doors of St James’s open to all who already 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
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In her Black History Month reflection, The Revd Dr Ayla Lepine celebrates four Black British women whose poetry, music, literature and art honour overlooked voices, challenge barriers to belonging and remind us that giving attention to every person is a sacred act.
This year’s national theme for Black History Month is Honouring Our Communities: recognising the people whose everyday work sustains Black life in Britain, often without public gratitude, celebration, or even acknowledgement. Ottobah Cugoano, who campaigned with the Sons of Africa and hoped to open a school for Africans in London, was one of them. So are the four Black British women whose work as authors, musicians, and artists in London today is transforming communities and opening up new conversations about the present and the future.
Theresa Lola: called by name
Theresa Lola was born in Lagos in 1994 and moved to London at thirteen. She took a first in accounting and finance before poetry claimed her through the Barbican Young Poets programme. In 2018 she was joint winner of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, which Bernardine Evaristo founded. In 2019 she became Young People’s Laureate for London, taking poetry into classrooms and starting the #MyMentalHealthJourney campaign. That same year her debut, In Search of Equilibrium, traced her grandfather’s decline with remarkable tenderness.
Ceremony for the Nameless (Penguin, 2024) opens with a Yoruba naming ceremony, a whole community gathering to welcome a child. It asks what names carry, and whom the world refuses to name at all. Lola has spoken of taking her middle name after her first was mangled on arrival in Britain. “I have called you by name, you are mine,” says the prophet Isaiah, and Lola’s poems take that promise seriously. At the National Gallery she gave voice to Balthasar, the Black king in Gossaert’s Adoration of the Kings: a figure long looked at, now heard.
Errollyn Wallen: music for all
Errollyn Wallen was born in Belize and arrived in Britain aged two. She is now one of the most performed living classical composers anywhere. Her work moves between orchestras, choirs, chamber ensembles, more than twenty operas and her own songs. She was the first Black woman to have a work played at the BBC Proms, and her music opened the London 2012 Paralympics.
In 2024 she became Master of the King’s Music, the first Black woman in the role, promising to champion music-making for all. I love that her next premiere is in a parish church. A Christmas Miracle, a community opera for children, adults and professionals, opens in November at Orford Church, where Britten’s Noye’s Fludde was first heard in 1958, then travels to St Magnus Cathedral on Orkney, her home. This is music as hospitality: everyone is given a part.
Bernardine Evaristo: a chorus of voices
Bernardine Evaristo grew up in Woolwich, the fourth of eight children of an English mother and a Nigerian father, and found the arts through youth theatre. Across ten books of fiction, verse, memoir and criticism she has written the African diaspora into British literature with wit and nerve. Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker Prize in 2019, making her the first Black woman to win it. It gives us twelve characters, most of them Black British women, in a form that hovers between prose and poetry. If the book has a theology, it is that every life deserves the whole of our attention.
Evaristo is also a builder of rooms for others. She has mentored poets of colour into print, revived out-of-print Black British writing through Penguin’s Black Britain: Writing Back, and led the Royal Society of Literature. For anyone who cares about art in sacred spaces, her Look Again: Feminism, on women of colour in British art, is essential reading.
Barbara Walker: being seen
Barbara Walker was born in Birmingham in 1964. She makes paintings and embossed works on paper, and draws in charcoal, often at monumental scale and directly onto vast walls. Her series Burden of Proof (2022), shortlisted for the 2023 Turner Prize, was made with people whose lives were upended by the Windrush scandal. Their portraits are layered with hand-drawn copies of the documents they were made to produce to prove their right to stay in the country they had long called home.
To spend time with these faces is a kind of visio divina: slow, attentive looking that becomes prayer. They speak to Lovelace’s paintings of passage and Cugoano’s story in the four paintings at St James’s. Who is asked to prove they belong, and who is simply assumed to belong? The Gospel’s answer is that belonging is given, as each person dwells in the love of God, and that this is eternal and steadfastly true even in the chaos of this world.
Four women, four art forms, and a shared quality in this vital work and creativity: attention given where it has been withheld, to a name, a face, a story, a song. Each of them makes room for others to be heard as well. That, I think, is what honouring our communities can look like, and it is sacred work. It is akin to the attention God offers to each of us, and the attention we are called to give one another. Interconnectedness is a given. What we do about this, and how to participate within these circles, is up to each of us.
