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We offer daily services and a creative programme of talks, events and concerts. We seek to be a welcoming space for people to reflect, create and debate.
We are delighted to announce that from 6 Jan until early Apr 2025, work will take place to reinstate the church’s South Door onto Jermyn Street, part of Sir Christopher Wren’s original design.
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.
New walkways, a restored courtyard and re-landscaped gardens will provide fully accessible, beautiful spaces for everyone to enjoy as well as improving our environmental performance.
St James's Church 197 Piccadilly London W1J 9LL
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Verger Tomas Hickman reflects on the challenges and innovations of integrating technology at St James, from livestreaming services and utilising hearing loops to implementing creative audiovisual solutions, all aimed at fostering inclusivity and accessibility for both local and global congregations.
One of the main things I have been tasked with since being appointed the “techie verger” is to expand and improve on what we can deliver for those not able to come to St James in person. Nowadays, most of what we do here is also online. Talks, presentations, conferences, meetings and many more. For example, we regularly have meetings in the church hall that are in person and on Zoom at the same time.
One of the blessings in disguise to come out of the pandemic is this new world of remote viewing and access we are now in. What was once necessary for us to help facilitate worship has now become standard practice for services. Every Sunday at 11am and Tuesday at 6pm we livestream to Youtube for those who can’t come to church in person. We do this even if the PA (public address) system is in a bad mood, which it regularly is. This has expanded and grown into an online congregation that stretches across the UK and internationally.
It’s a difficult balancing act doing this. At the same time as making sure the livestream is adequately audible; we must make sure those who come to the church can hear everything just as clearly, no matter where they are sitting. This is why the celebrant at the Eucharist will wear a headset microphone (also known as a Britney mic). Contrary to the belief of some, our clergy don’t wear these so they can feel like Beyoncé but to make sure their voice is amplified without restricting their movement. We used to use lapel microphones, but they would give a ghastly rustle almost every time the clergy moved or breathed. For the record, our clergy here hate the Britney mics. There is always an amusing struggle to get them on correctly before services and it is almost impossible to take them off in a dignified manner.
For those that have hearing difficulties and attending St James in person, we have a hearing loop set up within the church. A hearing loop, also known as an audio induction loop, is a type of sound system for use by people with hearing aids. The hearing loop provides a magnetic, wireless signal that gets picked up by the hearing aid when it is set to ‘T’ (Telecoil) setting. It’s driven by an amplifier connected to our PA system that pushes the signal through a wire that goes around the interior of the church. This “loop” of wire is what distributes the audio to the hearing aids within the area. It is the only assistive listening technology that can broadcast directly to a wide range of hearing aids, making them the most popular option for accessible audio in public spaces. This is always on whenever we have a service or event in the church. For those curious, next time you’re at St James, take look at the skirting at the bottom of the church walls and you’ll see a thin wire going around the whole church. That is our hearing loop cable!
Most of our talks and presentations held in the church are also livestreamed. Since joining St James I have devised a method of splitting and feeding the video of the presentation into the PA system and then having the presentation as a picture within the picture on the livestream. This allows those attending remotely to clearly see what is being shown via the projector and screen. Doing it this way makes it exceedingly easier to view the presentation instead of trying to look at an overexposed image from the projector. It’s just as complicated as it sounds as there’s a lot of pieces to that puzzle and they don’t always play nicely together.
When we stream to Youtube, we make use of one of Google’s very helpful accessibility features of automatic captioning. Automatic captions are generated by machine learning algorithms (or to use the current buzz word, “A.I.”) to create subtitles in real-time for a livestream. This is exceedingly helpful for those that are hard of hearing and want to join our services online. How this technology works is by listening to the speaker and using speech recognition patterns to determine what words are said. The “machine learning” refers to the fact that the more the algorithm listens, the more it learns and can recognise. It’s not a perfect system and it does produce some wrong results from time to time, but it still is an invaluable accessibility tool. I am personally wondering though how many more times we need to say “Piccadilly” for the machine learning to learn and get it right every time. For now, we’re stuck with results like “padil a”.
As a side note, I personally don’t agree with the use of the buzz word as the algorithms out there dubbed as Artificial Intelligence are not passing the Turing test anytime soon. Personally, I think they should be referred to as Virtual Intelligence, but I’ll leave that for another Thought for the Week.
