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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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Sunday 20 August, 11am
250th anniversary of the baptism of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano when a new commemorative plaque will be dedicated. Guest preacher, the Bishop of Croydon, the Rt Revd Rosemarie Mallett.
Dedication
Our guest preacher on Sunday 20 August is the Bishop of Croydon, the Rt Revd Rosemarie Mallett, and a new commemorative plaque will be dedicated. Lunch for the whole congregation will be served afterwards to include jollof rice, grilled chicken and fried plantain. Please come to honour this former congregation member of St James’s and hear his words which resonate through our church and society
Exactly 250 years ago on this day, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, aged 16, was baptised at the Grinling Gibbons font by the then Rector Dr Skinner. He had been trafficked from modern day Ghana to the Caribbean, brought to London and then freed. He was baptised in order that he could not be enslaved again.
His remarkable call to account and demand for the total abolition of the slave trade addressed to ‘the Inhabitants of Great Britain’ published in 1787 is still in print today. Along with fellow abolitionists Olaudah Equiano and William Wilberforce, he worshipped regularly at St James’s through the 1780s.
Commemorative Plaque
The Cardozo Kindersley workshop have produced this rough-hewn slate plaque to mark the 250th anniversary of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s baptism. The permissions process has been completed, and the design, materials and rationales are accepted by the Diocese of London and the Contested Heritage committee of the Church Buildings Council.
Rough-hewn slate was selected for this plaque for several reasons. The memorial plaque marking the baptism of William Blake, a contemporary of Cugoano, stands nearby which is also of slate. For Cugoano’s plaque, the rough-hewn character of the slate connotes the jagged intervention into his life that being kidnapped into slavery and shipped around the world to be sold as commodity represented. As this is the first plaque in any church to bear Cugoano’s name, and there is no known gravestone or birth register on which his name is written, the lettering is strong, clear and stark against this surface. The carved slate is both in keeping with the overall character of the other memorials in the church in terms of size and materials, but it will also stand out and carry a power befitting the writer and his work. The lettering is less calligraphic than that on some of the other memorials and will emphasise the bold, uncompromising nature of his writing, as he outlines his theologically-driven arguments in denouncing the evil of the transatlantic chattel slave trade.
The funding for this stone has come from a legacy from Ilse Boas 1925-2019. A member of St James’s congregation for over 25 years, Ilse died in 2019 aged 94. She had come to Britain on the kindertransport from Nazi Germany in 1939 aged 14, and all of her family were murdered in the Holocaust. Ilse started a new life in the UK, and was a prominent and active member of St James’s congregation. Ilse was outspoken, and fiercely defensive of the cause of many refugees, particularly Palestinians displaced since 1948.
It is Ilse’s legacy, left to St James’s, that has been used to create the plaque for Quobna Ottobah Cugoano. For this girl, who left Berlin alone in 1939, and as an adult describing herself as ‘once upon a time, a refugee’, supporting people who had been displaced, trafficked, removed, was a priority. Her long association with St James’s and her work to support others who were forced from their homes makes her legacy particularly appropriate for this project. She wrote that ‘St James’s has become “my community” instead of the family which I no longer have – haven’t really had since 1939’.