St Marylebone Parish Church: A Secret Wedding
Why is it significant?
Stand on the steps of the great portico and look straight across Marylebone Road: through a gap between the terraces you can see the columns of York Gate opening into Regent's Park. That line of sight is deliberate.
Key Facts
| Place | St Marylebone Parish Church: A Secret Wedding |
|---|---|
| Address | 17 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LT, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.52260, -0.15230 |
| Part of Walk | From 221B to Wimpole Street: Sherlock Holmes, Dickens and the Beatles in Marylebone, London |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on the steps of the great portico and look straight across Marylebone Road: through a gap between the terraces you can see the columns of York Gate opening into Regent's Park. That line of sight is deliberate. When John Nash laid out the park and its terraces in the 1810s and 1820s, he framed this church as the view from the park gate.
The church was built between 1813 and 1817 by the architect Thomas Hardwick, because the old village church down the lane had become far too small for a fashionable new suburb. The name of the whole district comes from that older church, dedicated to Saint Mary beside a little river called the Tyburn: Saint Mary by the bourne, Mary-le-bone. The stream still runs under these streets, buried in a pipe.
On 12 September 1846 a frail poet named Elizabeth Barrett slipped out of her father's house in Wimpole Street with her maid and married the poet Robert Browning in this church, in secret. Then she went home as if nothing had happened. About a week later the couple fled to Italy. Her father, who had forbidden all his children to marry, never spoke to her again and returned her letters unopened.
Charles Dickens lived just across the road through the 1840s, and he knew this church well. Readers have long seen it in Dombey and Son, in the cold, grand christening and wedding scenes of that novel. And it is still a working parish church, with a modern twist: since the 1980s its crypt has housed a health centre, so that people come here for healing of the body as well as the soul.
Before you go, glance up at the tower and its ring of gilded figures, glowing above the fumes of Marylebone Road. Then cross the road with care and walk into Marylebone High Street, the old village lane, where a carved stone wall on the corner remembers the most famous neighbour this church ever had.