From Mr Andrew Barr
Sir, — I look forward to Revd Dr John Pridmore’s book Inner City of God (extract, Features, 11 April), but I want to leap to the defence of St John-at-Hackney, Spiller’s 1790 new church (a design chosen by the congregation), which he describes as “the ugliest building in Christendom, bar one”, and a church building where “George MacDonald wept over it.”
In 1977, as a newly appointed BBC producer, I was helping to relaunch Songs of Praise in the now familiar form that includes film about the local community, when I heard Radio 2’s Sunday Half Hour from St John’s. It had a natural acoustic to die for. A few months later, the TV programme that Hackney people made in that building was watched by an audience of seven million, and acclaimed by the soon-to-be Archbishop, Robert Runcie, as showing that the “new-style” Songs of Praise would “run and run”.
Things began bleakly. One priest told the researcher that it was pointless his suggesting anyone for interview because “the Church of God is dead in Hackney.” People were reluctant to talk about inner-city and racial problems in public. But, with our encouragement, apprehensive local congregations came to fill the church, and, then and there, old denominational barriers fell.
One of Dr Pridmore’s eight redundant pianos was used by the choir of the New Testament Church of God, a denomination never before heard on Songs of Praise. Their performance of “O the Glory did Roll” mesmerised everyone. Harold Alleyne from Barbados, a stallholder in Ridley Road Market, sang a solo from his place in the congregation, a verse of Luther’s “Ein’ Feste Burg”. The Salvation Army band played, and the beautifully toned organ and that famous natural acoustic helped even the people who told us that they were non-singers to find a voice.
Nearly 100 years old, one declared non-singer, Hackney-born Jeanette Hemming, chose “Jerusalem the Golden” because it told her that death was not about darkness but “something to look forward to — bright”. She died just before the recording, but, more than 30 years later, I have still to hear a more natural and heartfelt interpretation of the hymn than that sung by her fellow citizens that night.
Today, borrowing a title, the producer might have chosen to call it “Hackney’s Got Talent”. Dr Pridmore also discovered that talent, evident still on the website of St John’s, but I must once again doff my cap to the simple church building that survived fire, flood, and vandalism to show a Songs of Praise audience a “glimpse of that golden city” which has not been bettered.
ANDREW BARR
Ardmor, 60 Main Street
Pathhead, Midlothian EH37 5QB
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