Holy Trinity Hoxton

• The church was built to meet the needs of the expanding population of this area of London in early Victorian times. The chancel is very short and suggests that in its early years the church did not have the strong high churchmanship that characterised it in the 20th century and which is still the pattern of worship today.
• The architect, William Railton (c1801-77), was a pupil of the London architect William Inwood and attended the Royal Academy Schools in 1823. He was architect to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners from 1838 until 1848 and was the designer of churches and many other buildings over a wide geographical range. His most famous work is Nelson's Column of 1839-43 in Trafalgar Square.
• Built in the Early English style of the 13th century in Kentish Ragstone the east end fronts directly on to Bletchley Street and has three graded lancets for a window (now blocked). • Inside the church the walls are plastered and whitened.
• The most important item is the polygonal pulpit made in 1686 for the church of St Mary Somerset, Upper Thames Street (demolished, apart from tower, in the 1870's). It then went to the now-demolished, nearby church of St Mary, Britannia Walk, Hoxton. It has panelled sides and seems to have been of the wine-glass type but the stem of the base is now lost. Part of a font cover from the same source is reused as a corbel for a statue. The church has an extensive collection of Anglo-Catholic fittings from the 1930s onwards. The reredos with a relief of the Crucifixion is by W E A Lockett. The confessional with tall Corinthian pilasters, possibly made up from old woodwork, is by Martin Travers who also did the painting above the reredos (1942) and the roundel above the chancel arch. At the west end there is a mid-20th-century organ gallery: the organ came from Holy Trinity, Folkestone (re: Clarke). The high altar was made up in 1941 of stones from six churches destroyed by air raids in 1940-1. The Victorian wooden altar in the N aisle has attractive floral paintings set in mandorlas.
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