St Paul's Churchyard and St Paul's Green

The first church on this site was consecrated on 7 June 1631 by the Bishop of London, William Laud. It was originally a Chapel-of-Ease to Fulham Parish Church of All Saints (q.v.), and was provided for the parishioners of the small distant hamlet of Hammersmith. The Earl of Mulgrave, Edmund Sheffield, who purchased the site for the chapel, had petitioned the Bishop in 1629, making reference to 'the length and foulness of the way [. . . ] in winter most toilsome sometime over ploughed land'. The cost of building was largely met by Sir Nicholas Crispe, and the foundation stone was laid in March 1630. Sir Nicholas, who had a riverside house at Hammersmith, was an ardent Royalist and supporter of Charles I, erecting a fine monument in the chapel dedicated to the king's memory, which had a bronze bust of Charles I by Le Sueur. When Sir Nicholas died in 1665, although he was buried at St Mildred Bread Street, his request that his heart be buried in a stone urn under the king's bust at Hammersmith chapel was carried out, though later his body and heart were re-united. The old church was described by Isabella Burt in 1871 as 'a plain, spacious, handsomely built brick structure' with 'a quadrangular tower, supported by graduated buttresses'; the church door was approached 'by a handsome avenue of limes, trimmed and trained to a state of neatness'. Daniel Defoe described the village in the 1720s as 'formerly a long scattering place, full of gardeners grounds with here and there a house of some bulk' but which now had fine houses and a square, and its residents were keen to be granted a license for a market, and to have built a 'fine stone bridge over the Thames'. The first Hammersmith Bridge was built in 1823, whose designer, William Tierney Clark, has a memorial in St Paul's Church.

Hammersmith remained within the Fulham Parish until 1834 when it became a separate parish. In the following decades it grew from a village to a prosperous Victorian suburb, particularly after the arrival of the railways in the 1860s, and in January 1880 it was decided that a new larger church was needed. The foundation stone for St Paul's Church was laid by the Duke of Albany in July 1882 and the nave was consecrated on 13 October 1883. Designed by Hugh Roumieu Gough and J P Seddon in 'Early English Gothic' style, the new church was built on the site of the C17th chapel, with a number of its interior fittings and old monuments, including Crispe's monument to Charles I, installed in the new church. Another monument in St Paul's commemorates Thomas Chamberlain, first Mayor of Hammersmith in 1900-02, whose firm was responsible for building the new church.

In 2000 the congregation was joined by 180 people from Holy Trinity Brompton (q.v.) and new facilities were needed for church activities. Funding was raised for a major extension to the west of the church, which was completed in 2011 as St Paul's Centre.

St Paul's Church formerly had a larger churchyard, but it was reduced in size when Queen Caroline Street was widened for the building of the Hammersmith Flyover in 1961. The surrounding churchyard wall, which appears in the 1880 architect's drawing to be of terracotta and brick, no long exists, and iron railings formed the boundary with Queen Caroline Street, but the boundary with Bridge Road was open. Care of the churchyard was handed over to Hammersmith Council in 1950; most of the graves were cleared away with a small number remaining alongside the wall and one chest tomb partially surrounded by railings was that of Barbara Banks (d.1763), with several benches placed informally. A number of trees are found in the churchyard, including a fine oak tree.

When the northern part of the churchyard was re-landscaped in the late C20th, a new urban open space was created on what had previously been derelict land used as an NCP car park, which was purchased by LB Hammersmith and Fulham and laid out in conjunction with realignment of roads. The design was commissioned in 1996 from landscape architects Whitelaw + Turkington, and it was landscaped between March and November 1998. St Paul's Green provides an open green space south of St Paul's Church and running west to the Flyover, with grassed areas, a wide broadwalk, seating and a sitting wall, avenue of trees and railings to the road. LB Hammersmith and Fulham won Beacon Status for St Paul's Green in 2002 as 'an outstanding example of good practice for improvements to urban open spaces across the borough', having already won the Landscape Institute Design Award in November 2001.