Officially known as the Royal Military Chapel, but generally just as The Guards Chapel, this building stands within the Wellington Barracks at the top end of Birdcage Walk opposite St James’s Park.
Although originally built in 1838 (the railings outside still bear the cypher W IV R of King William IV) the current sleek, modernist building dates from 1963 and is the work of Bruce George of the firm George, Trew and Dunn. And the reason why rebuilding was necessary takes us back to WW2 and the Nazi’s Vergeltungswaffen or ‘vengeance weapons’.
The 1838 chapel was apparently quite plain, but was remodelled in the late 1870s by George Edmund Street (architect of the gothic extravaganza that is the Royal Courts of Justice) who had embellished the place in what was called ‘Lombardo Byzantine’ style – lots of marble, mosaics and alabaster – harking back to pre-medieval Italian churches.
In 1940 after the roof was damaged in an air raid the chapel was given a replacement in concrete, but it was towards the end of the war when the catastrophic damage was inflicted.
18 June 1944 was a Sunday and a service was taking place when a German V1 smashed into the western end of the chapel. The concrete roof shattered and fell onto the congregation with the deaths of 121 soldiers and civilians. This was the greatest single loss of life of any V1 attack in Britain in the war.
The V1s were unmanned flying bombs (similar to a modern day drone or cruise missile) that traveled at 350-400mph with 850kg of explosive power. Although scientifically advanced for their day they were not ‘smart’ weapons and could not be given specific targets (and thus the chapel bombing was as random as any of their strikes on the capital). On launch they were essentially pointed in the direction of London (or wherever) with a timing mechanism that caused the jet engine to cut out and the nose of the bomb to tilt down when it was calculated that they would be over the city.
The first of these bombs to hit London was on 13 june 1944 (exactly a week after D Day) when six people were killed in Bow, East London. By the time the campaign finally ended (the bombs had limited range and most of the launch sites were overrun after the breakout from Normandy) some 10,000 had been launched towards England, nearly 2,500 had hit London and over 6,000 people had been killed.
Although much of the chapel had been reduced to rubble in the 18 June attack the eastern end, a semi-circular apse with a gold mosaic of Christ, survived, and a temporary chapel was erected onto this and was used until 1962 when work on the new design started.
Bruce George won the architectural competition for the new building which sits on the footprint of the destroyed chapel and incorporates the apse as well as the Arts and Crafts stained glass. Openings in the roof of George’s design bring in light to highlight the regiments’ colours that are displayed on the walls and portland stone pillars and marble panels further enhance the ‘brightness’ within the space.
His design “convinced both the avant-garde architectural establishment and more traditionally-minded Household Brigade officers. A remarkable achievement.” as one obituarist put it (George died in 2016 at the age of 100). And it would be hard to disagree, the interior of the chapel being one of the most refined and calming post war buildings.
The ‘colours’ by the way are the flags of each regiment and are felt to embody the spirit of their regiment. They generally come in pairs: the King’s/Queen’s Colour which is a union jack with the regimental insignia in the centre, and a Regimental Colour that includes the battle honours.
In battles of the past to have one’s colours captured by the enemy was a great dishonour and bright shame to the regiment. The annual ‘Trooping the Colour’ ceremony (the monarch’s ‘official birthday’ parade) harks back to these earlier times. Because of the longevity of some of the Guards regiments you can see colours on the chapel walls that were carried at Yorktown (in the American War of Independence) and at Waterloo.
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