Metropolitan Tabernacle

Stand on the pavement at Elephant and Castle and listen for a moment. Buses grind through the junction, a train rattles somewhere close, and people hurry past with headphones and shopping bags. Then lift your eyes. Behind the traffic, a row of tall pale columns holds up a classical portico, calm and solid against the moving city. It looks like a fragment of ancient Athens set down in south London. This is the Metropolitan Tabernacle, and the story behind that stone front is one of the most remarkable in the religious life of Victorian London.

The building exists because of one man's voice. Charles Haddon Spurgeon was a young Baptist preacher from Essex. He arrived in London in the early 1850s, barely out of his teens, to lead a small congregation at New Park Street Chapel in Southwark. Within months, people queued in the streets to hear him. He spoke plainly, with humour and urgency, and without the dry formality many listeners expected from the pulpit. Very soon, the chapel could no longer hold the crowds that came.

The congregation began to hire larger spaces. One of them was the Surrey Gardens Music Hall, a big entertainment venue in Walworth, not far from where you stand. In 1856, during an evening service there, someone raised a false alarm in the packed hall. Panic followed, and people were crushed on the stairs. Seven people died. Spurgeon was deeply shaken by the disaster, and some say it marked him for the rest of his life. It also made one thing clear. His church needed a permanent home of its own, large enough and safe enough for the crowds.

The answer was this site, at one of the busiest crossroads in south London. Money came from the congregation and from supporters across the country. The new building opened in 1861. It was designed by the architect William Willmer Pocock, and it was enormous for its time. Thousands could sit inside, with galleries rising in tiers around the main floor, and many more could stand. For decades it was one of the largest church buildings of its kind in Britain.

Now look again at that front. Why would a nonconformist Baptist church choose the language of a Greek temple, with Corinthian columns — the style topped by carved acanthus leaves? According to a story often told about him, Spurgeon argued that the New Testament was written in Greek, so a Baptist place of worship should look Grecian. Whether or not he put it exactly that way, the choice was deliberate. Many Victorian churches looked back to medieval Gothic. This one looked further back, to the classical world.

Inside, the Tabernacle was built for hearing. There was no great altar and no stained-glass drama. The focus was the platform from which Spurgeon spoke, and the galleries curved around it so that people could see and hear him clearly. He preached without a microphone, of course, to thousands at a time. Accounts from the period describe a clear, strong voice that could carry to the back of the hall. For many Londoners, coming here on a Sunday was part of the rhythm of the week.

His reach went far beyond this building. Spurgeon's sermons were taken down by shorthand writers, edited, and printed every week. They sold in huge numbers, were sent across the British Empire and to America, and were translated into many languages. A person in a distant colony could read on Monday what had been preached here the Sunday before. Around the church, Spurgeon also founded a college to train ministers and an orphanage. The Tabernacle was the centre of a whole network of work.

Spurgeon died in 1892, in the south of France, where he often went to rest because of poor health. His body was brought back to London. Large crowds came to the Tabernacle to see his coffin, and huge numbers lined the streets as the funeral procession made its way to West Norwood Cemetery. His grave is still there today, a short journey south of here. In this building, his name is still very much present.

Here is the first surprise. The front you are looking at is older than most of the building behind it. In 1898, a fire broke out and destroyed the main hall. The flames gutted the interior, but the portico and its columns survived. The church was rebuilt behind that classical front and reopened a few years later. So the stone face of 1861 stayed, while the body of the building changed.

And then it happened a second time. During the Second World War, south London was hit hard in the Blitz, and in 1941 bombs struck the Tabernacle. Once again, the interior was lost. Once again, the portico came through. After the war, the church was rebuilt in the late 1950s, this time smaller than the vast Victorian hall. That is the second surprise. The columns in front of you have outlived two different buildings behind them.

The Tabernacle is still a working church. It continues as a Reformed Baptist congregation, holding regular services in the tradition Spurgeon taught. It is not a museum, and there is no tour route through grand rooms. That is part of its character. If you see people gathering on the steps on a Sunday, you are seeing the same thing this front has watched for more than a century and a half.

The neighbourhood around it has changed again and again. Elephant and Castle grew into a major road junction in the twentieth century, with large post-war blocks and a shopping centre that became a local landmark before it was demolished in recent years. New towers now rise all around. Through all of it, the Tabernacle has kept its place on the corner. Its columns are one of the few links here to the Victorian city that Spurgeon knew.

Before you move on, take one more look. Notice how the light falls across the columns, and how the deep shadow behind them makes the portico look heavier than it is. Notice the traffic flowing past its steps, the same way crowds once flowed in to hear one young preacher. Then turn back into the noise of the Elephant... carrying with you the image of a stone front that has survived fire and bombs, and is still standing.