ABSTRACT
In Reyner Banham's Guide to Modern Architecture of 1962, one building is described in the same breath as Le Corbusier's pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp: Robert Maguire's parish church of St Paul, Bow Common, in the East End of London (Banham 1962). The photograph taken from the north-west entrance porch shows the font looking like a set-piece illustration from Gordon Cullen's Townscape, or one of Eric de Maré's sentimentally evocative photographs of nineteenth-century grit from his illustrations to The Functional Tradition in Early Industrial Buildings (Cullen 1961; Richards 1958). I am going to quote the critic Ian Nairn's entry on it from his 1966 classic Nairn's London in full, as his plain but forceful prose perfectly describes the authentically modern yet utterly timeless church in London's East End:
One worth-while new church in a city-region of ten millions, at a time when France and Germany have dozens. Make what you like of the implications. Anyway, here it is, burningly honest but not aggressive, on a run-down street corner (Burdett Road and St Paul's Way) in Stepney. It is completely fresh, the perennial force seen again for the first time. Purple brick, a top-lit cube on a long podium, with a porch almost detached with quivering letters on it: This is the Gate of Heaven. And it is. Not one thing has come out of slickness or a wish to be original. Hence it is truly original, like All Saints, Margaret Street, a century before. Often locked, but it is worth digging out the keys, for it was built from inside out, around a central altar. This is under the cube. Around it lights dance on a square iron frame, better than all the copies of parclose screens. Demure yet full of fun, reverent yet fully light-hearted: the place seems to heal you.
(Nairn 1966: 164–165)