When we were exploring the history of St Lawrence Church, Brentford, we read about some of the monuments that were inside the church, two of which were by noted English sculptors, John Flaxman and Nicholas Stone. Unfortunately, they are not there anymore and there is no account of where and when they were moved.
We began to explore and we contacted the Church authorities and were in the midst of this when Carolyn Hammond (the author of Chiswick 'Then and Now'), Editor of the Brentford & Chiswick Local History Society, informed us that some years ago Gillian Clegg (the author of 'Brentford Through Time' and 'Brentford Past') had done some research on the monuments in St Lawrence Church. Carolyn joined in and they tried to find out whether the monuments were still in the church and if not, where they had gone, but they were left with some unexplained disappearances.
Here is their report, written in 2003, of their excellent tracking, which includes details of one monument of the Clitherow family memorials that they tracked down to a garden in Highgate!
We are currently asking the Church of England, Churchcare department about the missing monuments and will continue to search. If anybody knows anything more please contact us.
St Lawrence's chapel, later church, was New Brentford's main place of worship from the 12th century until the 19th century and contained many monuments. These are recorded by Thomas Faulkner in his 'History and Antiquities of Brentford, Ealing and Chiswick', published in 1845 and listed below. St Lawrence was closed in 1961 when the various Brentford parishes were combined and the church became derelict. In1974 St Lawrence was placed on the register of redundant churches, and in 1979 it was leased for ninety nine years by the Church Commissioners to the St Lawrence Brentford Trust who were planning to convert the church into a restaurant/theatre. This, though, has never happened. In the late 1980s/early 1990s the Church housed a second hand furniture store. In 1991 the church, which has a Grade II listing, was added to English Heritage's `At Risk' list.
In 1974, the Vicar of Brentford, with approval from the parish council, allowed the Museum of London to purchase seven items from the church (those monuments marked in green with a + on the list below, also the stone font, a tablet listing donations to Brentford's National Schools and a tablet listing donations to the Poor of the Parish of New Brentford). Additionally, in 1974, the brass representing John Redman and family was lent to the Museum.
The three memorial brasses, made in 1528, and for the funerary monument for Henry Redman, a master mason to Henry VIII and Brentford resident, are now in the Museum of London, loaned by the St Lawrence, Brentford Trust.
A few monuments remain in the church (those in red with an * in the list below). Sadly, though, many of the others have simply disappeared. These include two monuments by important sculptors.
One of these important sculptures is the marble wall monument to William Howell Ewin LL.D (d.1804) which was designed by John Flaxman, the first professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy.
This monument is mentioned by Fred Turner in The History and Antiquities of Brentford (1922), but strangely is not included in the list of the St Lawrence monuments published by the Royal Commission of Historical Monuments in 1937. Chiswick Local Studies Department has a photograph of this monument taken by the National Monuments Record in 1962 so we can assume it was still in the church at this date.
The second important sculpture is an elaborate alcove monument displaying the figures of John Middleton and his wife with the date 1624.
This has been attributed to Nicholas Stone (from a photograph). Stone was one of the first stonemasons in the 17th century to move towards classical sculpture. He designed the grotto at Woburn Abbey and the monument to John Donne in St Paul's. You can see here some of Nicholas Stone's works in The Courtauld Institute.
It is known that this monument was still in the church in March 1974 since the Museum of London was quoted £914 from Carter Contracting for removing it (the Museum records don't record its opinion of this quote but presumably it was thought too expensive to proceed with).
Bridget Cherry in The Buildings of England claims that these two memorials are `in store'. A phone call to Ms Cherry elicited the information that the source for this was a transcript of the monuments in St Lawrence's made by members of the West Middlesex Family History Society in 1980. This transcript itemises monuments from the church `which have been removed to safe custody by the National Monuments Record.' The National Monuments Record can find no record of this and, points out that it is not NMR policy to store artefacts. The West Middlesex Family History Society can throw no further light on the source of this information.
In 2002 Carolyn Hammond and Gillian Clegg carried out further research in an attempt to discover what happened to these monuments. We questioned long-standing Brentford residents; consulted the parish records for St Lawrence and for St Paul's (with which St Lawrence merged), and the records of the Museum of London. We contacted the widow of the last vicar of St Lawrence; the St Lawrence Brentford Trust; Gunnersbury Park Museum; the Council for the Care of Churches; the Redundant Churches Department of the Church of England; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Courtauld Gallery; the Conservation Cases Recorder of Church Monuments. Unfortunately, none of these individuals or organisations were able to help.
This is a complete list of the monuments which are or were in the church, using the brief descriptions of those recorded by Thomas Faulkner in The History and Antiquities of Brentford, Ealing and Chiswick, published in 1845.
Monuments in red with * are still in the church
Monuments in green with + are in the Museum of London
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