The Ascension, Lavender Hill

The Ascension, Lavender Hill, was principally conceived by Fr John Bourdieu Wilkinson SSC. As a young man Wilkinson had often sat on Clapham Common and gazed down upon the blue fields of lavender which made up the historic Lavender Hill. He often dreamt that if he ever was called to become a priest, it would be upon the Lavender Hill where he would build a church for the faith to be proclaimed. Eventually his priestly calling began to materialize and he was ordained. Now a priest, Wilkinson was sent to St Barnabas, Pimlico where the effects of the "ritual riots" – a series of protests against high church practices in use there – were being felt. It was these riots that influenced Wilkinson,…

The people of the Shaftesbury Estate, many of them railway workers who had moved from the East End to work at nearby Clapham Junction made it clear that they wanted the Ascension to resemble the churches that many of them had left behind in east London. With that in mind, a significant Anglo-Catholic architect, James Brooks, was commissioned to design what was to be one of his finest churches. Francis Bumpus noted the French Cistercian influence on the Ascension, and on his Holy Innocents in Hammersmith, saying that both buildings were "conceived in a bold and vigorous Early Pointed style, recalling such Burgundian examples as Auxerre and Pontigny" and admirably adapted to contemporary…