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Organ Appeal At St Giles we hear sounds from the organ that our predecessors, including Byron, Shelley and John Soane, have heard for more than three hundred years. This historic organ urgently needed sympathetic restoration more>

On the Sunday after St Giles’s day, 1 September, we customarily celebrate not only our patron, St Giles, about whom nothing certain is known, but also the numerous benefactors of the parish. These include the people who over four centuries bequeathed or gave generous sums for the support of the poor, providing Almshouses, and numerous charities for the benefit of the poor, which are now consolidated into the St Giles in the Fields and Bloomsbury United Charity, and also charities to provide education and a start in life, as apprentices, for poor children, now consolidated as the St Giles-in-the-Fields and William Shelton Educational Foundation, as well as the many people who have left or given, according to their means, generous bequests for the benefit of the church itself. Without the generosity of many past benefactors, great and small, St Giles would not be able to flourish today.

As the current trustees of St Giles, the Rector, Churchwardens and Parochial Church Council have a responsibility to ensure that we hand on St Giles and its assets in at least as good, and hopefully an even better state than we received them, for the glory of God and for future generations. The Church of God has a glorious future, as well as a glorious past. We are building on the past for the future. Past generosity, reflecting the generosity of God’s love, enables us to have confidence about the present and hope for the future, and reminds us of the examples we have been set by our predecessors over the centuries.

We have a present opportunity to make a dramatic contribution to both the physical setting of St Giles, and to benefit our neighbours, who live and work in the parish, and pass by, and to reflect God’s presence in his world, by offering the hospitality of our Churchyard, the hospitality of which, until 1805 was only offered to parishioners, including our benefactors, in death. We have an opportunity to offer a place of life and hope to present and future generations and to enhance the setting of St Giles in relation to the nearby streets, which commentators on the church when it was rebuilt in 1734 thought had then been missed.

Within the next few years St Giles area is going to be transformed, and become a major centre for access to central London. Tottenham Court Road Underground Station is going to be rebuilt which will mean that St Giles Circus will be redesigned. Work has already begun on preparing the way for the new Crossrail station to adjoin the Underground station. Transport for London and the London Borough of Camden are developing proposals for improving the traffic flow in the area to make it much easier for pedestrians. The new Central St Giles will open next spring, and bring new residents and workers and visitors into the High Street. Further new developments are in the pipeline. The owners of Centrepoint are also developing proposals to improve the area at the base of Centrepoint. Streets that we now may hesitate to walk down should become very pleasant. In the middle of all this is St Giles and the Churchyard.

Everybody with an interest in the area is keen to talk to us about redesigning the Churchyard to improve the setting of the church, and to improve the facilities of the Churchyard and also its quality as an historic space, which helps to give the local area an identity. With financial help from the owners of Central St Giles and Centrepoint we have commissioned a landscape architect to produce a preliminary proposal, as a discussion starter for a new layout for the Churchyard, copies of which are currently displayed in the north lobby of the church. Your comments at this stage would be most welcome, and we expect to be arranging extensive consultations about the proposals during the course of the autumn. The design provides for reminders of the people who have been buried in the Churchyard, including our benefactors, and we have already had offers from the relatives of two people who were associated with St Giles to fund commissioning two pieces of art, as memorials, in the redesigned Churchyard. Benefactions, to the glory of God, and the good of God’s people, will, I hope, continue to be part of the long tradition of St Giles, so that we, in our generation, leave it better endowed for our successors.

Bill Jacob

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