Grosvenor Chapel

Where it sits. Grosvenor Chapel stands on South Audley Street in Mayfair, a few minutes' walk east of Hyde Park and just north of Grosvenor Square, in the City of Westminster. It is a plain, white-rendered box of a church with a portico projecting over the pavement and a short spire carrying a clock and a single bell, and it is easy to walk past — which is part of its appeal in a district otherwise given over to embassies, galleries and expensive tailoring. Behind it lie the gardens of St George's, Hanover Square, a quiet walled green that most visitors to Mayfair never find. The nearest Underground stations are Bond Street and Green Park, each about eight minutes away on foot.

The story behind it. Sir Richard Grosvenor, 4th Baronet, laid the foundation stone on 7 April 1730. He owned the surrounding land and leased the site for 99 years at a peppercorn rent to a syndicate of four "undertakers" led by Benjamin Timbrell, a prosperous local builder. The chapel was finished and in use by April 1731 — barely a year, which tells you how standardised Georgian church-building had become. When the original lease expired in 1829, the Grosvenor Chapel Act 1831 brought the building inside the parish system as a chapel of ease to St George's, Hanover Square, which is still its formal relationship. Its congregation over three centuries reads like a cross-section of British public life: John Wilkes, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the Earl and Countess of Mornington (parents of the Duke of Wellington), Florence Nightingale, and later the writer Rose Macaulay and the poet John Betjeman. During the Second World War American servicemen and women were welcomed here for Sunday worship — Grosvenor Square was the centre of the American presence in London — and a tablet on the west wall records it. Dwight D. Eisenhower worshipped in the chapel.

The building. The form is deliberately simple: a rectangular box with two tiers of arched windows down the side walls, a shallow projection at the east end for the communion table, and the portico and spire at the west. The model was James Gibbs's St Martin-in-the-Fields and John James's St George's, Hanover Square, and Timbrell — who had worked with Gibbs at St Martin's — could produce the design himself from those examples and the pattern books of the day, without engaging an architect. That lineage travelled: the type inspired a long line of New England meeting houses, so an American visitor may find the interior oddly familiar. The Anglo-Catholic character of the chapel today comes from Ninian Comper, who introduced fittings and adornments in 1912–13, including the screen and gilded work that give the plain shell its unexpected richness. The organ has a documented pedigree — built by Abraham Jordan in 1732 at Sir Richard Grosvenor's expense, altered twice in the 19th century by Bishop, rebuilt by Ingram in 1908, replaced by a J. W. Walker & Sons instrument in 1930 that reused older pipework, and replaced again in 1991 by William Drake of Buckfastleigh with a new organ in an 18th-century English idiom.

On screen. The chapel is the church at the very start of Richard Curtis's Love Actually (2003) — the wedding of Peter and Juliet, where the congregation rises with brass, strings and a choir to ambush the couple with "All You Need Is Love" as they walk back down the aisle. The production shot across London that autumn: Heathrow for the arrivals-gate framing device, the central court of Somerset House, Selfridges on Oxford Street, Lambeth Bridge and Chelsea Bridge, the Millennium Bridge, Tate Modern, Canary Wharf, Marble Arch, the OXO Tower, City Hall, Trafalgar Square, Poplar Road in Herne Hill, Elliott School in Putney, St Luke's Mews in Notting Hill and, for the Downing Street interiors, sets at Shepperton Studios. Of all of them, Grosvenor Chapel is the one that reads on screen almost exactly as it does in life — the same shallow galleries, the same clear glass and pale walls, the same long uninterrupted aisle. The film added flowers, a full congregation and hidden musicians in the galleries; the room itself needed no dressing.

Visiting. It is a working church, not a museum, and it keeps a full liturgical week rather than tourist hours; services and quiet prayer take precedence over sightseeing. Music is the reason most people come: a resident professional group of five singers and an organist maintain a repertoire running from Renaissance polyphony to contemporary work, augmented for major feasts — an orchestra is engaged for Easter Day. Free lunchtime concerts are held on Tuesdays at 1:10pm and are the easiest way for a visitor to hear the building properly. Entry is free at other times when the doors are open, and there is no ticketing, shop or café.

Getting there and timing. From Bond Street station, walk south down Duke Street, cross Grosvenor Square and continue into South Audley Street. Mayfair is quietest at weekends, and the interior is at its best on a bright morning, when light comes through the clear upper windows and washes the white walls. Mount Street Gardens, immediately behind, is one of central London's better places to sit.