Christ Church St Laurence – George Street, Railway Square – Blacket's Church, the Anglo-Catholic Tradition and the Parish of the Poor – 1838 to Today

If you come up out of Central Station by the Grand Concourse and cross over towards Railway Square, there's a sandstone church with a tall copper spire squeezed in where George Street and Pitt Street run together. Thousands of people walk past it every day on the way to the buses. That's Christ Church St Laurence, and it has been standing there since 1845. It's one of the oldest churches in the city, and for well over a century it has been the home of Anglo-Catholic worship in a diocese that mostly wants nothing to do with incense and vestments.

Christ Church St Laurence on George Street, looking down Valentine Street, the only spot where you can see the whole front of the church. Photo: Sardaka, 2018, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

A church for the poor end of town

In 1838 Sydney had only two proper Anglican churches, St Philip's on Church Hill and St James' in King Street. Bishop William Grant Broughton wanted another one at the southern edge of the town, which was turning into a rough, industrial quarter. That part of Sydney lay in the Parish of St Lawrence, one of the old survey parishes. Even in 1845 nobody seemed to know where the name came from. The first minister, William Horatio Walsh, wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald that the only St Lawrence he knew of was a deacon who was burnt at Rome in the third century.

While a permanent church was being sorted out, the bishop paid for a temporary one inside the old Albion Brewery on the corner of Elizabeth and Albion Streets. That temporary St Lawrence Church ran from 1838 to 1845. Walsh, a young deacon fresh off the boat, was appointed in April 1839, and Broughton ordained him that September. He stayed until 1867, and the parish counts him as its first rector.

Broughton laid the foundation stone of the present church on New Year's Day 1840. The University of Western Australia's Medievalism in Australian Cultural Memory project gives the same date. The site was surrounded by leftovers from the convict days. Across Pitt Street, where Central Station is now, stood the Carters' Barracks with its punishment treadmills, the Benevolent Asylum and the Devonshire Street Cemetery. Down the road were Francis Greenway's toll gates.

Henry Robertson, then Edmund Blacket

The first architect was Henry Robertson. He got the walls of the nave and the base of the tower up before the colony's money troubles stopped work between 1841 and 1843. When building started again, a young architect called Edmund Blacket took over. The University of Sydney Archives lists Christ Church St Laurence under 1843 among his early works, and the Dictionary of Sydney gives his connection with the church as running from 1844 to 1882.

Blacket finished the tower and the steeple, put in the timber ceiling and redesigned the windows with the stone tracery you see today. He also designed the font, the pulpit and the carved pew ends. He didn't just design the place, either. He was a parishioner from 1848 and a churchwarden for 22 years. The City of Sydney Archives describe the result as a church built from 1845 by Robertson and Blacket "in a transition style from Old Colonial Gothic to Victorian Free Gothic".

The sandstone front and spire of Christ Church St Laurence. Photo: Sardaka, 2021, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Broughton consecrated the church on 10 September 1845 under the name Christ Church. It was the first Anglican church in the city to be consecrated by a bishop. People went on calling it Christ Church, St Lawrence after the parish. In 1884 the parish took St Laurence of Rome, spelt that way, as its patron saint, and the double name has stuck ever since.

Blacket also built the parish school in 1845, at the corner of Pitt Street and what's now Rawson Place. When the government resumed that land in 1901 for the new Central Station, a former pupil of the school, John Burcham Clamp, designed the rectory and vestries in 1904 and a new school building, now the parish hall, in 1905. The State Heritage Register calls the rectory "a fine and elaborate face brick construction".

Christ Church St Laurence from George Street. Photo: Sardaka, 2022, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The Anglo-Catholic tradition

Walsh was a High Churchman, a follower of the Oxford Movement at a time when that could get you called a "Puseyite". He brought in a robed choir, sung Matins and Evensong, and Communion far more often than most colonial churches. Broughton visited in 1845 and wrote that everything was "marked by such a degree of order and solemnity" that he wished it could be a model for every church in his diocese.

Broughton's successor saw it differently. Bishop Frederic Barker was an Evangelical, and in 1868 he ordered a cross taken off the new tiled reredos above the altar. After Barker died, the rector Charles Garnsey moved the parish into full Anglo-Catholic practice. In 1884 and 1885 came the cross and candles on the altar, processions with banners, daily Communion and eucharistic vestments. A writer in the London Church Times that year called the church "an oasis in a desert". The Dictionary of Sydney dates the parish's Anglo-Catholic identity from the 1880s too.

It wasn't always smooth. In 1910 Archbishop John Wright made every new clergyman promise not to wear the chasuble. The parish went along with it under protest so it could get a new rector, and the chasuble was worn there for the last time on 19 April 1911. Priests have worn a cope at the altar there ever since. From 1926 until 1967 the parish held an outdoor procession of witness every year at its dedication festival, with incense, banners and clergy in copes walking through the streets. The State Heritage Register says the church's Anglo-Catholic identity at times reached "national iconic status within the church".

Inside Christ Church St Laurence. Photo: Sardaka, 2021, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Fire, Clamp and the windows

In August 1905 a fire went through the inside of the church. Clamp, who had been parish architect since 1899, restored it. His work includes the reredos of 1905, the St Laurence Chapel of 1912 and the screen under the organ of 1914, many of them carved with a crown of thorns. The great east window went in after the fire in 1906. The Dictionary of Sydney credits it to the stained glass designer John Radecki, and it was his first big independent job. Ten older windows came out from England between 1855 and 1864, by firms such as Clayton and Bell and James Powell and Sons.

In 1938 Vergilio Lo Schiavo painted a large fresco on the east wall, one of very few true frescoes in Australia. Then in 1963 the architect Morton Herman stripped out a lot of the decoration in an attempt to get back to what he thought Blacket had meant. In 2019 Paul Davies Pty Ltd carried out the first full restoration of the interior since 1906, and it brought back many of the colours Herman had painted over. The parish's own book about it, Restored to Glory, describes the work as returning the church "to the Victorian character imparted by the architect Edmund Blacket".

Stained glass and stonework inside the church. Photo: Sardaka, 2021, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The organ and the choir

Music has always been a big part of this church. The choir is known to have sung at the consecration in September 1845, helped out that day by the Sydney Choral Society, and it's one of the oldest choirs in the country. It was also the first in New South Wales to wear surplices. The first organ, built by George Holdich of London in 1844, was destroyed in the 1905 fire. The parish then bought a second-hand instrument built by William Hill and Son of London in 1891, and it was installed in 1906. The State Heritage Register lists the church as "Christ Church St Laurence Anglican Church and Pipe Organ" and names Hill and Son as the organ's builder. Orgues Létourneau of Quebec restored it in 1979.

Colin Sapsford was organist and choirmaster from 1936 to 1980, and Neil McEwan was director of music from 1980 to 2018. The choir's recording of Victoria's Missa Surge Propera was nominated for Best Classical Album at the 1991 ARIA Awards. These days the church still has High Mass on Sunday mornings and Evensong at 6.30pm. The parish's website lists a Solemn High Mass at 10.30am every Sunday.

The first rector also ordered six bells from John Taylor and Sons of Loughborough in 1852. They went up when the spire was finished in 1855, and four more were added in 1982 to make ten.

Christ Church St Laurence, between Railway Square and the city. Photo: Sardaka, 2025, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).

The church and spire in 2011. Photo: Sardaka, 2011, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).

Looking after the neighbourhood

The area around Railway Square was poor for most of the church's life, and the parish has always worked with the people on its doorstep. It ran schools for almost a century, until 1934. In the 1880s the Guild of St Laurence nursed the sick and poor of the parish. One young member, Amy Michelmore, caught typhoid doing that work and died in 1886. During the First World War the parish hall gave a "cheero" for servicemen passing through Central Station.

In the Depression the soup kitchen served up to 300 meals a night, and a free dispensary treated people who couldn't afford a doctor. In 1936 the parish set up a boys' welfare bureau with the Child Welfare Department. Historian Patricia Curthoys wrote about that work in the Sydney Journal in 2013. In 1957 Father John Hope gave a house in Glebe called Tranby to the co-operative that became Tranby Aboriginal College.

In the 1980s, when people with AIDS were being shunned all over the place, Christ Church held the funeral of Bobby Goldsmith in 1984. In 1991 it started an annual AIDS Requiem Mass. The parish was a founder of St Laurence House for homeless young people, and it still supports the Asylum Seekers Centre. The State Heritage Register puts it plainly: because of "its prominent history and strong support of social causes" the church keeps "a high level of social significance".

Christ Church St Laurence. Photo: Sardaka, 2026, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).

Visiting

The church is open on weekdays, and you can walk in off George Street. The parish says the easiest way from Central is through the North or Grand Concourse exits. It was listed on the State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999, as item 00123, together with its pipe organ. Next time you're waiting for a bus at Railway Square, have a look up at that spire. Blacket finished it in 1855, and it has been there ever since.

Where this came from

• NSW State Heritage Register: Christ Church St Laurence Anglican Church and Pipe Organ (SHR 00123), Heritage NSW.
• Dictionary of Sydney: Christ Church St Laurence (building entry).
• Medievalism in Australian Cultural Memory, University of Western Australia: Christ Church St Laurence Anglican Church.
• City of Sydney Archives: Christ Church St Laurence, George Street Haymarket, 1989 (A-00024091).
• University of Sydney Archives: Blacket, Edmund Thomas.
• Christ Church St Laurence parish website, ccsl.org.au (services, Restored to Glory).
• Patricia Curthoys, "'Problem children of this community'", Sydney Journal 4 (2013).
• Sydney Morning Herald, 2 June 1845 and 11 September 1845 (Trove), as cited in the Wikipedia article on the church.