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 Father Andrew Cain
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After 15 years, stained-glass windows make it to St Mary’s
A WEST Hampstead priest is celebrating the arrival of five stained glass windows after they had been left to go to ruin at a derelict nearby church for 15 years.
Father Andrew Cain has been the parish priest at Abbey Road’s St Mary’s church for eight years.
He was promised the late 19th-century windows from All Souls church in Loudoun Road, West Hamsptead, by developer Mark Cooper when the run-down building was first bought.
But after it took six years for Camden to greenlight plans to turn All Souls into 15 flats, Fr Cain finally had the windows installed in October. On Sunday they were blessed by the Bishop of Edmonton.
Fr Cain said: “I was very keen to keep them in the community because they’re all memorials to local people.”
One of the windows is a tribute to two sisters, Edith Louisa Smith, who died at 14, and Annie Margaret, who perished at just one.
Mr Cooper paid the £45,000 it cost to retrieve them from the deteriorating building, restore and install them at St Mary’s. Fr Cain said: “Mark lives locally himself and understood they were something worth keeping. Developers get a bad press and he is showing he has an investment in the buildings and the
heritage.”
Parishioners who joined St Mary’s when All Souls closed – due to the poor shape of the building – were pleased to see the windows follow them, said Fr Cain. But he joked that the windows had had less of an impact on his 150-strong congregation. “Most people didn’t notice, but I think its because they’re traditional glass and so they look so natural.”
Many of St Mary’s own stained glass windows were blown out by a bomb that hit the east side of the church in 1941.
Another seven windows are currently being restored.
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