In London, an independent music venue is opening. That alone feels like headline news. Rising, quite literally, from the ashes is Raleigh Chapel in Stoke Newington, a 19th-century church gutted by a fire in 1989 and now reborn as a bar, music and arts space, community centre and working church, thanks to the vision of sound artist and music researcher Mariam Bergloff.
“As more independent music spaces continue to close across London, it made me think about how we might create and sustain a long-term project,” she says. “We viewed a number of community and leisure buildings across London, but when I saw Raleigh Chapel, I knew it was right.”
To give the chapel its new look, she’s brought on Jermaine Gallacher, the designer behind Bistro Freddie in Shoreditch, Bar Crispin on Kingly Street, and the Jean Cocteau-inspired mural inside Frank and Jackson Boxer’s Below Stone Nest. “To be given the opportunity to do a project in such an epic space is rare, especially in London,” Gallacher says. “For me straight away the approach was a minimal touch with maximum impact.”
During the restoration, Bergloff spent months in archives and speaking with people familiar with the chapel’s original architect, John Sulman, to understand what the church would originally have been like before its demise. “What remains today is largely the exterior brickwork and the traces of fire inside,” she explains. “And it felt important to preserve those marks, as they’re the clearest physical record of the building’s history.”
On the ground floor, the space operates as a gathering place for readings, book clubs and workshops. By day, the bar serves as a cafe, and by night it pours wine and locally brewed beer. Underfoot is a mosaic of square plywood tiles, each painstakingly hand-charred with a diamond motif using a crème brûlée blowtorch (“all 1000 of them!”, Gallacher points out). The pews, chairs, and tables are treated the same way, sourced by Gallacher from various auctions and markets and arranged in loose clusters around a pair of Quad electrostatic speakers, creating an unfussy setting where people can drift in to talk, listen, and stay.
And then there’s the light; a beguiling purplish glow bathing the floor, thanks to Gallacher fitting the existing windows with pink stained glass. “It’s quite a bonkers effect when the sun is shining full beam,” he says. That glow stops short of the moodier bathrooms, with their deep brown gloss walls (to match the brown toilet bowls), kitted out with salt-glazed sinks, and antique French soap-holders with metal handles that jut out of the wall like a handshake holding a lemon-shaped bar of soap. In keeping with the building’s ecclesiastical past, cross motifs run throughout, from the hand-carved Portland stone sconce lights by artist Tom Pullen to artist Ben Burgis’s twisted metal handrails on the stairs, attached with cross-shaped brackets.
Climb those stairs, and the space opens into the rafters above. This is the chapel’s main hall, used for services, concerts, rehearsals, conferences and other large-scale gatherings. Programming is still taking shape as the house sound system is completed, but Bergloff is already running events with a local focus. The chapel opened with a solo exhibition by London-based artist Jurga Ramonaite, followed by a flea market raising money for not-for-profits supporting Palestine. March will see a three-day flower workshop, an opera and an ambient electronic performance.
Raleigh Chapel
138 Church Walk, N16 8QQ
Hours:
Opening times vary; follow Raleigh Chapel on Instagram for updates.
