Home›Churches›St Mary Magdalene, East Hill
Last modified: 12 October 2026 · Build 2
Work in progress. This page gathers what I know, and what I still need to check, about the Catholic church on East Hill, its presbytery facing North Side, and the older house that stood on the site. Corrections and further information very welcome.
The church and presbytery stand on the triangle of ground between East Hill and North Side, immediately east of Mount Nod, the Huguenot burial ground. The church’s east end looks out over the burial ground.
Before the church, the site was occupied by an older house. Charles Ferdinand Porden sketched it from North Side on 23 August 1813, describing it as “adjoining the burial ground of Wandsworth on the road to Clapham”. It appears in the background of several later views of Mount Nod, recognisable by its Venetian window.
Dorian Gerhold traces the house back to a fire insurance policy of 1718, when it belonged to John Bindon, a London haberdasher. Its high roof and large chimneys suggest that it was built in the seventeenth century. In 1793 it was described as “a genteel red brick house”, belonging to a Mr Walker. Gerhold found it still standing in 1894, but thought it must have disappeared soon afterwards. (Dorian Gerhold, Wandsworth Past, pp. 50–57.)
See also: September 2026 Chronicles, with the Porden sketch and the same view today, and the Mount Nod Porden house.
The parish was founded by the Salesians of Don Bosco, a teaching order founded in Turin and named after St Francis de Sales. They came to England in 1887 at the invitation of Countess Georgiana de Stacpoole, to take over the parish she had founded in West Battersea. The first community set up house at 26 Trott Street, Battersea, under Fr Edward McKiernan, with Fr Charles Macey and Brother Rossaro. Their mission was to work with poor boys – Battersea’s “wild boys”.
In 1902 Salesians from Battersea established a mission at East Hill.
The church was built in 1905–06 to designs by Lawrence Butler: red brick under a slate roof, in a plain round-arched style. From the outside it is unremarkable. The interior is another matter. It was decorated by the Salesian artist-priest Fr George Fayers, who also worked at the Sacred Heart, Battersea, and who is said to have been a pupil of Sir Edward Burne-Jones. The nave and chancel ceilings are painted with saints and sacred monograms, and the rood beam carries a frieze of angels playing instruments, “very Burne-Jonesian in character”.
Later additions include:
— 1959: a western gallery and baptistery, a second porch and new parish halls, designed by Riley & Glanfield.
— 1960: a new central panel for the reredos by the Yugoslav artist Ivan Tomlanovich, showing the penitent Magdalene at the foot of the Cross. Behind it lie the industrial banks of the Thames, with a distorted Battersea Power Station.
— 2001: windows in the side chapels by Leslie A. Huitson.
The church is not listed.
The presbytery facing North Side looks older than it is. It was built in the 1920s in the Neo-Georgian, or “Wren-naissance”, style then fashionable, with classical symmetry, multi-paned sash windows and red brickwork. It replaced an earlier house on the site.
In August 1906, soon after the church was finished, a correspondent from East Hill wrote to the Daily News complaining of the “occupation” of “that particular part of the borough known as ‘The Huguenots’” by Catholic clergy, and of a rumour that Huguenot bones had been disturbed when the foundations were dug. A week later Mr Jas. A. Rochford replied that the excavation had been done twelve months earlier, in the garden of a private house separated from the cemetery by a thick party wall, and that no bones had been disturbed. Both letters are transcribed on Huguenots in the Newspapers.
— Which house did the Salesians use? Taking Stock says they took “a late Georgian house on the site of the present presbytery”. But the house Porden drew looks seventeenth-century, and Gerhold thought it had gone soon after 1894. Was there a second, later house, or did the old one survive until the 1920s?
— “The Huguenots”. In 1896 the Daily Chronicle mentioned “a fine old house with gables, the most notable one called ‘The Huguenots’ still”. In 1906 Rochford wrote that “the fine old property known by this name is at present untenanted” and was not the Church’s. He also said that the Church’s own house, in whose garden the church was built, had been “private property since the days of Queen Anne”. So there seem to have been two houses: “The Huguenots”, and the house the Salesians took. Which of them did Porden draw in 1813, and when did each disappear?
[NOT “The Huguenots”, - this was a large house on the other side of East Hill, more or less facing today's Book House.]
— Unverified claims. An AI search summary (2026), citing “Salesian Historical Monographs”, makes several claims I have not been able to confirm: that in 1902 a Catholic benefactress, Miss Frances Ellis, bought the house and gave it to the Diocese of Southwark; that it was first the home of Father Hawarden, the Catholic chaplain at Wandsworth Prison; that French Salesians exiled by the anti-clerical laws moved in in February 1903 and ran a small day school there; and that the old house survived until the 1920s. These need checking against primary sources before I rely on any of them.
— Fr George Fayers. Dates, training, and confirmation of the Burne-Jones connection (the source is Denis Evinson, Catholic Churches of London).
— The presbytery: who designed it, and exactly when?
— Taking Stock: Wandsworth (East Hill), St Mary Magdalen (Historic England / Catholic Archdiocese survey)
— Salesians of Don Bosco UK: Origins and Foundation
— John Dickson, “The origins of the Salesian work in London” (centenary lecture)
— Dorian Gerhold, Wandsworth Past, pp. 50–57
— Denis Evinson, Catholic Churches of London
Philip Boys, October 2026.