
Margaret Street runs parallel to and north of Oxford Street in London, and I chose to walk that way to get to a particular shop.
You can see the spire of All Saints Church from hundreds of yards away, and noticeable because it is very Gothic with grey and white horizontal bands, probably of slate.
It was built as a chapel in the 1700s and then rebuilt in Neo-Gothic in the 1850s.
It looks European.
When you reach the church, the entrance is very modest within a little courtyard.
The church is made of brick and in a Neo-Gothic style, and it doesn’t give much away of what it is like inside.
Wow, I said as I got inside.
It is big, and decorated in the style of a Catholic Church and really is quite something.
It turns out that it is Anglo-Catholic, designed under the influence of the Oxford Movement that argued for the reinstatement of some older Christian traditions of faith and their inclusion into Anglican liturgy and theology.
I like to visit churches like this because you can go in them – unlike a lot of other building of great architecture in London.
Religion is funny, and even today Catholicism carries a faint distaste in the eyes of some, even though it is 500 years since Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church.
Of course, the kings and queens of England went back and forth on religious choice over the next hundred years or so.
Mary I of England, daughter of Henry VIII and his successor, only reigned for five years but she managed to have around 300 Protestants burned at the stake for refusing to convert to Catholicism.
Still, maybe she picked up bad habits from her dad, who had somewhere between fifty thousand and seventy thousand people executed for treason, including close advisors and wives, during his reign.
Perhaps it is the deaths that mean that although it was a long time ago the feeling lingers on.

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