N November 1850, a mob gathered in the streets of Pimlico, so large and so irate that it threatened to pull down a gate. The unlikely cause of the fracas was a church that had opened only five months earlier: St Barnabas, where curate W. J. E. Bennett, a Ritualist, had revived liturgical practices reminiscent of Catholicism. At a time when, in the wake of the Catholic bishops’ return to Britain earlier in the year, anti-Popish feelings ran high, Ritualism was viewed with suspicion—hence the crowd’s attempt to storm the service and stop the ‘Popery’. The Pimlico church, however, also drew (rather more measured) disdain from an otherwise sympathetic quarter: the influential Ecclesiological Society, which promoted Gothic Revival architecture in churches. The group dismissed St Barnabas as too bland and too ambitious at the same time. ‘The western elevation is not successful, owing to its attempting more than, in 1850.
