SOS Grove Gardens Chapel – Appeal

The Grove Garden Chapel has sat in Richmond Old Burial Ground since 1875 – functioning originally as the Church of England burial chapel for the cemetery. It was designed by the celebrated architect Sir Arthur Blomfield whose work scatters the globe, with structures in the Falkland Islands and buildings closer to home at Cambridge University and the law courts branch of the Bank of England in Fleet Street.

The chapel remained active for a century before being decommissioned in the 1960s. By the 1990s the building was declared redundant and had fallen into severe disrepair. In the late 1990s, The Environment Trust for Richmond, predecessor to H&H, restored the chapel to its former glory and adapted it for community use.

In 2016, cracks began to form in the nave where the the transepts meet. The deterioration reached such a severe level by 2020 that the children’s nursery which was occupying the building had to vacate. Thorough monitoring has been undertaken subsequently with weekly inspections carried out and bi-monthly measurements of the cracks undertaken by structural engineers.