South Kensington, London, has a long association with Anglican evangelicalism. The imposing building of St Paul’s, Onslow Square, was built for Capel Molyneux, who apparently desired ‘a great preaching box’ and was dutifully provided one by architect Charles James Freake. The building was consecrated in 1860, seating up to 1800 people, and from the beginning the congregation was decidedly evangelical. Molyneux’s anti-ritualist convictions led to his secession from the Church of England in 1872 when the judicial committee of the privy council pronounced the innocence of W. J. E. Bennett’s eucharistic doctrines. Molyneux’s successor, C. D. Marston, had a short incumbency, dying suddenly in 1876, to be replaced by Hanmer William Webb-Peploe. A star of the Keswick convention, Webb-Peploe helped St Paul’s to become a flagship for the evangelical movement. The ‘Evangelical Cathedral of London’ was highly regarded for its preaching and congregation size (a reported 10,858 communicants in 1898), but also for its robust financing of mission (£3249 was given to the Church Missionary Society in the same year); an enviable parochial machinery, including a District Nurse Fund, Home for Girls, Coachman’s and Menservant’s Club and Women’s Sick and Benefit Club; and an impressive supporting cast of staff and volunteers. Webb-Peploe claimed in 1902 to have about sixty district visitors, Bible nurses and lay missionaries; and to have trained over 111 men during the course of his ministry. St Paul’s was the training ground for an array of able curates, who strengthened evangelical witness in London, other parts of the country and the mission field. At the beginning of the twentieth century, St Paul’s was an evangelical success story.

Webb-Peploe was followed by a succession of evangelical incumbents, including William Talbot Rice (vicar 1919–35) and Arthur Barham-Gould (vicar 1936–53). The building, however, gradually became a burden which the dwindling congregation could not easily support. During the 1950s there was a wide appeal for financial aid; and in the 1970s the parish was joined with Holy Trinity, Brompton. In 1978 the Onslow Square building was made redundant. The decades which followed, however, witnessed a remarkable revival in its fortunes.