St Luke’s Church

Pauline Latimer was born in 1936 at 73 Peckham Road, right opposite the gate to St Luke’s church hall. “I could come out of my house, run across the road, and into the church grounds.” She was confirmed there by the Bishop of Birmingham on 6 March 1948, and she still has the little book she was given, The Hill of the Lord, signed by the vicar, Edward Charles, and P. G. Smith, lay reader.

St Luke’s was the estate’s first Church of England parish. It was carved out of the parish of St John’s, Perry Barr, in 1933, and for its first years the congregation met in the hall as a temporary church. The church itself was consecrated in 1937.

Brown brick and round windows

The Victoria County History describes it as a rectangular building of brown brick in “a modern Italianate style”, with a semicircular west end, round-headed windows and a small tower with a pyramid roof. It names the architect as P. J. Hunt; the Church of England’s own heritage record names F. Mottershead. The two have not been reconciled. St Luke’s is on the city’s local list. In 2015 the diocese’s archaeological survey noted one old neighbour: the former Kingstanding Lodge had stood to the north-west.

In 1948 St Luke’s took over the little mission church of All Saints at Oscott, and in 1939 its minister became a vicar.

High church, and a long argument

St Luke’s was “high”. Pauline remembered incense, and an interior that was nevertheless “very plain, almost austere”. Over the years that led to a long argument on Voices of Kingstanding: was it Catholic? Was it even Methodist? In 2012 Father Ron Farrell settled it. St Luke’s “has aways been, and remains, a parish church of the Church of England”, but in the High Church or Catholic tradition of its mother parish, St John’s, Perry Barr. Many of its priests were called Father; Edward Charles introduced vestments at the Eucharist.

Memory is not always reliable, even about the furniture. Father Farrell insisted there had only ever been chairs, dark wood ones. Marlene Sale was sure there had been pews. Marie Smith said she had a 1971 wedding photograph that showed them.

Seventy years of weddings

Above all, St Luke’s is remembered for weddings. Walter Beech, just out of the RAF, married Kathleen there on 20 November 1948; she was nineteen and needed her mother’s written permission. Couples married in the early 1960s remembered a Dutch vicar, and his son later supplied the name: Hendrik Loysen, whose family lived at the vicarage from 1957 to 1963. Brian Floyd and Daphne remembered kneeling behind him in October 1961 and seeing big holes in his socks. “As I had many holes in my socks in my growing up I related to the Rev.”

Pat Banks married in 1966 under Richard Butler, just as the church was being modernised, with scaffolding all over the inside of her wedding photographs. Visitors in later years were startled to find the old front door had become the back. Terry Claxton, a choirboy around 1958, admitted he joined not because he could sing but for the sixpence per wedding.

In October 2017 the parish marked its eightieth anniversary and asked for old photographs. The pictures were welcome. But Voices of Kingstanding had already given St Luke’s something rarer: seventy years of its weddings, remembered by the people who walked down the aisle.

Then and now

1950

2010