FORUM: London’s big... but also small

Published: 8 April, 2011

RETURNING to live and work in London after a gap of 30 years has been quite an experience. 

I came to St Giles-in-the-Fields last September after 22 years in Sussex, mostly in a Wealden village – ancient church, village pub, playing fields, cricket club, flocks of sheep, beech woodland, bluebells and deer.

Beyond the M25 such places still exist. But how would country living prepare me for parish ministry in the West End of one of the busiest and most cosmopolitan cities on Earth?

At first, it seemed, not at all. The streets were an endless torrent of people, traffic clogged up the arteries of the roads, and armies of labourers were digging like moles under the pavement of Tottenham Court Road station. They don’t have that in the countryside! 

But as time passed I came to see there was more to this part of the world than traffic and street life. 

There were people living and working here, in apartments and the occasional houses, raising families, running businesses, resting and playing. 

Gradually distinct neighbourhoods emerged, like Fitzrovia or Seven Dials, which people were attached to and which mattered to them. I came to see that the bigness of London concealed a warren of little villages.

Suddenly coming from a village became an asset. 

I’ve seen that everyone needs a place where they can belong and can create personal, human-scale community. Otherwise everything’s so anonymous. It may be harder to see, but the village lives on. 

I’m at St Giles to build up its pastoral life in this part of the big little village of London, creating a safe harbour for the wandering, a calm centre for the distressed, and a workshop where a very modern way of faith can be shaped from time-honoured wisdom. 

It’s like being back in a village again.

• The Rev Alan Carr is the associate rector of St Giles-in-the-Fields.