An Irishman’s Diary about the church buildings of John Semple

I’d never stopped to look at it before, somehow, probably because I was always in a car. But cycling down Dublin’s Monkstown Road the other day, I saw the local Church of Ireland loom up ahead, like an other-worldly vision. And the effect was to provoke me to quasi-religious utterance. The exact words were: “My God!”

If there’s a madder piece of ecclesiastical architecture anywhere in Ireland, I can’t think of it. No doubt there is, in the form of one of those post-Vatican II spaceships that landed in the 1960s. But considering its much greater age – 184 years now – Monkstown Church deserves a prize for eccentricity. You’d think, after nearly two centuries, it would have started to settle in.

On the contrary, it still looks like something you’d expect to see, through a heat haze, among the sands of Arabia, or Rajasthan. This effect was probably heightened for me because, from the angle I first saw it, the approach was guarded by a tall palm tree. Also, the sun was beating down on its Portuguese Gothic features.

John Semple

But studying the church at length, as I now did, I had to admit that if it was mad, it was at least mad in a pleasant way. So maybe it is finally beginning to adapt to its surroundings, or they to it, and it’s just that the architect responsible, John Semple, is still slightly ahead of our time.

He was certainly ahead of his own. According to the church website, Semple's design attracted some severely bad reviews in its early days. One sensitive critic, from the Dublin Penny Journal, implied that it hurt him to look at it. Never had he seen "a greater perversion of judgment and taste", he wrote, adding that there was "not a spot in the church where the eye [could] rest without pain".

That was in 1834. But in 1857, another commentator suggested that to anyone acquainted with the basic principles of religious architecture, the church "cannot but appear simply hideous". And another generation later, in 1880, the Ecclesiastical Gazette damned it as not being "suitable for a Christian place of worship".

In fact, suggests the church historian, it wasn’t until 1958 that the tide of public taste began to turn. Then the poet John Betjeman, who knew it well from his years as a press-attaché/spy in the British embassy, declared the “bold, modern, vast, and original” design one of his favourites. “Only today is the [...] genius of Semple beginning to be appreciated,” he added.

Sure enough, Betjeman was also a big admirer of another of Semple’s Dublin churches, which was notorious for a different reason. St Mary’s Chapel of Ease, aka the “Black Church”, in Broadstone was ahead of its time too, thanks to such dramatic features as the “parabolic arch” by which its walls curve inwards to become a ceiling.

But its folklorish infamy had less to do with parabolic spaces than diabolic ones. In a tradition inspired by its dark and ominous appearance, it used to be said that if you circled it three times in an anti-clockwise direction, you would summon the devil.

In some versions, I think, you had to run, and the circling had to be at midnight. No doubt other terms and conditions applied, depending on the teller. And I don’t know of any recorded appearances by the evil one.

But the legend was strong enough to hover over the 1962 autobiography of another poet, Austin Clarke. He grew up nearby and, taking no chances even with a book title, called his memoir Twice Round the Black Church.

Sixty years earlier, almost inevitably, the building also merited a mention in Ulysses, during the Monto-inspired dream sequence in which Leopold Bloom finds himself up in court, accused of various terrible sins. Among other things, he's charged with having once entered "a form of clandestine marriage with at least one woman in the shadow of the Black Church".

Supernatural

The building was deconsecrated in the early 1960s, and its supernatural associations, good and bad, have faded accordingly since. True, it was used for a time to house Dublin Corporation’s traffic wardens, who used to be regarded as evil, until the arrival of the actual antichrist, circa 1999, in a clampers’ van.

Today, it houses modern offices in a redesigned interior. And although the outer walls are as black as ever, this is still the simple result of Semple’s use of an impeccably native material – a form of limestone known as calp, which turns dark in the rain.

@FrankmcnallyIT