The oldest surviving church in the City of Sydney, St James’ was designed by convict architect Francis Greenway, built by convicts housed at Hyde Park Barracks, and consecrated in 1824. It has stood ever since at the heart of our growing, changing city.
The site on Queens Square at the northern end of Hyde Park was initially intended for the colony’s first purpose-built courthouse, and its bones are those of an imposing Georgian edifice, a mirror for Hyde Park Barracks across Macquarie Street. For budgetary reasons, however, Commissioner John Thomas Bigge ordered initial work on Macquarie’s ‘grand metropolitan church,’ on George Street, to be halted, and a square tower and steeple added to the courthouse plans, with several architectural flourishes pared back.
The design was by convict architect Francis Greenway (1777–1837) under the direction of the visionary governor Lachlan Macquarie, who together produced other well-known Sydney edifices, from Hyde Park Barracks, to St Matthew’s Windsor and Windsor Courthouse, and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (originally intended as the stables for Government House and similarly ordered repurposed by Bigge).
The first service at St James’ was led in 1822 by Rev’d William Cowper for convicts housed at Hyde Park Barracks. Many of the convicts were involved in the construction of the church, and it was held in the unfinished (and unconsecrated) building to shelter them from the rain.
Its steeple soaring 52 metres skyward, St James’ was the tallest structure in Sydney for five decades, and visiting ships would use it to navigate into the Harbour. That distinction was briefly passed in 1879 to the 64m timber and glass dome of the magnificent, ill-fated Garden Palace, which stood between the Mitchell Library and the Conservatorium, before it burned to the ground in 1882, pieces of blackened iron flung as far as Rushcutters Bay. But the imposing Sydney Town Hall (1889) and then General Post Office (1891) soon overshadowed St James’, which over its life has become ever more clustered round by towering city buildings.
And yet St James’ stands handsomely across from the Barracks, which between them frame the threshold between Hyde Park’s greenery and the Macquarie Street corridor of power. It lies near the centre of city’s financial and retail precincts, with the adjacent Supreme Court (another Georgian Greenway building, built 1820–28) and Law Courts on Queen’s Square (1977) fostering a strong and continuing relationship between the church and the legal community. St James’ has stood witness to nearly all Sydney’s complex colonial history, much of which is memorialized by the many plaques adorning its walls.
The church itself, though renovated, repaired, and carefully updated, holds the same purpose it always has. Its lovely wooden pews, stalls and choir screen, Italianate black-and-white tiling, beautiful mosaic chancel, and beaten copper semi-dome form an elegant backdrop for worship. Organists work the exquisite, sometimes gentle, sometimes thundering new Dobson organ, installed and consecrated in 2024. Light streams into the church through eight tall stained glass windows (1903–13) featuring saints and apostles, and pools in the sublime Chapel of the Holy Spirit (1988), with glasswork representing the Creation, Fall, and Crucifixion in the colours of the Australian continent, by Victorian artist David Wright.
Beneath the Church is a vaulted undercroft called the Crypt, well-loved for its Children’s Chapel decorated by the Turramurra Painters in 1929 with Biblical scenes re-set in Sydney Harbour, ringed by local animals and flowers. The Crypt has been a site of hospitality for the homeless for many decades, with the Sister Freda Mission serving hot meals there from 1936, and more recently to our neighbours as a cafe. It is now emerging as an exciting new space for visual artists, poets, and the broader arts community.
All are most welcome to visit this extraordinary building, for a worship service, a concert, a lecture, or simple a place of quiet refuge from the noise and pace of the city.