Nicky Haslam: I hope for relief… and pleasure

I hope to feel a blend of relief and pleasure. Relief at having got it together to actually go and drop that card (“Jeremy Clarkson for President”?) in the slot, and pleasure in the slot’s surroundings. My polling station is in the farthest, still-gentrified reaches of Earl’s Court… Philbeach Gardens to be exact.

There, surrounded by russet brick seminaries and halls in the Hanseatic style – blink and you could be in pre-bombed Hamburg – stands a building of exceptionally strange beauty, and one that houses not only the Host but, on this coming Thursday, the slot. My pleasure is in the church itself, dedicated to Cuthbert, the 7th century Saint of Lindisfarne fame and patron saint of otters.

It was built in 1886 by an obscure architect named Roumieu Gough regardless of cost, or indeed taste… by which I do not mean tasteless. Gough discarded the styles of his time, opting for a Cistercian-Norse-inspired exterior, and created something unique, a vast and soaring edifice. Its spire can be seen from the Hammersmith flyover, slender, dark and distinctly Germanic, beyond the rabble of Arks and Holiday Inns.

But it is the interior that astonishes. Primitive stained-glass gleams through a mist of incense wreathing the vast Spanish renaissance (what? why?) reredos, the rugged pulpit ornamented with chunks of semi-precious minerals in bronze settings and, weirdest of all, the lectern – a hammered, red-velvet-lined metal box raised high on sculpted brick pillars and lit by a pair of immense oxen (woolly mammoth?) horns curving up to fat tallow candles. No wonder John Betjeman christened the whole shebang “Nouveau Viking”.

So High-Anglican as to make the Oratory seem happy-clappy, St Cuthbert’s maintains its original traditions. It’s priest, the Rev. Paul Bagot is the kind of erudite churchman of Evelyn Waugh’s yearnings, who, with a posse of acolytes, smaller than Rishi in arsenic black soutanes and old lace, conducts services in ancient tongues, and rare hymns are played on the magnificent organ’s ivory-colour keys.

The sparse congregation comprises of tight-permed local ladies, and connoisseurs of tradition, architects, the occasional rock-star, visiting priests, some hippies, the homeless, and others who know, better than I, that here’s a spot, a slot, where Votive means more than mere Vote, and Manifest doesn’t have an o.