ABOUT THE
Fitzrovia Chapel
The Fitzrovia Chapel Foundation looks after the chapel and offers opportunities to visit, enjoy cultural experiences and learn about our history. An enchanting jewel of Byzantine-inspired architecture in the heart of Fitzrovia, the chapel was formerly part of the Middlesex Hospital and remains a place of meaning, memory, and sanctuary for many.
Today, it is also an enriching cultural space for creative health, wellbeing, and artistic exploration. Open to everyone, it welcomes visitors to explore, reflect and be inspired.
We are responsible for promoting the chapel’s unique place in local history, heritage, and culture, as well as the conservation, restoration, maintenance, and preservation of the building and its contents. As a registered charity operating without public subsidy, much of our work is funded through commercial hire, including weddings, marriage blessings and proposals, civil partnerships, baby naming ceremonies, workshops, exhibitions, concerts, fashion shows, book launches and shoots.
The chapel offers a distinctive artistic programme, supporting both emerging and established artists, and providing learning opportunities for the community. It is a space for quiet reflection, discovery, and celebration, connecting diverse communities, visitors, and partners. Open to all faiths, beliefs, backgrounds, and cultures, the Fitzrovia Chapel continues to be recognised as a landmark of cultural and historic significance, including hosting the King’s Christmas Broadcast in December 2024.
OPEN DAYS
The chapel’s original purpose was to provide a place for prayer, worship, reflection and quiet contemplation for the staff, families and patients of the former Middlesex Hospital. We continue this tradition, opening the chapel most weeks to the public. Between 11am and 5pm, Monday to Wednesday (and one Sunday a month), visitors are welcome to learn more of the chapel’s history, appreciate its breathtaking architecture or ‘just be’ in the calm and serene surroundings. Entrance is free and you don’t need to book. During exhibitions, we are open every day. We sometimes need to close for maintenance so please check our What’s On page before you visit.
community
The chapel sits in the very heart of community life. Mondays are our official community day when we invite community groups to come to draw, sit in peace or meet to talk. However, we are delighted to welcome visitors from all walks of life on all the days we are open to the public. We offer the chapel to you as a place where you can step out of the concerns of city life and feel you are in another world. If you are part of a community group that would like to hold an event at the chapel, please get in touch.
Please come as often as you would like. We value our community and love greeting familiar faces as well as new visitors. The chapel is wheelchair accessible and we have volunteers to talk to you about our history.
Caring for the Chapel every day
As well as looking after the day-to-day care of this treasured space, the Fitzrovia Chapel team greets visitors, recounts our stories, cherishes our history, passes on the wonder. Whether you are seeking peace and calm on our open days, enquiring about getting married, studying our unique architecture or holding a fashion show or shoot, we can help guide you to the right place. And if you’d like to volunteer, let us know your skills and how you’d like to share them with the chapel. We are also looking for people who would like to share their research skills with us.
MEET THE PEOPLE
behind the chapel
THE CHAPEL TEAM
Madeleine Boomgaarden
DIRECTOR
Madeleine comes to the chapel with a professional history of high-level communications and customer experience roles across the commercial, not-for-profit and government sectors. Working with the board and our team of volunteers and staff, she’s responsible for making sure the chapel remains a place of inspiration for everyone in the local community and beyond.
Freya Bently
CULTURE AND COMMUNITY MANAGER
Martha Harris
WEDDINGS AND EVENTS MANAGER
Since 2019, Martha has worked in several different roles in the chapel, never tiring of its astounding beauty and rich history. As the Wedding and Commercial Manager, she enjoys giving everyone who walks through the door the best possible experience at the chapel. Her favourite part of the job is meeting all the wonderful Fitzrovia Chapel wedding couples and making sure they have a unique, beautiful and carefully considered wedding ceremony. Alongside her work at the chapel, she is also a freelance florist and gardener who grows seasonal flowers in her back garden in East London.
Beth Carter-Woodhouse
Wedding and Commercial Manager
Natalie Wilkins
WEDDINGS AND EVENTS DUTY MANAGER
Natalie is the Weddings and Events Duty Manager at The Fitzrovia Chapel, where she delights in showcasing the venue’s unique charm. With broad experience in event planning for fashion, hospitality, the arts, and cultural spaces as well as hundreds of weddings and private celebrations, she brings a calm, detail-focused approach to every occasion. Inspired by the chapel’s beauty and history, and the foundation’s dedication to the arts and local community, Natalie ensures each event is thoughtfully delivered.
John Aubusson
FINANCE LEAD
John is an independent management consultant who has called Fitzrovia home for more than 20 years. He first visited the chapel in 2005 while recuperating at the hospital shortly before it closed, and so was delighted to accept the invitation to become Treasurer of the beautifully restored chapel as it reopened to the public in March 2016, allowing him to help shape the chapel’s growing role in the community and the arts. In addition to overseeing the development of the chapel’s finance function and reporting, and his wider board responsibilities, John chaired the finance committee which meets quarterly in preparation for the board meetings. John now splits his time between Fitzrovia and El Gòtic in Barcelona, loving both dearly. He has now stepped down from the board and is the finance lead for the chapel.
THE TRUSTEES
Carla Whalen
CHAIR
Carla is a charity lawyer based in south London. Before she entered the world of law, Carla studied music and English literature in Glasgow and worked for a time in arts fundraising. Carla is particularly attracted to the chapel’s history as a space for contemplation and reflection, and she feels privileged to be able to contribute to the continuance of this much-loved treasure.
Nicholas Cambridge
VICE CHAIR
Samar F. Zia
Samar F. Zia is a visual artist and art writer, originally from Pakistan. Through her art practice, she endeavours to activate the imagination of her audience, provoke thought and bring communities closer together. Representation for marginalised people is a great concern for her and the reason for being a member of the Alumni Of Colour Association (AoCA) of the University of the Arts London (UAL). She also freelances as an independent curator and art tutor.
As a former resident of Fitzrovia, the chapel is meaningful to her in more ways than one. Besides finding the interior architecture of the chapel absolutely awe-inspiring, she feels privileged to have held her first solo exhibition in London at the Fitzrovia Chapel in 2017.
David Woodhouse
David Woodhouse is a writer and local resident interested in the history of the chapel and the surrounding area. His publishes literary criticism on Lord Byron (who was born on Holles Street and baptised at St Marylebone) and William Hazlitt (who died on Frith Street and is buried in St Anne’s Churchyard). With John Leigh, David was co-author of Football Lexicon and the Mark My Words column in the Independent on Sunday. His latest monograph, Who Only Cricket Know, was launched at an event in the chapel and has won the four major Cricket Book of the Year awards. David is Treasurer of the Byron Society. His previous not-for-profit roles included a four-year term on the Audit Committee of UK Anti-Doping.
Steve McKechnie
Steve McKechnie is a director at multidisciplinary design firm Arup, responsible for a team of over 200 structural engineers. He has a particular fondness for existing buildings and masonry design. His team is designing the prestressed stone masonry structures that are needed to complete the Basilica of La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Steve has worked in the Fitzrovia area for over 40 years and is keen to contribute to the maintenance and preservation of the Fitzrovia Chapel because it is an astonishing, glittering, spiritual example of the way that building work can speak to, and even heal, the souls of the countless people who have visited over the years.
Nicholas Cambridge
Nicholas Cambridge is a retired general practitioner and medical historian. He qualified from The Middlesex Hospital and is enthusiastic about the history of the Fitzrovia Chapel, The Middlesex Hospital and the Fitzrovia neighbourhood. Following his retirement in 2009 he launched the Samuel Johnson Tercentenary by dressing up as David Garrick and walked 167 miles from Lichfield to London with his friend Professor Peter Martin, dressed as Samuel Johnson. In 2019 he chaired a committee which organised a successful symposium, gala dinner and tours of Fitzrovia for past Middlesex staff. Nicholas is extremely interested in Charles Dickens and published a book entitled ‘Bleak Health: The medical history of Charles Dickens and his family’ in 2022.