#stjohnswaterloo

St Johns Waterloo Church - Opening of Crypt, 1984

Thanks to David’s eldest son Simon and to David and Lesley Brooks, David’s old VHS video is a digital video! 

The centre was formally opened by Her Majesty The Queen on Friday 2nd November 1984.

Read David’s memory about how a small community mounted a Campaign that raised ￡ 720,000 to refurbished the crypt > 

You can see the annual report of the Waterloo Trust that David (then 42 years old) and Danny Levine (David’s best friend, director of the North Lambeth Day Centre, and former single homeless himself) set up in 1982 to raise funds to convert the crypt of St John’s Waterloo Road into a rehabilitative centre for the single homeless.  

More info:


About this blog >

Pleased to see memories of Swann with Topping here, as I worked as Front of House manager for six weeks that year, which included the run of that show. Greatly enjoyed it - Donald was a very sweet little man in a duffle coat and I wanted to tie a label on him saying ‘Please look after this Swann’! I was on the board of Upstream for a while too (as well as the ACG), and other highlights that stand out were the Kenneth Branagh one man show of Tennyson’s Maud, which I had studied at university and wanted to see performed (Branagh was almost unknown then), and The Last Day of a Condemned Man performed by the utterly compelling Alfredo Michelsen (the sexiest man in the world!).

I was also at the opening of the crypt by the Queen, having been first a member of St Andrew’s and later, when the parishes merged, of St John’s, from 1978 to 1989 when I got married and moved to Muswell Hill. I still love to visit Waterloo - St John’s is looking really good with new murals and artworks, and I had a great time a couple of weekends ago at the Waterloo Festival, first going for an industrial history walk around the area, and then on the Sunday attending the excellent Festival Eucharist, set to  a jazz mass with the church’s fabulous choir (and worship led by two gay men with a gay woman as preacher - wonderfully inclusive!).

While I’m here I just want to say how sorry I am to learn of David’s Alzheimer’s. Can’t believe you are 74, David - but then I am 63 myself and have my state pension, though still working on writing for the Christian market.

Submitted by Veronica Zundel on 14 July 2016.

Passion 18 March 2016