Mick Hartley

According to Time Out, London “hosts more religions than any other city on the planet”. Here are maps showing the distribution of the big six (though I find it hard to believe that there are only 29,000 Hindus. Surely there’s a nought left out there).

One of the oddest and generally unremarked features of London’s religious life is the growth of evangelical Christian churches. Time Out, typically, head to Kensington for their brief investigation, where the influence is mainly US Pentecostalism and the preacher and much of the congregation are white, but the overwhelming majority of these new churches are in run-down areas like Hackney or Peckham, or in industrial estates even, where the congregation are overwhelmingly black, and the style African.

Photographer David Spero has a gallery of a few of these places, from his recent book. The United Church of the Kingdom of God at Finsbury Park, just down the road from me, used to be the Astoria – rock venue the Rainbow in a later incarnation – and hit the news more recently as the place of worship of Victoria Climbie’s wretched guardians.

I’ve cycled past this on a Sunday and the road and car park were jam-packed. No more though – it’s inside the new Olympic Park. As is this. I wonder where they’ve ended up. Not in any of the empty under-used Anglican churches dotting the city, that’s for sure.