Let there be light

Once, churches were places of fear and exultation. They were the venues of the most vivid, lurid, overwhelming shows in town, with painting, sculpture, light, architecture, performance and music conspiring to impress on you love and (especially) fear of God. In the church of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, carvings show children going into the torments of hell, as a result of the sins of their parents. There is also a figure of St James gleefully decapitating Muslims, around which still crowd candles from grateful pilgrims.

Churches mobilised the sort of budgets and the arrays of diverse talents - from painters to builders -that are now mobilised by blockbuster movies. They also defined architecture:in the history of the craft the parts which were not about the palaces of the rich and powerful were mostly about churches.

So when, standing in the Lumen United Reform Church and Community Centre, I am asked, "Do you often write about churches?", I pause. The answer is almost never, out of the hundreds of thousands of words I write about architecture. There doesn't seem to be the demand for them any more, at least in London, a city whose Christianity is ever more notional in the face of atheism and the rise of other faiths, and which is overstocked by churches inherited from the past.

Architecture isn't mostly about churches any more. At the same time, religious sculpture in the style of Quentin Tarantino has gone out of fashion. At the Lumen Church, there are no scenes of slaughter and torture and, rather than a genocidal St James, there are Muslim prayer mats folded up in the conical multi-faith prayer space. There is not even a Christmas crib.

All is whiteness and light. It has somehow become the consensus of church design around the world, whether protestant, Catholic or some foaming American sect, that the divine is no longer represented by intense images but by light from unseen sources and by abstract shapes. The remodelled Lumen, a rare example of new church architecture in London, follows in this modern tradition.

It stands south of St Pancras station on the site of a church built in the 1820s to serve the capital's expatriate Scots, who were thought at risk of perdition in this English Babylon. It was imposing, with twin towers that imitated York Minster, and capacity for 1,800 people.

This church was wrecked by a V2 rocket, reportedly the last of the Second World War. It was eventually replaced in 1965, with the help of £44,000 of Government War compensation, with a simple concrete-framed barn enlivened by a big sheet of stained glass, but which presented a dull and impenetrable façade. The identity of its architect has been lost to history.

The latest version serves a very different world to that of the original. The congregation is now to be counted in two figures rather than four, and the people in most pressing need are less Scots than refugees, asylum seekers and the homeless.

The church enthusiastically promotes multi-faith events, and a mosque group is going to move into one of its offices. Its purpose is less to hold services specific to one version of Christianity, more to be a general centre of peacefulness, aid to the needy and all-round niceness. Its crypt, a survival of the 19th-century church, is used as a shelter for homeless people.

The church's minister, Maggie Hindley, wanted a place of worship in the centre of the space which would present itself immediately to people entering, rather than at the far end. She wanted it to be clear that "anyone can use it, and that you don't have to sign up to 600 impossible things before you can say a prayer". She also wanted a "shopfront" presenting the church to the outside world, and a café to encourage "sharing with the community".

From this brief, architects Patrick Theiss and Soraya Khan created the tall, leaning cone in the centre of the church that is the most striking feature. It contains the sacred space Hindley asked for. It reaches all the way to the roof to bring in natural light and, focusing attention inwards and upwards, creates an appropriate place of retreat from the quotidian streets of Camden.

The cone is essentially a chapel, but placed in the centre rather than the edge. It divides the nave into two sections. The one nearest the street contains the café, with a large Sixties window extended to enhance the connection with the outside, and its formerly obscured glass replaced with clear. The other half of the nave remains a place of collective worship, but with no fixed altar. The Sixties stained glass window has been relocated to the furthest end of the building.

Otherwise, Theiss and Khan have created a glassy new entrance and improved access for the disabled. They have made a new cloistered court with a glass-walled events space off it and turned the slightly crabby and meagre Sixties building into an easier, more pleasurable, calmer place.

In all this they have enlisted the help of two artists. Sixty-year-old Alison Wilding has created three objects relating to water: a little fountain next to the cone, a font and a pool in the cloister. Each is a considered piece of shape-making, which works with the smoothness and roughness of materials, their degrees of reflectivity and the degrees to which they encourage or deter touch. 

Rona Smith, 25, has made an openwork metal tracery that stands in front of the big window to the street. It is inspired by Buddhist and Islamic patterns and by Christian rose windows.

The idea of collaboration with artists is also popular in modern church design, going back at least to the post-war reconstruction of Coventry Cathedral. It goes back further to the use of painters and sculptors in medieval religious building, but now artists are employed in a different way. They are no longer enlisted in a single grand project of exalted propaganda but are asked to create further objects for thoughtful contemplation, alongside the spaces made by the architect.

The contemporary approach may not be as compelling or awe-inspiring as churches of the past. For these qualities in art and architecture you now have to look in non-religious contexts.

It may create spaces in which religion is an atmosphere or a flavouring rather than the core of the experience. But churches like the Lumen do make centres of calm and decency that few other building types provide. Speaking as an atheist, this is progress.