Christ Church, Lucknow: built after the 1857 siege as a memorial, not the church that endured it

On Mahatma Gandhi Marg, in the Hazratganj district of Lucknow, in Uttar Pradesh, Christ Church, sometimes called the “Martyrs’ Memorial Church”, was built between 1858 and 1860 and consecrated on 26 November of that year by Bishop George Cotton. It is in Gothic style, on a cruciform plan, with about twenty spires and pinnacles, and was built by the Royal Engineers. The architect’s name, given by some tourist sources as an unspecified “General Hutchinson”, is not confirmed by a primary source. An earlier church had already been built in the Mariaon cantonment, with permission granted in 1837 and completion in 1842, holding ninety people, under the chaplain Henry Polehampton. That building was destroyed by the rebels in 1857, during the Indian uprising, and abandoned. A widespread inaccuracy online, repeated even by some encyclopedia entries, needs correcting: the present Christ Church, completed in 1860, was built three years after the siege of 1857 and therefore cannot be the building that endured it, as is sometimes wrongly reported. The building actually besieged, now in ruins, with a cemetery of about two thousand graves including that of Sir Henry Lawrence, is the separate church of St Mary’s, at the Lucknow Residency. The correct and verifiable link between Christ Church and the events of 1857 is therefore that of a memorial built afterwards in memory of the British dead of the uprising, as confirmed by the plaques and memorial tablets kept inside. Lucknow has no Anglican cathedral of its own: the seat of the diocese of the Church of North India that includes the city, All Saints Cathedral, is in Prayagraj (Allahabad). Today Christ Church is both an active church, with a capacity of about one hundred and thirty people, and the home of Christ Church College, a school affiliated to the CISCE founded in 1878 by H. McConoghey, which today has around two thousand five hundred students.