The Back Step

We had the police at the church's back door again yesterday.

It's a familiar enough call by now. People sit on our back step, out of the wind, and smoke crack, and sooner or later somebody phones somebody and the whole tired choreography plays itself out once more. I don't write that to complain. I write it because of where that step is.

Our back door opens onto Dyott Street, at the junction with Bucknall Street. In the nineteenth-century surveys, Dyott Street is named as the eastern boundary of the St Giles rookery – the slum the Victorians called, without much hesitation, the worst in London. Five acres of courts and cellars running west towards Tottenham Court Road, an intricacy of yards that the inspectors compared to a rabbit warren.

None of which is coincidence. Bloomsbury Chapel was put here on purpose. Samuel Morton Peto paid for a chapel on the very edge of the rookery, and William Brock came to minister on the understanding that the poverty on the doorstep wasn't a distraction from the gospel but the reason for it. Our own history records that the Domestic Mission in those slums was led by George M'Cree, remembered in the church's own words as a man of "consecrated commonsense". I've read a great many job descriptions for ministry and I've never seen a better one.

Now here's the thing I keep turning over.

In 1751 William Hogarth published Gin Lane – probably the most famous image of addiction in the English language, reproduced ever since on book jackets and pub walls. Most people who know the picture couldn't tell you where it's meant to be.

But it's set here, outside our back door. That's not local fancy, it's the settled reading. The picture shows the stepped steeple of St George's, Bloomsbury, at the right-hand edge, with George I on top in Roman dress. Hogarth's first audience would have recognised Hawksmoor's steeple instantly and known, without being told, that they were looking at a street in the St Giles rookery. In his day the street was Dyott Street; it became George Street in the nineteenth century and reverted after the slum was cleared, so the sign above our back door is near enough the one Hogarth could have read. Trace the line of sight back from the steeple and it lands, more or less, on our back step.

The buildings are invented, of course – the collapsing house and Gripe's pawnshop are moral furniture, not surveyed fabric – but the ground is ours. Two hundred and seventy-five years, the same few square yards of London, the same desperation, the same trade making money out of it. Only a different drug. It's become a commonplace to say that gin was the crack cocaine of the eighteenth century. Standing on our back step, it isn't a comparison. It's the same doorway.

And Hogarth being Hogarth, the theology is built into the picture, sharper than any sermon I'm likely to preach. Look at what he stacks up the right-hand edge. Lowest is the church spire. Above the church comes the crown, in the form of George I on his pyramid. And highest of all hangs the pawnbroker's sign – three balls arranged, by a deliberate trick of alignment, so that they form the cross on top of the church. That cross isn't the church's at all. It belongs to the man who takes the coat and the kettle and the wedding ring in exchange for one more day's oblivion. Patrick Dillon reads it as an inversion of all proper order: religion debased below the court, and money ruling over both. And we know it's deliberate, because in the companion print the world is the right way up. In Beer Street the spire rises above the royal standard, and the pawnbroker's sign droops far below.

But Gin Lane is not neutral witness. It's a campaign poster, made in alliance with Henry Fielding's push for the Gin Act, and it works by turning the poor of St Giles into grotesques so that respectable people will look and recoil. The historian Jessica Warner argues that the gin craze was as much a drug scare as a drug epidemic, and warns against thinking that the miseries of complicated places reduce to a single cause – gin, or heroin, or crack. Wage war on the substance and leave the poverty untouched, and you've done nothing but decorate the problem. She's describing 1751. She could be describing any drugs policy of my lifetime.

Which matters here, because it's the same look. Whoever is on our step this morning gets exactly the appraisal Hogarth's audience gave his figures: a spectacle to be deplored, a type rather than a person.

So, the uncomfortable question for those of us who happen to occupy the spot. Is a church built to border this misery any more use than that serene, faintly-drawn spire in the background? It would be so easy not to be. Easy to phone the police, tidy the step, and get on with the respectable business of religion at a safe altitude. And I should admit, before I go any further, that we are currently looking into studs for the step to make it less comfortable to sit on, and that I can't write that sentence down without wincing at it. Because the nineteenth century's solution, in the end, wasn't mission either. It was to drive New Oxford Street through the rookery and disperse the people. Clearance dressed up as improvement. We're still, as a city, extremely good at that.

Our founders spoke of bringing Christ to the poor, and I honour the impulse even as I want to complicate its grammar. Christ doesn't need bringing to that step. Christ is already there – in the company of the God-forsaken, on the long Saturday between the cross and whatever comes next, always on the side of the ones being ruined and never on the side of the ones doing the ruining. The question isn't whether we can carry him out through the back door. It's whether we can recognise him when we open it.

Which isn't a warm note to finish on, and I won't reach for one. We're not a drug service; there are people a few streets away who do this properly and to whom we should defer. Most days I couldn't tell you whether it was the same person as yesterday. What we have is a corner and an inheritance of organised pressure – the understanding, built into this place from the start, that relief on its own leaves the arrangements untouched, and that if you want fewer people in doorways you go after housing and wages and the decisions that put them there.

So we organise, and turn up, and press this city to be something other than what it is for its poorest. It's slow, and unglamorous, and it doesn't clear the step. And alongside it, something harder: refusing the eighteenth-century look, not letting the figure by the bins become an illustration, a thing the sermon can use. That's not a programme. It's a discipline that needs working at.

So we had the police at the back door again yesterday. But we are still here.