How it started v How it's going - Part Three
15 July 2025
We're back with a third post where we're casting our minds back to 2019-2020 when The Box was being developed. This time we're looking at St Luke's church, which underwent a huge transformation inside and outside to become the beautiful gallery space it is today.
Originally built in 1828, St Luke’s began life as a chapel of ease to Charles Church and was once home to a thriving parish. It acted as an air-raid shelter for local residents during the Second World War and the congregation initially gathered there after Charles Church was bombed.
Although St Luke’s survived the war many residential properties in the parish did not and the congregation dwindled. The last regular service was held at the 2,000 seat church on Easter Sunday 1962 with just 54 attendees. In the years that followrd it was occupied by Plymouth City Council’s Library Service and used as the Bookbinding Department. It later became an annexe to the main Central Library building with many staff and a meeting space located there.
The building closed in 2016 so we could transform it into a contemporary gallery space. Although it looks very different now, we have retained many of the original features both inside and out, including the external pulpit. The first image shows the pulpit before development work began. The second image shows it on The Box's opening day in September 2020.
When work started the building had a false ceiling......
.....this was removed to create the extra height that might be needed for some of our future exhibitions and to give the space more flexibility. Repairs, the removal of internal partition walls, a new floor, fresh paint.....in the images below you can see how the space was transformed.
You'll also notice that the boarded up window at the back of the church was replaced with a beautiful fused glass window by Portuguese artist Leonor Antunes. The window was inspired by the marbled endpapers in a book from The Box's historically significant Cottonian Collection. Antunes was also chosen as the first artist to have an exhibition in the church when The Box opened. Her practice closely considers the architecture of the spaces where it's displayed and enabled visitors to appreciate the work that had been done to building as well as her work in its own right.
To date St Luke's has hosted 12 exhibitions. As the images below show, it's proven to be a beautiful and versatile space that looks different with every presentation:
● Leonor Antunes: sequences, inversions and permuations (29 September 2020-30 August 2021)
● Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters (21 October 2021-27 February 2022)
● Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945 (26 March-5 June 2022)
● Because the Night Belongs to Us (25 June-4 September 2022)
● British Art Show 9 (8 October 2022-8 January 2023)
● Sue Williamson: Between Memory and Forgetting (4 February-4 June 2023)
● Rana Begum: Dappled Light (24 June–24 September 2023)
● Dutch Flowers and Kedisha Coakley (7 October 2023-7 January 2024)
● Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now (17 February-2 June 2024)
● The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure (29 June-29 September 2024)
● Osman Yousefzada: When will we be good enough? (2 November 2024-9 March 2025)
● Jyll Bradley: Running and Returning (on display now-until 2 November 2025)
Next year, the church will host a major exhibition celebrating the life and career of artist Beryl Cook from 24 January-31 May 2026.
We'll round off this post with a couple of views of the exterior of St Luke's. The first shows how the building looked at the start of the redevelopment work. The second shows the building as it looked on our opening day in 2020. Hasn't it scrubbed up well?
We hope you've enjoyed this ‘How it started v How it’s going’ look at St Luke's church! You can also read our previous posts about some of our first floor spaces and exterior and some of our ground floor galleries on this blog.