My London Year

Every day, I relive one year of my life by listing or reading all the moments that I remember, music, movies, news stories etc. As it happens, today’s year is 1982. If I were offered special powers, I’d love to be able to physically travel back in time to specific days. But if it’s a whole year, one year that I found it difficult to say goodbye to (a prompt from earlier this year) was my London year.

I worked as a voluntary evangelist (VE) with London City Mission from September 1982 to September 1983. We were reminded from the outset that we were there to work. It wasn’t a London holiday. And we did work, but it also felt like a holiday. I’d often travel to museums and tourist spots on my day off. And I took the opportunity to visit different parts of England. My fondest memory are all my friends. I often think that I didn’t appreciate them at the time as much as I should have done. But I’m still blessed by all the wonderful memories.

I remember visiting my old hostel in 1996. All my friends were long gone. The new folk did invite me in for a chat. What shook me is that they knew no-one that I knew 😀. So much had changed. And even more has changed since. They knocked down the hostel some years later and replaced it with a new building.

We used to preach on Tower Hill, alongside the Tower of London, where a wide variety of Christian and secular groups spoke. Local office workers would come and heckle as a hobby. And I’d meet people from all over the world – something that wouldn’t happen back in Ireland at that time.

We had a little Christian mission hall in Covent Garden. There, we had meetings for the homeless, local senior citizens, a coffee bar for the general public and various other activities. We’d also visit homes in the local neighbourhood and practice some street evangelism.

On my way home everyday, I’d walk past the Most Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church in Bermondsey. I stopped being a Roman Catholic a couple of years earlier, so I never went inside. I only recently discovered that it was built to replace an older building that was the last building to be struck by a V2 rocket in World War 2. London has so much history to it. Someone once said, “he who is tired of London is tired of life”. But maybe we all get a bit tired of things. Perhaps it’s all more magical to me now than it was at the time.

For church, in addition to our own meeting at the hostel and at Covent Garden, I attended Bermondsey Christian Fellowship, which later became City Hope Church. Now and then, I’d attend Westminster Chapel and Metropolitan Tabernacle. And I remember visiting Milmead Centre (Guildford Baptist Church) from time to time. I remember doing some evangelism with Westminister Chapel, led by R.T. Kendall. Went I went to London, I was 90% charismatic and 10% reformed in my theology. When I came back, I was 90% reformed and 10% charismatic 😀. But all sorts of churches and movements have blessed me throughout my life. And it’s Jesus I follow – not movements, though I benefit from all sorts of movements.

In addition to meeting R.T.Kendal, I remember meeting David Pawson and John Stott. 1983 was the first year of Mission to London, an evangelistic endevour which involved Luis Palau, and Argentinian evangelist. We were involved in that. One of my final memories was bringing some local folk to a tent meeting in Harrigay, where Luis Palau himself preached. And I remember going to one of the initial preparatory meetings in All Souls Langham Place in 1982. Luis Palau came to Ireland a few years later.

So, as always, let me close with a few songs. I remember Pass the Dutchie being on London news one night in September 1982. These kids were amazing. David Bowie’s Let’s Dance was playing everywhere in the Spring of 1983. I remember watching Top of the Pops in late September back home, and Modern Love came on. I remember it playing in our coffee bar in Covent Garden in late August. I hadn’t realized at the time that it was David Bowie. I think that I missed London so much that I almost became obsessive about the songs of the period.

Here are secular songs from September 1982 and September 1983:

And here are a couple of favourite Christian songs that I associate with London at the time.