Chapelle Victoria

Chapelle Victoria stands in Grasse, a Côte d'Azur city whose Belle Époque years drew a British community. They built it at the end of the nineteenth century for their Anglican worship. John Lord Bowes and his brother-in-law Charles Edward Booker formed a society in 1890 to buy land and raise a Protestant chapel. The Liverpool architect George Ashdown Audsley designed it in an Anglo-Norman half-timbered style. A pointed bell tower crowns the whole roof. Wooden framework curves the interior ceiling into an upturned ship's hull.

Queen Victoria stayed in Grasse from late March to late April 1891, just as the builders finished. She attended the Good Friday service and every Sunday service in the chapel, then called Saint John's Church. Her thank-you gift survives in stained glass by the London firm Heaton, Butler and Bayne. Saint George stands there, flanked by John the Baptist and John the Evangelist. The design adds her intertwined monogram, the motto of the Order of the Garter and the arms of England, Wales and Scotland. Opposite, the Bowes family's memorial window for John Lord Bowes, dead that same year, shows Christ among the prophets Hosea and Malachi. Baroness Alice de Rothschild gave a third window: five women under a dove with an olive branch. Ruth wears the face of Mary Sands, the baroness's close friend.

After the 1907 law separating church and state, the chapel became the property of a British evangelical society. French services spread after the Second World War, and in 1970 the Anglican association handed it to the Reformed Church of France. Known for its acoustics, the chapel regularly hosts concerts, exhibitions and cultural events. The building joined France's list of historic monuments in 2021. The association Les Amis de la Chapelle Victoria raises funds for the upkeep. Inside, the light still falls through the windows of a queen, a family and a baroness.