Grade-1 listing for Britain's first truly Jewish synagogue

When it opened, nearly 130 years ago, the New West End Synagogue proved that London's Jewish community had arrived.

Yesterday, the magnificent Bayswater building officially joined the top three per cent of the country's historic buildings when it was given a Grade I listing.

Older 19th-century synagogues had been built to look like Christian churches, or the buildings that surrounded them, as if their designers were reluctant to draw attention to them.

But by the late 1870s, leaders of the Jewish community in London's West End felt more secure. Most official forms of anti-Jewish discrimination had been lifted. There were about 46,000 Jews in the UK, before the huge influx started by the anti-Semitic riots in Russia in the 1880s. It was 20 years since the law began allowing practising Jews to become MPs, an anglicised Jew, Benjamin Disraeli, was Prime Minister, and most of London's congregations were joined under the United Synagogue.

The United Synagogue hired George Audsley, a Scottish born architect, and the younger of two brothers who ran one of Liverpool's leading firms of architects. Audsley's speciality was Christian churches, but a few years earlier he had won a contract to design an impressive synagogue in the Toxteth area of Liverpool, which is now a Grade II* listed building. The New West End synagogue, in Bayswater, was also given Grade II* listing in 1998, but was upgraded yesterday by the Department of Culture to a Grade I.

It is large enough to seat a congregation of 800 people, and cost a princely £24,980 to build. The money was raised by private subscription. Leopold de Rothschild, one of the main financial backers, laid the foundation stone in 1877. It opened in 1879.

Designed in what the architect called a Graeco-Byzantine style, it is the second synagogue in the UK to receive Grade 1 listing. The other is the UK's oldest synagogue, the Bevis Marks, opened in 1701 in Bishopsgate, London. "The New West End Synagogue is the architectural high-water mark of Anglo-Jewish architecture," Simon Thurley, Chief Executive of English Heritage said.

Hannah Parham, English Heritage's protection adviser, added: "A lot of early 19th-century synagogues tried to follow the styles of their Christian counterparts, but the New West End Synagogue celebrated the cultural heritage of the people it served."

The upgrading is a tribute not just to Audsley but also to Sharman Kadish, a Manchester-based lecturer and author who has campaigned for years to protect Jewish sites in the UK. Her book Jewish Heritage in England, published last year, said many synagogues and other Jewish sites in the UK had disappeared or were under threat.

Independent