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The best churches, temples, mosques and synagogues in London, worth going inside for the architecture, the art or the history.
The German Protestant church in Sydenham, named for the pastor who served this congregation in the 1930s and was hanged by the Nazis ten years later.
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There has been a German Protestant congregation in Sydenham since 1875, and between 1933 and 1935 its pastor was Dietrich Bonhoeffer - theologian, a founder of the Confessing Church that refused to fall in behind the Nazi state, and later a conspirator against it. He went back to Germany, was arrested in 1943 and was executed in April 1945, weeks before the war in Europe ended; he is among the twentieth-century martyrs carved over the west door of Westminster Abbey. The church he preached in on this site was destroyed by bombing in 1944 and the one standing now, finished in 1958, was named after him.
It is a working congregation rather than a memorial. Services are in German twice a month, the English-speaking Ichthys Fellowship uses the same room, a choir and a flute consort both carry Bonhoeffer's name, a German Saturday school meets here and a German kindergarten runs four days a week. The Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Centre, founded here in 2013 out of a study centre of 1980, keeps the international research archive and publishes the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Studies series.
Services on the second Sunday of the month at 15:00 and the fourth at 11:00
Hours compiled from public listings, checked 22 September 2026.
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Photo by Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL.