St Luke's Church, Chelsea, was a new-built Commissioner's Church of 1820–24, partly built using a grant of £8,333 towards its construction with money voted by Parliament as a result of the Church Building Act of 1818. It is often said to be the first Gothic Revival church in London, and, as Charles Locke Eastlake put it: "probably the only church of its time in which the main roof was groined throughout in stone". Nonetheless, the parish was firmly low church, and the original arrangement, modified in the 1860s, was as a "preaching church" dominated by the pulpit, with a small altar and wooden galleries over the nave aisle.