It was the cathedral of Calcutta until St. Paul's took over in 1847. James Agg modelled it on St Martin-in-the-Fields, and Warren Hastings laid the foundation stone in 1784. The stone came from the ruins of Gaur, the medieval capital of Bengal, which the Company quarried without much ceremony.
The churchyard is the reason to come. Job Charnock's octagonal mausoleum stands in it, built by his son-in-law around 1695, and the dark stone it is made of was unfamiliar enough to geologists that they named it charnockite after him. It is still the standard term for that class of rock.
Inside is Johann Zoffany's Last Supper, painted in 1787, in which the apostles are portraits of Calcutta residents. The auctioneer William Tulloh is St. Peter, and Judas is a local solicitor Zoffany apparently disliked, which caused a certain amount of trouble at the time.
The Black Hole memorial, moved here from the GPO site in 1940, stands in the grounds, as does the mausoleum of Admiral Watson and a monument to the Rohilla War.
What the guidebook leaves out
The type of rock Charnock's mausoleum is cut from is called charnockite worldwide because of this building. A Calcutta grave named a global rock classification.
