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For the first time in five generations, Christianity is winning more converts than losing them. In Britain and London especially, the Church is once again seen as offering solace and direction to a wayward youth, unmoored by a lack of community and a world that seems to turn on its axis every 24 hours. One of the leaders of this new Church — young, urbane and perhaps more evangelical than most — is Pat Allerton, aka the Hot Vicar of Notting Hill, although he prefers to go by a different alias. On Instagram, you’ll find him under @theportablepriest, an account which has 18.4k followers at the time of writing. Allerton has an additional 9,000 followers on TikTok; and his book, A Pocketful of Hope, which flogs bitesize pearls of wisdom lifted from The Bible, has sold thousands of copies.
Allerton first went viral during the pandemic when he took to the streets of London, visiting residential areas and standing opposite hospitals and prisons blasting out songs of hope and leading remote Church services. People took immediate notice of the fact that Allerton is notoriously handsome — and yes, before you ask, he is familiar with Hot Priest lore. He was “a little late to the Fleabag game,” he admits today, but knows all about the public enthusiasm for Phoebe Waller Bridge’s psychosexual relationship with a Catholic priest played by Andrew Scott in the second season of her hit series.
As a Church of England vicar, Allerton is bound by none of the same strictures that force Catholic priests to take a vow of celibacy. He married his South African girlfriend, Kirsty Turnbull, in 2021 and they have two daughters together: Phoebe and Ivy, who was born this April. As someone who’s dedicated their life and career to celebrating "The Creator", how does it feel to become one twice over? Being a father has “transformed his understanding of God’s love,” Allerton says. The love which he feels for his daughters has only amplified his sense of the sacrifice God made when he sent “his one and only son, Jesus, to die for us”.
Buoyed by the fame of his Covid-era services, Allerton today has resumed more traditional priestly duties. His Church, St Peter’s in Notting Hill, is a beautiful neoclassical building on Kensington Park Road with a distinctly well-heeled congregation, “lots of them interior designers”, who’ve donated “the couches we’re currently sitting on”. Allerton and I meet in his plush, nearby office on Portobello Road; yet despite his lofty surroundings, Allerton hasn’t abandoned his public mission. He regularly spends the afternoon outside Notting Hill Gate dispensing soundbite-friendly aphorisms to any passer-by who might listen. With a face, and charm, like his... most do.
Allerton is, in many ways, the best PR the C of E has had in years. The Church itself is in crisis, with no successor yet chosen for the Archbishop of Canterbury. The last man to hold the office, Justin Welby, resigned last year following reports that he had failed to hold to account the serial child abuser and former chairman of the Iwerne Trust, John Smyth. Does our vicar want the job? “Ha! No,” he says. “It’s a thankless task.” He later amends this to “an impossible job”, which is little more conciliatory.
Allerton looks even better in person than he does online. On the day we meet, he wears beige chinos, preppy white sneakers and a perfectly fitted white tee shirt. He is fashionably tanned and his teeth so perfect I wonder if he’s wearing veneers, safe for the silver tooth that adorns his first molar on the left. I realise, as I begin our interview, that I’m unsure whether to call him “Pat” or “Father”, so do my best to avoid both. This is surprisingly easy to do in person, but much harder over text — a fact I’m forced to reckon with when Allerton and I trade WhatsApps to discuss photo selection. He insists that I call him Pat.
Allerton was raised in a family he describes as nominally Anglican: his dad “had a quiet faith all his life” and never expected any of his sons to join the priesthood. His parents were divorced by the time he was nine and he attended boarding schools from age seven. He seems remarkably balanced for someone who boarded so young, I suggest. “I hide it well,” he laughs (one has to assume “it” refers to some kind of turmoil), before adding that he’s only joking and, later, that he received “a lot of healing from the Lord”. He also admits to having “cried every first night back at boarding school until [he] was 18.”
Does he ever cry in Church? “I choke up a lot,” he says, “but rarely does it come to tears.” It might be easy to dismiss Allerton as just another Old Etonian with a soul (the trope of the privileged finding enlightenment is a tired one), but he is so charming that you find yourself totally engrossed. His spiritual leadership is compelling and has the potential to reach far more than just Christians and believers. Indeed, in an era of toxic masculinity and declining prospects for teenage boys, his duty to the Church and role in the local community are something of an example to young men.
It wasn’t until he was 17 that Allerton first heard the voice of God. “My best friend at the time, who is still my best friend now, was the one who got me into it." He attended a week-long Christian camp during the Easter holidays while he was meant to be revising for his A-levels. “I sat in silence waiting for a sign during Christian camp, and after five minutes it washed over me like electricity… liquid joy and love and peace just filling me.”
There’s something ironic about more and more people turning to the Church in times of despair. If, indeed, God is all-powerful, then the fact that there is so much tragedy in the world is surely proof that He does not exist. When I ask Allerton whether there is anything God cannot control, he gives an elegant answer. God, however Almighty, has given us free will; he’s done this because he trusts that a species modelled after Him will ultimately do the right thing. “God doesn’t want robots,” Allerton explains. “He wants a relationship that is freely chosen”. The same free will that sees men go to war is that which sees them come together in love. To me, at least, that’s more than a pocketful of hope.
