As early as the 16th century, the English (the first among Europeans) established regular trade relations with Russia, founding the English Trading Company for this purpose. The Russian authorities imposed no restrictions on their faith.

After Peter I’s trip to England in 1698, the flow of British subjects invited by the tsar to Russia sharply increased. At the beginning of the 18th century, the English formed their own congregation. In June 1723, the company’s factory moved from Moscow to the new capital, where the English were almost monopolists in foreign trade for nearly a century—especially during the reign of Catherine II. At that time, the Anglican church appeared on Galernaya Street, with about 300 parishioners. Initially, the English prayed in a chapel in the house of merchant Netleton on Galernaya Street, then in the Lutheran church in the courtyard of Vice-Admiral K. Kruys, where they had their own pastor since 1719.

The three-story stone house on the plot of house No. 56 on the English Embankment was built between 1735 and 1738 and belonged to Prince Peter Borisovich Sheremetev. In 1747, through the English Consul General Baron Jacob Wulf, the Factory informed the London Russian Company of its desire to build a new chapel and chaplain’s house. Empress Elizabeth assisted in finding a plot, and in 1753 the English minister-resident and banker Baron Wulf reported the purchase of Prince Sheremetev’s house. After necessary alterations, the church was opened in March 1754. The spacious prayer hall, decorated in the Italian style, was located on the second floor of the house. Even then, it was double-height, with two rows of windows, so from the main facade the building appeared three stories tall. In front of the carved redwood altar, surrounded by railings, stood four columns, a pulpit, and a wooden staircase with artistic carving leading to it. On the eastern (altar) wall of the nave hung marble slabs: in the center—the tablets of the Mosaic commandments, on the left—the Lord’s Prayer "Our Father," on the right—the Creed. Opposite the pulpit were seats for the English envoy and his retinue... By 1790, the building on the English Embankment was already recorded as the English Church. By the 1810s, the Anglican community in the Northern capital had significantly grown, and there was a need to reconstruct the church building. In 1814, work began on rebuilding the building according to designs by Giacomo Quarenghi.

Thanks to drawings and engravings preserved in Italy, made from Quarenghi’s plans and published after the architect’s death by his son, one can judge the original concept of the author. Using the English Chapel building, which faced the Neva River embankment with its main facade, and two small wings on Galernaya Street, the architect connected them with service buildings of varying sizes arranged around the courtyard perimeter, creating a magnificent unified complex of buildings from the English Embankment to Galernaya Street. The facade facing the Neva was designed in the style typical of that time. The central risalit featured a portico with four Corinthian columns and two pilasters. The risalit was topped with a smooth triangular pediment with three sculptural figures at the corners: "Faith," "Hope," and "Charity." The central axis of the building was emphasized by a semicircular window in the basement and two sphinx figures on pedestals on either side of this window. In 1824, the author of a pamphlet about the English Factory in Russia wrote: "...The Factory expanded the church, the chaplain’s residence, the library, and other services and furnished them in a manner reflecting the honor of the English nation." The chaplain’s apartment was on the first floor of the building, directly beneath the church hall. The walls of the church hall were divided by Corinthian pilasters and columns. The altar was located on the east side. The painting "The Crucifixion" was framed by a stucco portal with archangels above. A semicircular solea with marble steps was placed between two columns. On the south and north sides of the "Crucifixion," in the wall piers, were stove-fireplaces with figures of saints above them. In the center of the longitudinal northern wall was a richly decorated wooden carved pulpit; opposite it, in the southern wall, was the place for the English ambassador with a canopy and the British royal coat of arms.

In 1860, academic architect Alexander Khristoforovich Pel added a second floor to the side wings and made the main entrance to the church building from the embankment. A new decoration of the altar was a specially made copy of the large-scale painting "The Descent from the Cross" by Peter Paul Rubens (from the original now in the State Hermitage). In connection with the upcoming jubilee of Queen Victoria, head of the Anglican Church, in 1876 the English community invited civil engineer Fyodor Karlovich Boltenhagen for another reconstruction of the church. Work under his supervision was carried out in 1877–1878. Overall, he preserved Quarenghi’s concept but removed the third-story windows from the main facade, correspondingly increasing the height of the second-story windows and rusticating the facade, so that from the outside the building appeared two-story rather than three-story.

The new decoration of the church hall—in the spirit of the Victorian era—is unusual for Christian temples. The pilasters and columns were painted with stylized flowers, leaves, and fruits: lilies, laurel, pomegranate, apple, rosehip, olive, oak. The pilasters closest to the altar were decorated with grapevines, and the columns with wheat ears. At the same time, the church was gifted two stained glass windows from the 1880s depicting England’s patrons—Saint George and Saint Elizabeth. To install them, window openings were made in the southern wall of the nave. Along with them, another 13 stained glass windows decorated the windows of the northern and southern walls. They were made by the firm "Heaton, Butler and Bayne," where church orders were executed by stained glass artist Robert Bayne. He is probably the author of these monumental compositions. This is the only example in Russia of English stained glass art from the late 19th century. In 1877, by order of the English colony, an organ was built by the English firm "Brindley and Foster." The firm was founded in 1854 in Sheffield due to the growing demand for organ building for the large number of churches being built. According to literary sources, four organs were made for Russia, but the only one preserved is in the Anglican Church in Saint Petersburg. On the organ’s console is an inscription with the names of donors John Jelibrand Hubbard and William Edgetron Hubbard. The organ case is made of oak, in accordance with English organ-building traditions; the pipes in the prospect are decorated with paintings (oil, gilding). The console is made in the form of a cabinet in the lower part of the prospect; the upper part of the console is closed by two sliding wooden glazed doors. The white keys are covered with bone, the black ones are made of wood. In the 1970s, the instrument was severely damaged: about 40 percent of the pipes were lost, the mechanical action abstracts were broken, and the air channels were torn out. Finally, at the end of the 19th century, the church was decorated with mosaic panels made in the Roman technique. They were created in 1894–1896 in the workshop of academician P. P. Chistyakov at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts with funds from parishioners. The church was maintained by subsidies from the London Russian Company and donations from parishioners and was under the patronage of the English Embassy. In 1914, the building underwent repairs. The church was closed in 1919. In the 1920s–1930s, the building with all its property (including the extensive library of the Anglican church community) was under the jurisdiction of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the USSR in Leningrad. In 1939, the building was transferred to the Presidium of the Leningrad City Council. In 1941, the wooden railing of the pulpit, the wooden pew mounts in the floor, and the bronze chandelier from the stairwell were dismantled from the church hall. During the Great Patriotic War, four artillery shells hit the building. In the mid-20th century, a complex of works was carried out: facade repairs on the English Embankment, repairs of the carriage sheds in the courtyard, restoration of stained glass, chandeliers, painted ceiling, paintings, oak doors, the main building’s grand staircase, and central heating was installed. The inlaid parquet floors were covered with new parquet floors. From 1970 to 1999, the building housed the City Excursion Bureau, and the church hall was used as an assembly hall. In the late 1970s, deteriorating statues were removed from the pediment. Earlier, the sphinx sculptures disappeared from the pedestals at the church’s main facade. Since the early 1990s, the City Excursion Bureau administration, having moved to the courtyard wing, began renting out the church hall and adjacent second-floor rooms. One of the tenants set up a closed "retail point" for foreign tourist groups. High glass display cases with jewelry and souvenirs were installed in the church. Tour guides brought groups of foreigners from cruise liners here. A cafeteria was arranged in the room adjacent to the prayer hall. Unauthorized work was carried out to open the ceilings between the first and second floors of the right courtyard wing. In the 1990s, under the KGIOP program, seven stained glass windows in the Church Hall were restored... Since 2001, the building has been under the operational management of the Saint Petersburg State Conservatory named after N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov. Due to violations of the preservation obligation, KGIOP filed lawsuits to recover fines and compel the user to carry out prescribed preservation works, but the claims were denied. In 2016, the federal cultural heritage site "Anglican Church of Jesus Christ" at English Embankment, 56 was transferred to the operational management of the Saint Petersburg State Theater "Music Hall" to create a new open cultural space—a Concert Hall on the English Embankment. It is planned that the new concert hall will host performances by the symphony orchestra of the "Music Hall" Theater "Northern Symphony" under the direction of Maestro Fabio Mastrangelo, the Chamber Choir under the direction of Honored Artist of Russia V. S. Kopylova-Panchenko, as well as other musical ensembles of the city and country... His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Kent, during his visit to the Anglican church building on March 26, 2017, expressed private support for the decision to transfer the building to the theater for the creation of a concert hall. As noted during a meeting with representatives of the Anglican faith in Saint Petersburg, organized by the British Consul General in Saint Petersburg Keith Allan, the management of the "Music Hall" Theater expressed readiness to hold festive services in the hall. "This will be a gift to the small Anglican community in Saint Petersburg—the opportunity to hold services in a building restored at the city’s expense," noted Sergey Makarov (Chairman of KGIOP). 

Sources:

https://www.citywalls.ru/house1244.html