At its design and completion, St Chad's was situated on the north-east corner of Nichols Square, a poor residential area consisting principally of terraced housing.

James Brooks is the name which one associates above all with the creation of a new type of urban church especially intended to act as a focus in poor and deprived areas.

His great brick basilicas with their austere E. E. details, lit by tall clerestories rising triumphantly above their once squalid settings, are to be found chiefly in the East End, at Hoxton and Shoreditch.St Chad's is a good example of Brooks's austere and muscular red-brick Gothic, entirely appropriate for bringing Anglo-Catholicism to HaggerstonNichols Square was demolished in 1963 to create the Fellows Court Estate.

[13] At St Chad's, he designed the reredos, which was carved by Thomas Earp, and the pulpit, and may have been responsible for further details including the rood screen.

[16] St Chad's is an active Anglican parish church under the alternative episcopal oversight of the Bishop of Fulham, and is in the deanery of Hackney, in the Diocese of London.