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The church was confiscated in 1684 and handed over to Huguenot refugees from France, much to the anger of the Greek Archbishop, who wrote and circulated a furious pamphlet which criticised this move and detailed how the English authorities had expropriated the community. He wrote that the community "never sold the said Church, nor received any sum for the building thereof". The church no longer stands but the dedicatory plaque that was embedded over the main entrance is now housed in the [[narthex]] of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of St Sophia in Bayswater.
During the next 150 years, the community had to worship in the Imperial Russian Embassy. Finally, in 1837, an autonomous community was set up in Finsbury Park in London. The first new church was built in 1850, on London Street in the City. In 1877, the Church of St Sophia (the [[Holy Wisdom]]) was constructed in London, in order to cope with the growing influx of Orthodox immigrants to the United Kingdom. By the outbreak of the First World War, there were large Orthodox communities in London, Manchester, Cardiff and Liverpool, each focused on its own church.
The issue of how these significant communities were to be governed was not resolved until 1922, when the [[Ecumenical Patriarch]] [[Meletios IV (Metaxakis) of Constantinople|Meletios IV]] created the [[Diocese]] of Thyateira—named after the famous See of Thyateira in Asia Minor. Based in London, this diocese had [[jurisdiction]] over all Western Europe.