Another in the series on historic churches in the City of London …

By the time of the Great Fire of London in 1666, there were over a hundred parish churches and other places of Christian worship within and immediately without the walls of  the City, despite a number having been closed down during the Reformation. To be precise, according to  Parish Clerks’ records, there were 97 churches within the walls of the City, and 16 without, making a total of 113.

All Hallows Bread Street (reverse “5” on “sixteenth-century “Agas” Map/”Map of Early Modern London”) was originally built in the thirteenth  century, sometime before 1291, being mentioned in the “Taxatio Ecclesiastica” of Pope Nicholas IV of that year.   John Milton was christened in the church  in 1608.

The church was subsequently burned down in the Great Fire of 1666,  and rebuilt by Wren in 1681-98, only to be  demolished in 1877,  when the parish was merged with St Mary-le-Bow.

It is one of the twenty-one lost Wren churches, and one of the ten lost between 1860 (“Union of Benefices Act”)  and 1900.

Only a  plaque on the wall of St Mary-le-Bow and some parish boundary markers survive  at  its former site.  The salvaged pulpit also survives,  in St Vedast, Foster Lane.