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.
The church of All Hallows the Great (“V” on sixteenth-century “Agas” Map/”Map of Early Modern London”) was originally built in around 1235.
The church was subsequently burned down in the Great Fire of 1666, and rebuilt by Wren in 1677-84, only to be demolished between 1876 and 1894, when the parish was merged with St Michael Paternoster Royal.
It is one of the twenty-one lost Wren churches, and one of the ten lost between 1860 (“Union of Benefices Act”) and 1900.
Essentially nothing now remains of it at its former site, other than the name, which lives on in that of Allhallows Lane (the last vestige, the churchyard, having been lost during the construction of the City Fire Station).
Note, though, that the salvaged chancel screen survives, in St Margaret, Lothbury. Salvaged statues of Moses and Aaron, and a carved figure of Charity, also survive, in St Michael Paternoster Royal.
I’m as surprised as delighted that they salvaged it!
The screen is wonderful.