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 Honey Lane (not shown on sixteenth-century “Agas” map/Map of Early Modern London) was originally built around the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the oldest record of it being in  a deed dating to between 1191 and 1212.  By the early sixteenth century, the church was known for its Lutheran leanings, and in 1540, its curate, Thomas Garret or Gerrard, was burned at the stake  at Smithfield for heresy.  It was described by Stow in his “Survay of London” of 1598 as a “small parish church”, with “no monuments … worth the noting”.  The church was subsequently burned down in the Great Fire of 1666, and never rebuilt, and the parish was merged with that of St Mary-le-Bow.

Only parish boundary markers survive  at  its former site.  However, some “Anglo-Norman” structures were uncovered during post-fire redevelopment, and a twelfth-century column  capital in the  form of a serpent, possibly from the church, was salvaged, and may now be seen in the  British Museum.  Buried human remains  were uncovered during archaeological excavations at No. 111 Cheapside in 1954-5.