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 the Less (“M” on sixteenth-century “Agas” map/Map of Early Modern London) was originally built in the early or mid thirteenth century, at least in part over a vault or cellar, such that it was referred to as Omn’ Scor’ super Celar in Pope Nicholas IV’s Taxatio Ecclesiastica of 1291. It was repaired and partially rebuilt around the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The church was subsequently burned down in the Great Fire, and never rebuilt, the parish merging with that of All Hallows the Great.
Essentially nothing now remains of the church at its former site, the churchyard having been damaged by bombing in the Second World War, and lost to post-war redevelopment.
However, the name lives on, in that of Allhallows Lane.
