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.

St Benet Fink  (“26” on sixteenth-century “Agas” map/Map of Early Modern London) was originally built at least as long ago as  the thirteenth century, and subsequently rebuilt by one Robert Finke in the ?fourteenth  (note in this context that a grave-slab tentatively dated on stylistic grounds to  the late tenth or early eleventh century has been found here).

The church burned down  in the  Great Fire of 1666, and was  rebuilt – to  an “uncommon and very effective”  decagonal design –  by Wren in 1670-5.  It was  demolished, to make way for the rebuilding of the Royal Exchange, in 1841, when the parish was merged with St Peter-le-Poer.

It  is one of the twenty-one lost Wren churches.

A Corporation “Blue Plaque” marks  its former site.  Some salvaged communion plate still  survives,  in the church of St Benet Fink  in Tottenham.  Salvaged paintings of Moses and Aaron, which were formerly part of the altar-piece, ended up  in Emmanuel School in Wandsworth.