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 Clement Eastcheap (“F” on sixteenth-century “Agas” map/Map of Early Modern London) was originally built at least as long ago as the eleventh century, and described by Stow at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth as “a small church, void of monuments”. It was repaired and beautified in 1632.
The church burned down in the Great Fire of 1666, and was subsequently rebuilt by Wren between 1683-7, and altered in 1872 and again in 1932-4.
This is probably the St Clement’s of nursery rhyme fame.
