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 James Duke’s Place was originally built in 1622, on land that before the Dissolution used to belong to Holy Trinity Priory. It was undamaged in the Great Fire of 1666, but fell into disrepair and had to be rebuilt in 1727, only to be demolished in 1874, when the parish was merged with St Katharine Cree.
Essentially nothing now remains of the church at its former site, other than the name, which lives on in that of St James’s Passage, and some parish boundary markers in Creechurch Lane and in St Katharine Cree churchyard in Mitre Street.
Some memorial plaques salvaged from the church survive in St Katharine Cree.
