Another in the series on the historic churches of the out-parishes 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. There were a further twelve  in the out-parishes of Middlesex (north of the river) and Surrey (south of the river).

St Mary, Islington was originally built in the twelfth century, and subsequently rebuilt in the fifteenth.  The Jacobean playwright John Webster, perhaps most famous as the author of the revenge-tragedy “The Duchess of Malfi“, married his second wife, Sara Peniall, in the church in 1606, under special licence. She was seventeen, and heavily pregnant.

The church was rebuilt again in the eighteenth century, and yet again  sustaining bomb damage  during the Blitz in the twentieth, which had left only the tower still standing.