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 John the Baptist upon Walbrook (“W” on sixteenth-century “Agas” map/Map of Early Modern London) was originally built around 1150, and subsequently rebuilt in 1412, and repaired in 1621 and again in 1649-50.   John Stow wrote, in  “A Survey of London written in the year 1598” : “There be no monuments in this church of any account, only I have learned William Cobarton, skinner, who gave lands to that church, was there buried 1410; and John Stone, tailor, one of the sheriffs 1464, was likewise buried there”.

The church burned down in the Great Fire of 1666, and was not rebuilt again afterwards, the former  parish merging  with that of St Antholin Budge Row.

A  tiny portion of the churchyard  survives, in Cloak Lane, together with a commemorative plaque put up in 1671.

Some  parish boundary markers also survive.

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 Garlickhythe (“1” on sixteenth-century “Agas” map/Map of Early Modern London) was originally built in around 1100, and subsequently rebuilt in 1326, by the Vintners Richard de Rothing and his son John.  According to Stow, among those buried here was one Richard Lions “a famous merchant of wines, and a lapidary, sometime one of the Sheriffs, beheaded in Cheap by Wat Tyler and other rebels in the year 1381 [i.e., during the “Peasants’ Revolt”]”.  Lions was depicted on his gravestone “with his hair rounded by his ears, and curled; a little beard forked; a gown, girt to him down to his feet, of branched damask, wrought with the likeness of flowers; a large purse on his right side, hanging on a belt from his left shoulder; a plain hood about his neck, covering his shoulders, and hanging back behind him”.

The church burned down in the Great Fire of 1666, and was rebuilt by Wren between 1676-82 and 1714-17.  It was then  damaged by bombing in the First World War, and narrowly escaped total destruction in the Second, when a 500-lb bomb landed in the south-east corner but failed to explode, after which it was  rebuilt between 1954-63.  It was also damaged by,  and repaired after, a freak accident involving a falling crane in 1991.

The church is popularly known as “Wren’s lantern” on account of the illumination from the clerestory windows, which are of clear rather than stained glass.

Some of the interior fittings were salvaged from St Michael Queenhithe, including the fine carved pulpit (with wig-peg), the choir stalls, and a wrought-iron sword-rest.  The church registers date back to 1535, and are the oldest in England.

The recurring stylised scallop motif, for example above the doorway, on the clock above the doorway, and on the parish boundary markers, is in allusion to the sea-shells carried by pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where St James’s bones were miraculously discovered some 800 years after his death (the church  being the customary point of departure for pilgrims leaving from London).

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.

Another in the series on “historic sites on the “Thames Path” walk …

Deptford  was first recorded in 1293 as Depeford, meaning deep ford (across the River Ravensbourne, a tributary of the Thames).

The ford, and the trackway leading to and from it, had almost certainly been in existence in the pre-Roman period, and became incorporated into Watling Street in the Roman.

By Medieval times, a small village had sprung up here, on what had by then become part of the pilgrimage route from London to Canterbury, and it was  referred to in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”, written in 1400.  The Battle of Deptford Bridge was fought here in 1497.

In later post-Medieval times, the former village  grew into a sizeable town, with strong and lasting links to the Royal Navy, and to maritime trade (including the iniquitous slave trade).  One of the Royal Naval Dockyards was built here in 1513, Trinity House in 1514 (the first master being Captain Thomas Spert of the “Mary Rose”), and the East India Company Yard in 1607.

In 1549, a mock naval battle was staged here for the entertainment of Edward VI; in 1581, Elizabeth I knighted Francis Drake here aboard his ship the “Golden Hind(e)”, recently returned from its successful circumnavigation of the globe; and in 1698 the Russian Czar Peter the Great stayed in John Evelyn’s house here in order to study the shipyards.

The area’s comparative prosperity began to decline in the eighteenth century, after the seventeenth-century rebuilding of Chatham Dockyard, which was more accessible to ocean-going shipping, being situated in the Thames estuary, some twenty-five miles further downriver.

The decline continued into the nineteenth century, as evidenced by William Booth’s “Poverty Maps”, and was accelerated by the bombing of the Blitz of the Second World War in the twentieth, but is now in the process of being reversed by regeneration.

Deptford was historically part of the county of Kent, but since 1965 has been officially part of Greater London.

Church of St Nicholas

The church of St Nicholas was originally built at least as long ago as the twelfth century, and subsequently rebuilt in the fourteenth or fifteenth century and again, partly through the benefaction of the East India Company,  in the late seventeenth,  around 1697, only to be badly damaged in the Blitz of the twentieth.  The fourteenth- or fifteenth- century tower still stands.

The poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe – he of the “mighty line” – is buried in the churchyard, having been murdered in a  nearby tavern in 1593.  There are also a number of surviving post-Medieval memorials in the interior, including those to Sir Richard Browne of Sayers Court (d. 1604), who was John Evelyn’s father-in-law, and to other members of both Browne’s and Evelyn’s families; and to Jonas Shish (d. 1680) and his sons  Michael (d. 1685) and John (d. 1686), all of them Master Shipwrights.  And a late seventeenth-century carved wooden panel of “Ezekiel in the Valley of the Dry Bones” that has been attributed to Grinling Gibbons, who is known to have once lived and worked nearby.

Nicholas is the patron saint not only of children but also of mariners and fishermen (and of those wrongly condemned).

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 Helen Bishopsgate (“S. Elen” on sixteenth-century “Agas” map/Map of Early Modern London) was originally built as a parish church at least as long  ago as 1010, and subsequently rebuilt to incorporate  a – Benedictine – nunnery  church in 1210, and  extended and embellished between the fourteenth and early seventeenth  centuries (the nunnery was suppressed in 1538, whereupon its buildings and land were given to Thomas Cromwell’s adopted son Richard Wyllyams, who sold them  to the Leathersellers’ Company).  The original construction of the church made use of much Roman dressed stone and tile, most likely sourced  either from a   Roman building  that once stood on the site, or from the city wall that once stood a short distance away.  The dedication to Helen is interesting, as she was the mother of the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine.

It was undamaged by the Great Fire of 1666, although nonetheless requiring to be restored in 1893, …

… only to be damaged by IRA bombs in 1992 and 1993,  and restored again in 1994-5.

The church is dubbed “The Westminster Abbey of the City” because of its  beauty and of the richness of its memorials.

The exterior is substantially surviving early thirteenth-century, and in the Early English Gothic style, although  both  west front doors are later replacements, …

… and the porch housing the south side door is early seventeenth-century, and in the Renaissance style.

In the interior, the arcade separating the former nuns’ quire from the nave dates to 1475; …

… the nuns’ squint, built into the monument to Johane Alfrey, to 1525.

The carved wooden figure of a beggar supporting the poor-box,  the intricately carved and panelled  pulpit, and the south doorcase all date to the first half of the seventeenth century;  the inscribed wooden sword-rest to 1665.

The alabaster effigies of Sir John de Oteswich and his wife, salvaged from the church of St Martin Outwich, date to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, …

… and numerous other monuments to the fifteenth to seventeenth, including those of Sir John Crosby (d. 1476), …

… Sir William Pickering (d. 1574), …

… Sir Thomas Gresham (d. 1579), …

… and Martin Bond (d. 1643), …

… together with some brasses with their “superstitious inscriptions” deliberately defaced by Puritans in 1644.

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 Gregory by St Paul’s (“St Gregory” on “Map of Medieval London”) was originally built sometime before 1010, when the bones of the martyred St Edmund, King and Martyr, were  brought here from East Anglia so as to be safe from Viking raiders (they were later returned).  It was subsequently rebuilt after a fire in 1087, and  thereafter occasionally used for services ordinarily conducted in St Paul’s when the cathedral  itself was out of commission, as in 1561 (“[S]erves at Saint Gregore Chyrche be-syd Powlles … tyll Powlles be rede made”).

The church was then restored at considerable expense by its parishioners in 1631-2 and 1637, only to – controversially – demolished and rebuilt by Inigo Jones in 1641, as part of his redesign of the west front of St Paul’s  (according to one source, it was Archbishop Laud who ordered its  demolition).  It is shown abutting the south-west tower on the above engraving.

My eleven-times Great Uncle and Aunt, John and Frances West, were married in the church in the February of 1666 (Frances’s first husband, Robert Mickell, having died of the  Plague  the previous year).  It burned down in the Great Fire of the September of 1666, and was not rebuilt again afterwards, its parish merging  with that of St Mary Magdalen Old Fish Street.

Nothing  now remains of the church, whose former site is now occupied by the statue of  Queen Anne in front of St Paul’s.  Some church records survive, though, in the Guildhall Library.

Gregory was the Pope responsible for sending Augustine to England to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity   in 597.

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 George Botolph Lane (not individually identified on sixteenth-century “Agas” map/Map of Early Modern London) was originally built at least as long ago as the twelfth century, being referred to in a deed of 1180 (as “St. George’s in Estchepe”).  It was renovated in the late fourteenth century, in 1360, and again in the early seventeenth, in 1627.  Adam Bamme, Mayor of London, died in office in 1397, and was buried in the church  (whereupon Dick Whittington was appointed to succeed him as Mayor).  Many of the church’s monuments were, as Stow put it, “well preserved from spoil” (during the Reformation of the mid-sixteenth century).

The church burned down in the  Great Fire of 1666, and was subsequently rebuilt by Wren in 1671-6, using material from “Old  St Paul’s”, only to be allowed to fall into disrepair, and declared an unsafe structure and demolished in 1904, when the parish was merged with St Mary-at-Hill.

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

Essentially nothing now remains of it  at its former site, other than the name, which lives on in that of St George’s Lane, …

… and parish boundary markers in  Botolph Alley and on Pudding Lane.  Two seventeenth-century chairs salvaged from the church survive, in St Margaret Pattens.

George was martyred in the fourth century, and made the patron saint of England in the fourteenth.  Surprisingly, this was the only church in the City of London ever dedicated to him.

The first in an occasional series on historic sites on the “Thames Path” walk …

Woolwich was first recorded in 918 as Uuluuich, from the Old English wull, meaning wool, and wic, probably in this context referring to a riverside trading settlement (note, though, that there is also evidence of habitation here  in the earlier – late seventh- or early eighth- century – Anglo-Saxon, Roman and even prehistoric periods).  From the tenth century to the twelfth, it was ruled by the Abbots of St Peter’s Abbey in Ghent, who were given it by Alfred the Great’s daughter Aelfryth.  Woolwich remained a comparatively small rural settlement throughout the remainder of the Medieval period, but burgeoned into an important naval and military base and industrial town in the post-Medieval. Its fortunes began to decline in the twentieth century, after the naval and military bases ceased operations, although it has been undergoing something of  a regeneration in recent years.  Nominally part of Kent throughout much of its history, it is now part of the London Borough of Greenwich.

Woolwich Dockyard was originally founded here by Henry VIII in 1512, and remained operational  for nearly four centuries, during which time a  number of historically important ships were built here, including the “Henry Grace a Dieu” or “Great Harry” (in 1514), the “Prince Royal” (in 1610),  the “Sovereign of the Seas” (in 1637), the “Royal Charles” (in 1655), the “Dolphin” (in 1756), and the “Beagle” (in 1820).  It  was finally decommissioned  in 1869.  The oldest surviving building is the Dockyard Office, dating to 1783-4 (which it is now known as the Clock House).  Some associated structures also survive, both in Woolwich and in  the Woolwich Dockyard Estate in North Woolwich (i.e., on the north bank of the Thames).

Woolwich Arsenal was originally founded here in 1671, and remained operational for nearly three centuries (i.e., throughout  the most important period of the growth of the British Empire, and both World Wars).  It was finally decommissioned in 1967.   The oldest surviving buildings are the Royal Brass Foundry, dating to 1716-17, and the Beresford Gate, the entrance to the Gun Machining Factory, dating to 1717-20.  The football club now known as the Arsenal was originally founded here – as   Dial Square – in 1886.  It changed its name in 1904, and relocated north of the river to Highbury in 1913.

The church of St Mary Magdalene was built in 1727-39, on or near  the site of an earlier   church, as one of the “fifty new churches” commissioned by Act of Parliament in 1711.  The interior contains a stained-glass window commemorating the seven hundred souls lost in the sinking of the paddle steamer “Princess Alice” in a collision at Tripcock Point in nearby Thamesmead in 1878.

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 Gabriel Fenchurch  (“Fen church”  on sixteenth-century “Agas” map/Map of Early Modern London) was originally built sometime before 1291, being mentioned in Pope Nicholas IV’s “Taxatio Ecclesiastica” of that year as “Omn Scor’ de Fanch’” (All Saints), and also being known as S. Mary’s until 1517, when it became known as S. Gabriel’s.   As Stow has it, the suffix probably alludes to “fenny or moorish ground, so caused by means of this bourne which passed through it”.  Rather wonderfully, what is now known as Langbourn Ward was once known as “Langborne Ward and Fennie About”.  In 1603, the church featured in the pageant commemorating the accession to the throne of James I, Ben Jonson noting  that at that time it was decorated to look like “the side of a Citie; … with houses, towers and steeple in perspective”.  It was enlarged in 1631.  Samuel Pepys visited what he described as “the little church in the middle of Fenchurch Street” in 1665, where were “very few people”.

The church burned  down in the Great Fire of 1666, and was never rebuilt, and the parish was merged with that of St Margaret Pattens.

A Corporation “Blue Plaque” marks its former site.

The site of the past churchyard is in the present Fen Court.  Benedict Spinola, a prominent Genoese banker, was buried in the choir of the church after he died of the plague  in 1580.

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 Vedast alias Foster  (shown at southern end of “Forster lane” on sixteenth-century “Agas” map/Map of Early Modern London) was originally built at least as long ago as the thirteenth century, and possibly as long ago as the twelfth.  According to Wilberforce Jenkinson, “it seems to have been newly rebuilt in the beginning of the sixteenth century”, and,  “[i]n 1614, … was repaired and enlarged”.

The church was badly damaged, although not completely destroyed, in the Great Fire of 1666.  It was subsequently substantially rebuilt by the parish and by the Rebuilding Commissioners between 1669-72, incorporating parts of the surviving Medieval fabric, most notably the south wall, as revealed by recent restoration, and the tower.   It was further  remodelled by Wren between 1695-1712, when the old tower was taken down and a new one, with a spire, put up.  The spire has a distinctive obelisk-like design reminiscent of that of St Luke, Old Street, built by Hawksmoor.

It was then  gutted by German incendiary bombs during the so-called “Second Great Fire of London” on the night of 29^th December, 1940, and was marked  in magenta on the London County Council’s “Bomb Damage Map”, meaning that it was considered “seriously damaged”, but “repairable at cost”.

It was restored between 1953-63 by Stephen Dykes Bower, with stained glass windows by  Brian Thomas.

The richly-carved pulpit was salvaged from All Hallows Bread Street, the seventeenth-century organ from St Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange, the eighteenth-century reredos from St Christopher-le-Stocks, and, among other items, the seventeenth-century communion table from St Matthew Friday Street.

Vedast was Bishop of Arras in France in the sixth century.