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.
All Hallows-on-the-Wall (“28” on sixteenth-century “Agas” map/Map of Early Modern London) was originally built around 1120.
The church was undamaged in the Great Fire of 1666. My distant ancestor Simon West, was married here, for the third time, in 1677.
The church was subsequently rebuilt by George Dance the Younger in 1765-67, and further modified in the late nineteenth century. The rebuilt church had to be restored twice in the twentieth century, after sustaining bomb damage during both the Second World War of the early part, and the IRA terror campaign of the late.
The font was salvaged from St Mary Magdalen, Old Fish Street.
Of the 97 parish churches within the walls of the City of London at the time of the Great Fire of 1666, only 8, namely, All Hallows Barking, All Hallows Staining, St Alphage, St Andrew Undershaft, St Ethelburga, St Helen, St Katharine Cree, and St Olave Hart Street, survived, and still survive, with at least some pre-Great Fire structures standing, above ground (*).
