All Hallows by the Tower
Oldest Church
SHAMEFULLY ISOLATED ON Tower Hill, between a busy road and an appalling modern shopping precinct, is THE OLDEST CHURCH IN LONDON, All Hallows by the Tower. It was founded in 675, as a chapel of the Great Abbey of Barking, and hence is sometimes known as All Hallows Barking. Inside, a 7th-century Saxon arch containing recycled Roman tiles stands at the south-west corner, THE OLDEST SURVIVING PIECE OF CHURCH FABRIC IN LONDON.
Half-way down the stairs to the medieval Undercroft is a tiny, barrel-vaulted chapel of bare, crumbling stone, dedicated to St Clare. Though only yards away from the uproar of Tower Hill it is one of the most peaceful places in London to sit and think. On entering the Undercroft you can actually walk on a remarkably well-preserved section of tesselated Roman pavement laid down here in the 2nd century. At the east end in the Undercroft Chapel is an altar made of stones from the Templar church of Athlit, in Israel, and brought back from the Crusades. Recesses in the walls hold boxes filled with the ashes of the dead. Charles I’s Archbishop, William Laud, was buried in a vault in this chapel for over 20 years after his beheading in 1645. At the Restoration his body was moved to St John’s College, Oxford.
In 1535 the bodies of St Thomas More and Bishop Fisher were brought into the church after their execution at the Tower for refusing to sign Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy.
LANCELOT ANDREWES (1555–1626), the scholarly Bishop of Winchester, was baptised at All Hallows in 1555. He was the last occupant of Winchester Palace in Southwark and is buried in Southwark Cathedral.
In 1650 some barrels of gunpowder that were being stored in the churchyard exploded, destroying some 50 houses, badly damaging All Hallows and causing many fatalities. In 1658 the church tower was rebuilt, THE ONLY EXAMPLE OF WORK CARRIED OUT ON A CHURCH IN THE CITY DURING THE COMMONWEALTH (1649–60).
In 1644 WILLIAM PENN, the founder of Pennsylvania, was baptised at All Hallows. Twenty-two years later in 1666 Penn’s father, Admiral William Penn, saved All Hallows from the Great Fire of London by ordering his men from the nearby naval yards to blow up the surrounding houses as a fire break. Samuel Pepys climbed ‘up to the top of Barking steeple’ to watch the fire and there witnessed ‘the saddest sight of desolation’ before he ‘became afeard to stay there long and down again as fast as I could’.
The following year, 1667, JUDGE JEFFREYS, James II’s notorious ‘hanging judge’, was married at All Hallows. In 1797 JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, later to become 6th President of the United States, married Louisa Catherine Johnson, daughter of the US consul in London, in All Hallows.
From 1922 to 1962 the Vicar of All Hallows was the REVEREND PHILIP ‘TUBBY’ CLAYTON who, as an Army chaplain in 1915, ran a rest-house and sanctuary for soldiers of all ranks at Poperinge in Belgium. It was named Talbot House in memory of Lieutenant Gilbert Talbot, brother of Army chaplain the Revd Neville Talbot who had set up the rest-house. Talbot House became known by its signals code name of TOC H. After the war Clayton fostered the spirit and intent of Talbot House through the Toc H movement and encouraged the setting up of Toc H branches in cities across Britain.
Among the surviving treasures of All Hallows are a wonderful collection of medieval brasses, a rare 15th-century Flemish triptych and what many regard as THE FINEST WOOD CARVING IN LONDON, a font cover carved in lime-wood by Grinling Gibbons in 1682.
St Olave Hart Street
‘… a country church in the world of Seething Lane’
SIR JOHN BETJEMAN
ACROSS THE ROAD from All Hallows, at the top of Seething Lane, is the mainly 15th-century church of St Olave Hart Street, described by Samuel Pepys as ‘our own church’. In 1660 he had a gallery built on the south wall, with an outside stairway leading from the Navy Office in Seething Lane, where he worked, so that he could go to church without getting rained on. The gallery is gone but there is a memorial to Pepys marking where it used to be. Pepys’s home was also in Seething Lane, and it was while living here that he wrote his diaries. His next-door neighbour was Admiral William Penn (see All Hallows). In 1669 Pepys’s beloved wife Elizabeth died of a fever at the age of 29, and he commissioned a marble bust of her to be placed on the north wall of the sanctuary, where he could see it from his pew. On his own death in 1703 Pepys was buried alongside his wife in the nave.
Font cover by Grinling Gibbons in All Hallows
In the tower there was a memorial, damaged in the blitz, to Monkhouse Davison and Abraham Newman, whose grocery business in Fenchurch Street sent out the tea that was seized and jettisoned in the Boston Tea Party in 1773, catalyst for the American War of Independence.
St Olave was the Norwegian King Olaf who helped Ethelred the Unready to pull down London Bridge in 1014. A church was built here in his memory not long after his death in 1025. The present St Olave’s dates mainly from 1450 and was one of the few London churches to escape the Great Fire in 1666. It was damaged in the Blitz, but sensitively restored in the 1950s.
A plaque in the churchyard informs us that MOTHER GOOSE was laid to rest there in 1586. In 1665 many of the victims of the Great Plague were buried in the churchyard, including Mary Ramsay, who is said to have brought the Plague to London. No doubt in reference to this, a set of skulls are carved in stone above the gateway to the churchyard, which inspired Charles Dickens to refer to St Olave’s in The Commercial Traveller as St Ghastly Grim.
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EC3 SOUTH
The heart of Richard I (the Lionheart) is said to be buried somewhere in the north part of the churchyard of All Hallows by the Tower, beneath a chapel built there by Richard in the 12th century. The chapel is long gone.
FENCHURCH STREET STATION, one of four stations to feature on the Monopoly board, opened in 1841, and was THE FIRST RAILWAY STATION TO BE LOCATED WITHIN THE CITY OF LONDON. It was the location of THE FIRST RAILWAY BOOKSTALL IN THE CITY, operated by William Marshall. Fenchurch Street Station is the only central London station not to have its own underground link. A clothing brand, Fenchurch is named after it.
ST MARGARET PATTENS on Eastcheap gets its name from ‘pattens’, a type of shoe that was made in the lane that runs by the side of the church. It was burned down in the Great Fire and rebuilt by Christopher Wren. Inside are THE ONLY TWO CANOPIED PEWS FOUND IN ANY WREN CHURCH. One of them has Wren’s initials ‘CW 1686’ carved on the ceiling of the canopy, indicating that this is where he sat when attending services here.
The main body of the church of ST DUNSTAN IN THE EAST on Idol Lane was destroyed in the Blitz, but the shell remains and has been turned into a charming garden, often described as the most beautiful public garden in the City, an oasis of peace for City workers wanting a quiet place to sit. The magnificent Gothic Wren tower of 1697 has survived hurricanes and bombs and now houses a small health clinic at the base. It is topped with a crown, similar to that above St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh.
THE OLDEST ANNUALLY CONTESTED SPORTING EVENT IN BRITAIN, THE DOGGET’S COAT AND BADGE RACE, is a 4-mile (7.2 km) rowing race from London Bridge to Chelsea. It was established in 1715 by Thomas Doggett, an Irish actor and manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, as an incentive for apprentice watermen. The contestants are drawn from the Watermen and Lightermen’s Company, and the prize is a scarlet coat, a silver badge and a special lunch held at the Fishmongers’ Hall in the winner’s honour.
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ALDGATE – ST HELEN’S – LEADENHALL – CORNHILL – ROYAL EXCHANGE
The Royal Exchange – Britain’s first specialist commercial premises
St Botolph Aldgate
Oldest Organ
ALDGATE WAS THE City’s easternmost gate, and Geoffrey Chaucer had lodgings above the gatehouse for several years while Comptroller of Customs in the 1370s and 80s.
Marooned on a traffic island nearby, at the end of Houndsditch, is St Botolph Aldgate, built in 1744 by George Dance, who built the Mansion House. There has been a church here for over 1,000 yea
rs, situated just outside the ‘ald’ gate. There are three other St Botolph’s in the City, all beside gates (Billingsgate, Aldersgate and Bishopsgate), because St Botolph was regarded as a saint for travellers. Botolph gave his name to Boston in Lincolnshire (Botolph’s Town) and hence Boston, Massachusetts.
If the environs of the church are uninspiring, the interior of St Botolph’s is breathtaking. Remodelled at the end of the 19th century by John Francis Bentley, architect of Westminster Cathedral, the plasterwork and carving on the ceiling and galleries are rich and decorative, and there are cornices of angels holding shields of city companies. The whole effect should be too much, but somehow it works, filling the church with light and energy.
The organ in the west gallery is by one of the two great 17th-century organ-builders, RENATUS HARRIS (the other was Father Smith), and was given to the church in 1676, making it THE OLDEST CHURCH ORGAN IN LONDON.
The most poignant and unexpected monument in the church is a wall tablet commemorating one of the world’s great inventors, WILLIAM SYMINGTON (1763–1831), the Scottish engineer who built the world’s first steamboat and took the poet Robert Burns for a ride in it, on Dalswinton Loch in Scotland in 1788. ‘Dying in want he was buried in the adjacent churchyard March 22nd 1831,’ says the tablet. It seems almost inconceivable that this brilliant man who contributed so much to the world should have died poor and alone so far from home.
DANIEL DEFOE was married at St Botolph’s in 1683.
St Helen’s, Bishopsgate
Westminster Abbey of the City
ST HELEN’S, THE largest surviving church in the City, stands in a quiet, shady courtyard far removed in both looks and atmosphere from the temples of commerce that surround it. One of the few City churches to survive the Great Fire and the Blitz, it retains a pleasingly medieval appearance on the outside, despite being damaged by IRA bombs in 1992 and 1993. At the west end there is a fine bell turret perched between two big windows, both 400 years old.
Helen was the mother of the Emperor Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, who is linked with the original church, built here in the 4th century on the site of a pagan temple. St Helen’s is unique in the City in that it possesses two parallel medieval naves, one belonging to the original parish church, the other, on the north side, to a Benedictine nunnery founded here in 1204 – this is THE ONLY BUILDING FROM A NUNNERY TO SURVIVE IN THE CITY.
The interior of the church is a medieval treasure trove, for St Helen’s contains MORE MONUMENTS THAN ANY OTHER CHURCH IN LONDON EXCEPT WESTMINSTER ABBEY – hence its title ‘the Westminster Abbey of the City’. The array includes the tomb chest of SIR THOMAS GRESHAM (c.1517–79), wealthiest of the Elizabethan merchants and founder of the Royal Exchange, and the altar tomb of SIR JOHN CROSBY, who was buried here in 1475. He was the owner of the tallest house in London, the magnificent Crosby Hall on Bishopsgate, which was demolished in 1908 and removed to Chelsea. There is also a depiction of William Shakespeare in one of the few surviving sections of stained glass. Shakespeare is recorded as living in the parish in 1597 and was obviously familiar with Crosby Hall as he uses it as a setting for the plottings of the hunchback Duke of Gloucester in Richard III.
After the IRA bombs of 1992 and 1993 St Helen’s was restored by the neo-classical architect QUINLAN TERRY.
St Helen’s Place
Try Saying Leathersellers Quickly Three Times
NEXT DOOR, REACHED from Bishopsgate through noble iron gates, is one of the most unusual and attractive office blocks in the City, ST HELEN’S PLACE. Redesigned in the 1920s for the HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY, who had their offices here, it consists of a short, cobbled street surrounded on three sides by smart, neo-classical style buildings reminiscent of Paris. Presiding over the grand Bishopsgate façade is a Hudson’s Bay Company beaver running along the copper weather-vane on top of a square turret and cupola. The whole block sits under the towering, futuristic bulk of the ‘Gherkin’, and the effect of this intriguing juxtaposition is quite startling.
ST HELEN’S PLACE is sited on nunnery land bought by the Leathersellers’ Company in 1543, at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and on the north side of the courtyard is the LEATHERSELLERS’ HALL. In shape it is a near perfect 38 ft (11.6 m) cube and possesses THE LARGEST AND HEAVIEST CRYSTAL CHANDELIER COMMISSIONED SINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR.
St Andrew Undershaft
Dance Around the Maypole
ST ANDREW UNDERSHAFT in St Mary Axe, a survivor of the Great Fire, is so called because of the maypole, taller than the steeple, that was put up outside the church in the 15th century. In 1517, on what became known as ‘Evil May Day’, City apprentices rioted against immigrants and foreign imports and the maypole was taken down and never used again.
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The Hudson’s Bay Company
Founded on a charter from Prince Rupert in 1670, the Hudson’s Bay Company is THE OLDEST CHARTERED TRADING COMPANY IN THE WORLD. It was given territory amounting to some 40 per cent of Canada and, in return for settling and developing that territory, it was given a monopoly of the region’s natural resources. It was THE LARGEST LANDOWNER IN THE WORLD for much of the 17th and 18th centuries and controlled the fur trade throughout much of North America. In 1970, on the 300th anniversary of the founding of the company, its headquarters were moved from London to Winnipeg and then Toronto in Canada. Today the legacy of the Hudson’s Bay Company is a number of department and clothing stores across Canada operating under a variety of different banners.
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Inside the church there is a monument to JOHN STOW (1525–1605), THE FATHER OF LONDON HISTORIANS, famed for his Survey of London which appeared in 1598. Every year a memorial service is attended by the Lord Mayor, who places a new quill into Stow’s hand and presents the old one to the child who has written the best essay on London. The artist HANS HOLBEIN, who drew the definitive portrait of Henry VIII, lived in the parish of St Andrew Undershaft and is buried here. In the south porch lobby there is a bell-shaped tablet commemorating FABIAN STEDMAN, the man who originated the art of change ringing and wrote the first ever book on the subject. He was buried here in 1715.
St Katharine Cree
A Stylish Mix
ST KATHARINE CREE in Leadenhall Street, another survivor of the Great Fire of 1666, is a 17th-century rebuilding of a 13th-century church and is unique among City churches in being a mixture of Gothic and classical styles. The vivid rose window at the east end is modelled on the one in old St Paul’s Cathedral and tells the story of St Katharine, an Egyptian princess who was martyred on a wheel at the age of just 18, early in the 4th century. The wheel was destroyed by a bolt of lightning from God and is the origin of the Katharine Wheel firework. Purcell, Wesley and Handel are all believed to have played on the Father Smith organ, since rebuilt by Willis in 1866 and Lewis in 1906. Father Smith (1630–1708) was one of the two leading organ-builders of the 17th century, along with Renatus Harris. There is a magnificent monument to Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, after whom Throgmorton Street is named. The father-in-law of Sir Walter Raleigh, he died in 1570. Buried under the altar is SIR JOHN GAYER, a 17th-century Lord Mayor of London who survived an encounter with a lion in the Arabian desert and in gratitude endowed the Lion Sermon, which is still preached annually on 16 October.
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Livery Companies
Most of London’s Livery Companies have their origins in the medieval City guilds, informal bodies made up of merchants or craftsmen, which were formed to look after the interests of their members and uphold the standards of their particular trade. They would apply for a Royal Charter which established the Company and enshrined its rights over trade, as well as allowing the privilege of wearing its own unique ceremonial robes known as a ‘livery’. Charters also gave the Companies the right to own property and many of them built Halls in which to conduct their business, where previously they would have met in taverns or private houses. There are 41 Livery Halls remaining in the City today, formi
ng a remarkable heritage of historic architecture and tradition.
In 1516 the Lord Mayor decided to rank the 48 Livery Companies that existed then in order of preference. The most senior companies were known as the ‘Great Twelve’:
Mercers
Grocers
Clothworkers
Fishmongers
Goldsmiths
Skinners
Merchant Taylors
Haberdashers
Salters
Ironmongers
Vintners
Drapers
The Skinners and the Merchant Taylors could not agree on their ranking and still take turns to occupy sixth and seventh places, an arrangement that gave rise to the expression ‘at sixes and sevens’.
At the time of writing there are 107 London Livery Companies, although the number is growing all the time. Today they function primarily as charitable organisations.
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Lloyd’s of London
From a Coffee Shop to a Coffee Machine
THE SILVER STEEL and glass LLOYD’S OF LONDON BUILDING at No. 1 Lime Street is perhaps the most controversial and talked-about structure in the City, even today, more than 20 years after its completion in 1986. It was designed by Richard Rogers in the ‘inside out’ style of his Pompidou Centre in Paris, with all the service pipes, ducts and lifts exposed on the outside, and broke new ground in the City by paying no regard to the traditional architecture of the buildings around it.
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