The title is a bit disingenuous. Before the Great Fire of 1666, the square-mile City of London had 107 churches and all of them therefore had to be no more than 250 yards from the city walls. That fire destroyed 86 of them along with 2/3rds of the city. Renaissance man Christopher Wren (34 years old at the time of the fire) led the design efforts to rebuild 51 of them along with his masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral. Fortunately, Wren lived to age 90 so he had enough time to get the work done. St. Paul's completed when he was 79 and eventually became his tomb. By then, his work had fallen out of favor and his critics probably thought burying him in St. Paul's was just desserts. (Some writers want all of their work burned at their death; do architects lie down in the crypts of their masterpieces?) Wren got the last laugh and his work set the standard for church construction pretty much until World War II destroyed much of his work. In many cases, restorers found Wren's plans and followed them religiously (the were building churches, after all), allowing them to remove all of the architectural impurities added through the years by zealous pastors trying to leave their mark on their churches.
Below is a map showing (with crosses) the location of some of the churches before the Great Fire:
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As the map shows, the entrance to the nave of St. Paul's is about 200 yards from the wall. Here's a view of its baroque entrance. Like any good cathedral, the church is designed as a Roman cross with its axis aligned to Jerusalem making the nave entrance face west:
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Below (left) is the same west entrance from about where the walls would be (perhaps the gateway of Ludgate) if they hadn't been torn down a few decades after St. Paul's rose from the ashes. At right is a view from the north side showing Wren and Robert Hooke's Bernini-inspired dome. The place is lucky to be there as the Germans specifically targeted it during the Blitz; bombs hit it twice including a time-delayed bomb that, if not quickly defused, would have completely destroyed St. Paul's once again.
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While we're on Wren (but otherwise drifting off our topic of churches), here's his Doric column dedicated to the Great Fire that gave him the chance to become the world's premier urban renewer:
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Londoners refer to this pillar as "the Monument." It's 202 feet high so if you toppled it in the right direction, it would fall exactly on the Pudding Lane bakery shop where the three-day fire began in 1666. (Do not try this!) Tallest in the world when it was built, the pillar's interior houses over 300 black marble steps that ascend to a copper flame and the cage at top, added in the 19th century to stop suicides. Its 40-foot base (above) displays an alto/bas relief by Danish sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber depicting King Charles II and the soon-to-be-king James II directing London's restoration. They wear togas, perhaps to make reference to Roman grandeur (rather than Belushian dissipation). For more on the allegory of this relief, click here. No longer showing are the words (removed in 1831) blaming Roman Catholics for the fire. (Long before Billy Joel, we might add.) Always the Renaissance man, the architect designed the column to conduct pendulum and other Wrenching experiments. Full disclosure: Many reputable sources believe that the monument was not designed by Wren at all, but by his assistant, the physicist and architect Robert Hooke. |
OK, we've segued pretty badly from our church theme. Here's one of the 50+ churches Wren designed after the fire:
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At right is St. Bride's of Fleet Street, the church of those journalists that still pray (prey?). It's not named St. Bride because of its wedding cake top, but rather for a contraction of the name of St. Bridget of Ireland. (In fact, wedding cakes were later designed to look like its spire.) This is probably the 8th church on this ancient worship site, going back at least to the 7th century Saxons. The Norman church in this spot held King John's parliament sessions. Wren designed this church in 1672 to replace the 15th century building destroyed by the Great Fire (even though the church had its own fire engine). It was one of the first churches rebuilt by Wren although he added the steeple later. Its Portland stone stood while German fire-bombs gutted the interior in 1940. Even though the conflagration melted its bells, somehow Wren's steeple stood. St. Bride's destruction gave archeologists seventeen years to examine the remains of the many churches below its foundation (and a Roman house as well). The crypt, sealed and forgotten once Londoners were forbidden to bury within the City after the Great Plague, now houses a museum. Local journalists and publishers paid for the restoration after WWII which was based upon Wren's original drawings, eliminating a lot of the superfluous modifications added through the ensuing years. Well before the modern British Press headquartered here, this has been the church of writers including Johns Dryden and Milton as well as Richard Lovelace. The first printing press in England with moveable type was housed next to St. Bride's, primarily because the clergy tended to live in this area. They made up the overwhelming majority of those who could read and were therefore the publisher's main customers. |
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Of course, other churches were erected much closer to London's city walls. Some, like All Hallows (All Saints to us Americans) were built with the city wall as one of their walls. At left is the perpendicular gothic St. Giles-without-Cripplegate shown across from one of the walls surviving bastion and moat. The "without" means outside the walls-- obvious from its position relative to the fortifications. (We'll talk about the Cripplegate on the "Other Gates" page but should mention that St. Giles was the patron of beggars and cripples but that has nothing to do with the "Cripplegate" area designation.) In general, the city walls stopped the fire and so this 1545 church survived that great 1666 devastation to be one of the few medieval churches in the City of London. Today St. Giles rises placidly among the Barbican Estate buildings that added over 2000 housing units to this area devastated by WWII German bombs. Those bombs also gutted St. Giles interior but it was restored from the 1545 plans. John Milton still rests here, justifying the ways of God to man.
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Another "wall" church is St. Anne and St. Agnes located almost on top of the Londinium fort walls:
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For the last 40 years, this church of Anglican heritage has been used by a diverse Lutheran congregation (including services in Swahili). Christopher Wren designed this unusual (for the City) Greek-cross shaped structure after the Great London Fire that spared only the previous church's spire. German incendiary bombs were not kind to it even as they exposed the Roman fort walls around it. Lutherans from around the world paid to restore it to Wren's vision, stripping the ornamentation added during the ensuing years.
Sick of churches? There are over forty churches left within the square mile City of London. Although not all of them are actives houses of worship, there's about 1 church for every 250 residents. We've seen several other churches in previous pages, click here to travel back to them:
St Peter in Chains (inside the Tower of London)
St. Botolph-without-Aldgate
St. Botolph-without-Bishopgate
We've got one more church to visit which we'll do next when we talk about John Wesley.
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