Church sights in London
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Westminster Abbey
If you're one of those boring sods who boast about spending months in Europe without ever setting foot in a church, get over yourself and make this the exception. Not merely a beautiful place of worship, Westminster Abbey serves up the country's history cold on slabs of stone. For centuries the country's greatest have been interred here, including most of the monarchs from Henry III (died 1272) to George II (1760).
Westminster Abbey has never been a cathedral (the seat of a bishop). It's what is called a 'royal peculiar' and is administered directly by the Crown. Every monarch since William the Conqueror has been crowned here, with the exception of a couple of unlucky Eds…
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St Paul's Cathedral
Dominating the City with one of the world's largest church domes (around 65,000 tons worth), St Paul's Cathedral was designed by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire and built between 1675 and 1710. The site is ancient hallowed ground with four other cathedrals preceding Wren's masterpiece here, the first dating from 604. As part of the 300th anniversary celebrations, St Paul's underwent a £40 million renovation project that gave the church a deep clean.
The dome is famed for sidestepping Luftwaffe incendiary bombs in the 'Second Great Fire of London' of December 1940, becoming an icon of dogged London resilience during the Blitz. Outside the cathedral, to the north,…
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Temple Church
This magnificent church lies within the walls of the Temple, built by the legendary Knights Templar, an order of crusading monks founded in the 12th century to protect pilgrims travelling to and from Jerusalem. The order moved here around 1160, abandoning its older headquarters in Holborn. Today the sprawling oasis of fine buildings and pleasant traffic-free green space is home to two Inns of Court (housing the chambers of lawyers practising in the City) and the Middle and the Lesser Temple.
The Temple Church has a distinctive design: the Round (consecrated in 1185 and designed to recall the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem) adjoins the Chancel (built in 1240),…
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St Clement Danes
An 18th-century English nursery rhyme that incorporates the names of London churches goes: ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clements’, with the soothing final lines: ‘Here comes a chopper to chop off your head/Chop, chop, chop, chop, the last man’s dead!’ Isn’t that nice? Well, even though the bells of this church chime that nursery tune every day at 9am, noon and 3pm, this isn’t the St Clements referred to in the first line of the verse – that’s St Clements Eastcheap, in the City. But we all know that historical fact needn’t get in the way of a good story.
Sir Christopher Wren designed the original building in 1682 but only the walls and a…
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All Hallows-by-the-Tower
A church by the name All Hallows (meaning ‘All Saints’) has stood on this site since AD 675, and the best bit of the building today is undoubtedly its atmospheric Saxon undercroft (crypt). There you’ll find a pavement of reused Roman tiles and walls of the 7th-century Saxon church, as well as coins and bits of local history. Above ground it’s a pleasant enough church, rebuilt after WWII. There’s a copper spire (added in 1957 to make the church stand out more), a pulpit from a Wren church in Cannon St that was destroyed in WWII and a beautiful 17th-century font cover by the master woodcarver Grinling Gibbons. From April to September, free 20-minute church tours leave at…
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St Lawrence Jewry
To look at the Corporation of London’s extremely well preserved official church, you’d barely realise that it was almost completely destroyed during WWII. Instead it does Sir Christopher Wren, who built it in 1677, and its subsequent restorers proud, with its immaculate alabaster walls and gilt trimmings. The arms of the City of London can be seen on the north wall and the Commonwealth Chapel is bedecked with the flags of member nations. Free piano recitals are held each Monday at 1pm; organ recitals at the same time on Tuesday.
As the church name suggests, this was once part of the Jewish quarter – the centre being Old Jewry, the street to the southeast. The district…
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St Martin-in-the-Fields
The ‘royal parish church’ is a delightful fusion of classical and baroque styles that was completed by James Gibbs (1682–1754) in 1726. The church is well known for its excellent classical music concerts, many by candlelight, and its links to the Chinese community (mass is held in English, Mandarin and Cantonese).
A £36-million refurbishment, completed at the end of 2007, provided a new entrance pavilion, a wonderful new cafe that hosts jazz evenings once a week, a foyer, and several new areas at the rear of the church, including spaces offering social care to the Chinese community and homeless people.
Refurbishment excavations unearthed a 1.5-tonne limestone Roman…
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St Bride’s, Fleet Street
Rupert Murdoch might have frogmarched the newspaper industry out to Wapping in the 1980s, but this small church off Fleet St remains ‘the journalists’ church’ – William Caxton’s first printing press was relocated to the churchyard after his death in 1500. Candles were kept burning here for reporters John McCarthy and Terry Anderson during their years as hostages in Lebanon in the 1990s, and a plaque commemorates journalists killed in the Iraq war alongside even more recent memorials. St Bride’s is also of architectural interest. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1671, its add-on spire (1703) reputedly inspired the first tiered wedding cake. In the crypt there’s a…
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Chelsea Old Church
This church stands behind a bronze monument to Thomas More (1477–1535). More’s body is thought to be buried somewhere within the church; his head, having been hung out on London Bridge, is now at rest far away in St Dunstan’s Church, Canterbury. Original features in the church include the Tudor More Chapel. At the western end of the south aisle don’t miss the only chained books in a London church (chained, of course, to stop anyone making off with them).
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St James’s Piccadilly
The only church Christopher Wren built from scratch and on a new site (most of the other London churches are replacements for ones razed in the Great Fire), this simple building is exceedingly easy on the eye and substitutes what some might call the pompous flourishes of Wren’s most famous churches with a warm and elegant user-friendliness. The spire, although designed by Wren, was added only in 1968. This is a particularly sociable church; it houses a counselling service, stages lunchtime and evening concerts, provides shelter for an antiques market (10am to 5pm Tuesday) and an arts and crafts fair (10am to 6pm Wednesday to Saturday), has Caffé Nero attached on the side,…
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St Peter’s Church
This Norman church has been a place of worship for 1300 years and parts of the present structure date from 1266. It’s a fascinating place, not least for its curious Georgian box pews, which local landowners would rent, while the serving staff and labourers sat in the open seats in the south transept. Against the north wall of the chancel is the Cole Monument, depicting barrister George Cole, his wife and child, all reclining in Elizabethan dress – an unusual design for an English church. Of interest to Canadians, St Peter’s is the burial place of Captain George Vancouver, who was laid to rest here in 1798; his simple tomb is on the southern wall of the cemetery.
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Queen’s Chapel
This small chapel is where contemporary royals from Princess Diana to the Queen Mother have lain in their coffins in the run-up to their funerals. The church was originally built by Inigo Jones in the Palladian style and was the first post-Reformation church in England built for Roman Catholic worship.
It was once part of St James’s Palace but was separated after a fire. The simple interior has exquisite 17th-century fittings and is atmospherically illuminated by light streaming in through the large windows above the altar.
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All Souls Church
This delightful church, designed by John Nash (the man behind Trafalgar Square, Regent’s Street and Piccadilly Circus) features a circular columned porch and distinctive needle-like spire, reminiscent of an ancient Greek temple. Built from Bath stone, the church was very unpopular when completed in 1824 – a contemporary cartoon by George Cruikshank shows Nash rather painfully impaled on the spire through the bottom with the words ‘Nashional Taste!!!’ below it. It was bombed during the Blitz and renovated in 1951, and is now one of the most distinctive churches in central London.
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St Stephen Walbrook
Along Walbrook, past the City of London Magistrates Court, is St Stephen Walbrook, built in 1672. Widely considered to be the finest of Wren’s City churches and a forerunner to St Paul’s Cathedral, this light and airy building is indisputably impressive. Some 16 pillars with Corinthian capitals rise up to support its dome and ceiling, while a large cream-coloured boulder lies at the heart of its roomy central space. There is a modern altar by sculptor Henry Moore, cheekily dubbed ‘the Camembert’ by critics.
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Brompton Oratory
Also known as the London Oratory and the Oratory of St Philip Neri, this Roman Catholic church is second in size only to the incomplete Westminster Cathedral. Built in Italian baroque style in 1884, the impressive interior is swathed in marble and statuary; much of the decorative work predates the church and was imported from Italian churches. The incense-infused services are spellbinding, especially the Solemn Mass in Latin on Sundays (11am). Intriguingly the church was employed by the KGB during the Cold War as a dead-letter box. If you want to get married here, apply six months in advance. There are five daily Masses on weekdays, four on Saturday and seven on Sunday…
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St Andrew Holborn
This church on the southeastern corner of Holborn Circus, first mentioned in the 10th century, was rebuilt by Wren in 1686 and was the largest of his parish churches. Even though the interior was bombed to smithereens during WWII, much of what you see inside today is original 17th century, as it was brought from other churches.
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Christ Church Spitalfields
Diagonally opposite Spitalfields Market, on the corner of Commercial and Fournier Sts, is this restored church, where many of the area’s weavers worshipped. The magnificent English baroque structure, with a tall spire sitting on a portico of four great Tuscan columns, was designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and completed in 1729.
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St Alfege Church
Designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1714 to replace a 12th-century building, this glorious parish church features a restored mural by James Thornhill (whose work includes the Painted Hall at the Royal Naval College and St Paul’s Cathedral), a largely wood-panelled interior and an intriguing ‘Tallis’ keyboard with middle keyboard octaves from the Tudor period.
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St Mary Woolnoth
In the angle between Lombard and King William Sts, Nicholas Hawksmoor’s St Mary Woolnoth is recognisable by its distinctive twin towers. Completed in 1727, it is the architect’s only City church and its interior Corinthian columns are a foretaste of his Christ Church in Spitalfields.
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St George’s, Bloomsbury
Superbly restored in 2005, this Nicholas Hawksmoor church (1731) is distinguished by its classical portico of Corinthian capitals and a steeple that was inspired by the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. It is topped with a statue of George I in Roman dress.
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St Ethelreda
The crypt at the largely restored church of St Ethelreda, north of Holborn Circus, dates from about 1250.
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St Olave
Tucked at the end of quiet Seething Lane, St Olave’s was built in the mid-15th century, and restored in the 1950s. Most famous of those who worshipped at the church is Samuel Pepys, who is buried here with his wife Elizabeth. Dickens called the place ‘St Ghastly Grim’ because of the skulls above its entrance, but today it’s a lovely little spot.
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St Alban's
A Wren-designed church destroyed in WWII.
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