Religious, Spiritual sights in London
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St Giles-in-the-Fields
Built in what used to be countryside between the City and Westminster, St Giles church isn’t much to look at but has an interesting history, while the area around St Giles High St had perhaps the worst reputation of any London quarter. The current structure is the third to stand on the site of an original chapel built in the 12th century to serve the leprosy hospital. Until 1547, when the hospital closed, prisoners on their way to be executed at Tyburn stopped at the church gate and sipped a large cup of soporific ale – their last refreshment – from St Giles’s Bowl. From 1650 the prisoners were buried in the church grounds. It was also within the boundaries of St Giles …
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All Hallows-by-the-Tower
All Hallows is the parish where famous diarist Samuel Pepys recorded his observations of the nearby Great Fire of London in 1666. 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 the WWII, a beautiful 17th-century font cover by the master woodcarver Grinling Gibbons, and some interesting modern banners. Free 20-minute church tours leave at 2pm each day. However, 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 …
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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 1678, and its subsequent restorers proud, with its immaculate alabaster walls and gilt trimmings. The arms of the City of London adorn the organ above the door at the western end. 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…
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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. A £36-million refurbishment project, completed at the end of 2007, provided a new entrance pavilion and foyer, and several new areas at the rear of the church, including spaces offering social care to London’s Chinese community and the many homeless people who rely on the church’s help. These are in addition to the main hall, where Mass and musical concerts are held in English, Mandarin and Cantonese, and the famous crypt cafe, where over 150 classical and jazz concerts are held each year, in candlelight.
Refurbishment excavati…
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Chelsea Old Church
This church stands behind a bronze monument to Thomas More (1477–1535), the former chancellor (and now Roman Catholic saint) who lost both his property and his head for refusing to go along with Henry VIII’s plan to establish himself as supreme head of the Church of England. Original features in the church include the Tudor More Chapel. 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 a long way away in St Dunstan’s Church, Canterbury. 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), including …
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St James’s Piccadilly
The only church Christopher Wren built from scratch and on a new site (most of the others were 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 his 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 6pm Tuesday) and an arts and crafts fair (10am to 6pm Wednesday to Sunday), has Caffé Nero attached on the side, as well as, what w…
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St Anne’s, Limehouse
There isn’t much to Limehouse, although it became the centre of London’s Chinese community – its first Chinatown – after some 300 sailors settled here in 1890. It gets a mention in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), when the protagonist passes by this way in search of opium. The most notable attraction here is St Anne’s, Limehouse. This was Nicholas Hawksmoor’s earliest church (1725) and still boasts the highest church clock in the city. In fact, the 60m-high tower is still a ‘Trinity House mark’ for identifying shipping lanes on the Thames (thus it flies the Royal Navy’s white ensign).
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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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All Souls Church
A Nash solution for the curving, northern sweep of Regent St was this delightful church, which features a circular columned porch and distinctive needlelike 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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Buddhapadipa Temple
A surprising sight in a residential neighbourhood half a mile from Wimbledon Village, this is as authentic a Thai temple as ever graced this side of Bangkok. The Buddhapadipa Temple was built by an association of young Buddhists in Britain and opened in 1982. The wat (temple) boasts a bot (consecrated chapel) decorated with traditional scenes by two leading Thai artists. Remember to take your shoes off before entering. To get to the temple take the tube or train to Wimbledon and then bus 93 up to Wimbledon Parkside. Calonne Rd leads off it on the right.
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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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St Nicholas Church
This late-17th-century church contains a memorial to playwright Christopher Marlowe, who was murdered in Deptford in a tavern brawl at the age of 29 in 1593 and may be buried here. The fight supposedly broke out over who was to pay the bill but it is generally believed that Marlowe was in the employ of the Elizabethan intelligence service. The skull and crossbones over the entrance is said to have been the inspiration for the Jolly Roger pirate flag.
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St Paul’s Church
The Earl of Bedford, the man who had commissioned Inigo Jones to design Convent Garden piazza, asked for the simplest possible church, basically no more than a barn. The architect responded by producing ‘the handsomest barn in England’. It has long been regarded as the actors’ church for its associations with the theatre, and contains memorials to the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Vivien Leigh. The first Punch and Judy show took place in front of it in 1662.
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Brick Lane Great Mosque
The best example of the changes in population that this area has experienced over the past several centuries is this house of worship on Brick Lane. Built in 1743 as the New French Church for the Huguenots, it served as a Methodist chapel from 1819 until it was transformed into the Great Synagogue for Jewish refugees from Russia and central Europe in 1898. In 1976 it changed faiths yet again, becoming the Great Mosque. Visits allowed outside prayer times.
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St Mary-le-Bow
Built in 1673 St Mary-le-Bow is famous as the church whose bells dictate who is – and who isn’t – a cockney; it’s said that a true cockney has to have been born within earshot of Bow Bells, although before the advent of motor traffic this would have been a far greater area than it is today. The church’s delicate steeple is one of Wren’s finest works and the modern stained glass is striking.
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Brompton Oratory
Also known as the London Oratory and the Oratory of St Philip Neri, this Roman Catholic church was built in the Italian baroque style in 1884. It has marble and statues galore, and counts Tony and Cherie Blair, Britain’s former ‘First Couple’, among its celebrity parishioners. There are five daily Masses on weekdays (including a Latin one at 6pm), four on Saturday, and nine between 7am and 7pm on Sunday.
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St Pancras Chambers
Its current rundown surroundings make it tempting to describe this Victorian Gothic masterpiece as the poor cousin of the Houses of Parliament. But it's an unusual building nonetheless. Today it constitutes part of St Pancras' train station and with the adjacent Eurostar Terminal due to have opened in late 2007, it's partly being redeveloped into the same thing George Gilbert Scott built it for in 1876 - a hotel.
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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 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 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). St Alfege was an archbishop of Canterbury, killed on this site by Vikings in 1012.
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St George-in-the-East
This church was erected by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1729 and badly damaged in the Blitz of WWII. All that now remains is a shell enclosing a smaller modern core. It was closed for a time in the 1850s when the vicar introduced what was considered ‘Romish’ (Roman Catholic) liturgy.
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Tyburn Convent
A convent was established here in 1903, close to the site of the Tyburn Tree gallows. The crypt contains the relics of some 105 martyrs, along with paintings commemorating their lives and recording their deaths. A closed order of Benedictine sisters still form a community here.
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St Mary Woolnoth
In the angle between Lombard St and King William St you’ll see the twin towers of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s St Mary Woolnoth, built in 1717. The architect’s only City church, its interior Corinthian columns are a foretaste of his Christ Church in Spitalfields.
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Lambeth Palace
The red-brick Tudor gatehouse located beside the church of St Mary-at-Lambeth leads to Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Although the palace is not usually open to the public, the gardens occasionally are; check with a tourist office for more details.
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St Paul’s Church
To the south of Albury St is this baroque church built in 1730. In the churchyard is the grave of Mydiddee, a native Tahitian who returned with Captain Bligh (of Bounty mutiny fame) on the HMS Providence and died in Deptford almost immediately in 1793.
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