Back in London: The City

 Oranges and Lemons,

 say the bells of St Clements.

You owe me five farthings,

say the bells of St Martins.

     Thursday was even colder, with a bitter, searching wind and the sky by turns bright and overcast.  Not really a day for sight seeing, but you can hardly spend the day in your hotel room, warm though it is. So into the City for a brisk morning's walk between City churches - a mini church crawl. I concentrated my efforts in the western part of the City. I took the tube from St Pancras/King's Cross to Barbican, and walked south from there, through Smithfield (St Bartholomew the Great not yet open) to St Paul's, re-tracing in part a walk through the City I made back in 2021. A pause for refreshment in Paternoster Square, before plunging into that tight, atmospheric network of lanes between the Ludgate Hill and the dreadful Queen Victoria St, which effectively severs this part of the city from the river Thames.  

     I was vaguely heading for St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe, and the adjacent Wardrobe Place.  I came across the former almost by happenstance, standing at the end of a particularly dark and narrow alley. The church, which was gutted in the Blitz and restored by the architect Marshall Sisson (1887-1978), was originally the work of Sir Christopher Wren - one of his basilican planned churches; red brick and stone dressings and rather sombre.  His last City commission too.  The church is essentially free standing: to the s is a graveyard/garden, but to the n, and much more interesting and atmospheric, is a narrow passage between high walls. Sisson didn't make too bad job of the restoration, which included the walling-in of the aisles to form ancillary spaces.  Today its use is shared between the local Anglican parish and the Coptic church.  Standing there and thinking on the current condition of the Coptic church I felt deeply moved.  Nearby, hidden away in the dense urban fabric of this part of the City is the remarkable Wardrobe Place, a court built, post Great Fire, on the site of the King's Wardrobe. Not a giant article of furniture, but a sort of central store and supply for the King's household.

    Up the hill and over Ludgate to St Martins, a Wren church that escaped serious damage in WWII.  It is easy in today's City to forget the legends that surround it; Ludgate itself is associated with King Ludd, and St Martin with the supposed burial place of King Cadwallo, sometimes thought of refering to the Anglo-Saxon king Caedwalla (Brythonic name) and sometimes the Welsh king Cadwallon ap Cadfan - according to wiki that is.  But why the Brythonic element to both stories? The interior is atmospheric, more redolent of the smoky 19th century than Wren, but in need, I think, of restoration.  The altarpiece is original and rather fine, though it looks as it has been given a paint job at some point.  At the time I didn't quite notice the dove in the pediment - is it original or painted later? It looks a bit disconsolate.  Perhaps it is Georgian.  As we shall see in the next post there is a similar image of the Holy Spirit at St Vedast, Foster Lane, and, just outside the western boundary of the City in St Mary-le-Strand.  All evidence of a High Church Eucharistic theology of consecration (i.e. that it is the work of the Holy Spirit) that has largely disappeared from the Church of England.  Sadly.

     St Martin's forms part of the same Anglican parish as St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe.