[This is the final of 10 articles briefly describing the 39
functioning historic Anglican churches in the City of London]
This is my final piece on the City Churches. I have written
10 articles each covering 4 churches, and since there are 39 recognised City churches
I stretched the rules to make it 40 by including the extra-diocesan Temple
Church, strictly a “Peculiar” belonging to two Inns of Court, but definitely
within the City. I will therefore describe St
Martin Ludgate Hill, St Bride’s Fleet Street, St Dunstan-in-the-West and The Temple Church.
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To get access to the West front of St Paul’s Cathedral you have to climb up
gentle Ludgate Hill past, in medieval times, Lud Gate and in the 19th and 20th
centuries an intrusive railway viaduct, thankfully recently removed.
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| St Martin Ludgate Hill |
There has been a church dedicated to St Martin here since 1174,
later rebuilt in 1437. It was consumed
in the Great Fire of 1666. The lead spire and fine portico of St
Martin was designed and placed by Wren and his assistant Robert
Hooke to complement the dome of his great cathedral.
The interior is tall and cruciform with a baptismal font inscribed
with a Greek palindrome. Many of the furnishings come from other, now
demolished, churches. There are more paintings than usual with two trompe d’oeil saintly images looking
like stone statues being particularly striking.
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Walking West down Ludgate Hill takes you into Fleet Street,
once home of almost all the national press and the haunt of journalists and
proprietors. Their bibulous and sulphurous lifestyle hardly stretched to
church-going but they adopted St Bride’s
Fleet Street as their very own,
a place to repent of their many sins.
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| The Steeple at St Bride's Fleet Street |
The church site is very ancient; supposedly a church was
founded by the Celtic missionary St Bridget in Saxon times. The church we now
see was built after the Great Fire by Wren in 1684 although he built the famous
tower later in 1703. The steeple is remarkable and a landmark: it seems to be
true that tiered wedding-cakes copy its design.
The church was gutted in 1940 in the Blitz and renovated to
a new design by Godfrey Allen with collegiate seating, lavish cream and gold
decoration and many memorials to editors, journalists and press barons.
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A little further up Fleet Street takes you to idiosyncratic St Dunstan-in-the-West. Its fine tower
and lantern dominate Fleet Street and are built in the Gothic manner. The
church also salvaged from its predecessor a splendid 17th century
clock, with wooden figures of giants striking bells within a wooden temple.
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| St Dunstan-in-the-West |
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| The Romanian Orthodox iconostasis |
The church is dedicated to St Dunstan, a very popular saint
in medieval England,
though later surpassed by St Thomas Becket. It has many 16th and 17th
century memorials retained from the earlier church and there is a strong
connection with the Hoare banking family whose head office stands opposite. Famous benefactors like Lords Northcliffe, Camrose and Rothermere are also
commemorated.
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My final church is the historic Temple Church
within the precincts of the Middle and Inner Temples,
the august Inns of Court where now barristers have their legal chambers.
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| The Temple Church off Fleet Street |
This magnificent church was consecrated in 1185 by the English
members of the Knights Templar. The Templars were an Order of soldier-monks
founded in 1118 to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land
at that time controlled by the European Crusaders. There were two other such
Orders, the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights of St John. The Templars
attracted the sponsorship of revered St Bernard of Clairvaux and the admiration
of the kings of France
and of Henry III, devout King of England.
The original church was entirely round, in careful imitation
of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem built on the spot where Christ
was said to be buried and the site of
the Resurrection. When King Henry III expressed a wish to be buried in the
church it was especially extended with the building in the 1230s of the Chancel,
when the King and Queen bequeathed their bodies to the church.
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| Effigies of Knights in the Round Church |
The Round
Church was built in the
Norman style with seats against the walls with sturdy carved Norman porticos and
capitals. The leading Templars were buried here notably the immensely powerful
William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, the original Earl Marshal. His effigy and
those of other unidentified Knights lie in the middle of the Round Church. The Chancel is built in the Early English
Gothic style and is a Hall
Church with its two
aisles the same height as the Nave.
With the loss of the Holy Land
to the Saracens in the late 13th century the Templars lost their rationale. Their wealth attracted the
cupidity of Philip the Fair of France and later Edward II of England: the
Order was suppressed in 1307 with trumped up charges of heresy. Many Knights
were burnt at the stake. Their property, including the Temple Church
was passed over to the Hospitallers, who rented it to two colleges of lawyers
who evolved into the Inner and Middle Temples. At the Dissolution Henry VIII
seized the church but a 1607 agreement with James I gave the church in
perpetuity to the two Inns of Court.
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| The Chancel of the Temple Church |
Since then the church was the centre of theological
controversy between Puritans and moderate Anglicans. but it has mainly become a
processional church for the legal profession and grandly claimed to
be “The Mother Church of the Common Law” Gutted by the Blitz, the church has
been sympathetically restored.
The Temple
Church features in The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown which
sold over 80m copies spinning a yarn about the Jesus bloodline, after his
“marriage” to Mary Magdalene, being perpetuated via the Templar Priory of Sion
and opposed by Opus Dei in the form of a fanatical albino priest! Pure hokum of
course, but great box-office for the Temple
Church and Rosslyn Chapel, near Edinburgh: Da Vinci Code fans can trivialise and
diminish all such places.
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| A Capital at the Temple Church |
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The City Churches suffered two catastrophes – the Great Fire
in 1666 and the Blitz in 1940-41. An immense effort was made to rebuild them
and later generations owe a debt of gratitude for this effort.
I hope my 10-part series has stimulated some readers to take
an interest in and even visit these 40 excellent churches.
SMD
3.04.13
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013
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