The City Churches
BY JOHN BETJEMAN IN the London Museum, when it was at Lancaster House, there used to be a delightful dark tunnel of models of old London, including one of the Great Fire itself.' These blodels have lost their intimacy and character in the arid apple- green quarters of the new London Museum which is in the Puller rooms of Kensington Palace. But it is still possible, laY kneeling at the models so that the houses are at eye level, raimagine oneself back in the medieval City, where every ouse seemed to look like a cross between Staple Inn and venham and where there were 108 City churches.
With this picture of a walled city, with red roofs -and white Stone and many turrets and a wide, slow-flowing Thames, held pp from the sea by the sluice of waters under London Bridge, 4.!ave Kensington and go to Aldersgate Street. By going under the arch of the Star Inn in that street and turning left among tile parked motors, you can still come out into the country. gilence reigns and bracken and willow-herb and a few saplings Pow among grass which covers a multitude of basements. A footpath toward the Middlesex-looking tower of St. Giles's, Cripplegate, leads in this count0 quiet to some large remains of the City wall. And as you see this great wall stretching ruinously toWards Moorgate you can imagine yourself once More in the fields outside the ancient City. Though there are eight City churches which have survived, or at any rate partly survived, both the Great Fire and the German bombs, only two of them, I think, bring back medieval London—St. I3artholomew the Great and St. Ethelburga, Bishopsgate. The venerable and blackened Norman interior of St. Bartholomew's 16 not improved by cement vaulting in the aisles and by the Plethora of chairs, postcard tables, vases, brooms, ladders and other semi-sacred impedimenta of our dear old Church of England, and I really catch more of an idea of what the old • Churches of London before the Fire may have looked like from the humble little church of St. Ethelburga. Wren rebuilt fifty churches after the fire. Before the Germans came we had ourselves destroyed nineteen of these. The Germans completely gutted seventeen more Wren churches and there are now only fourteen with their roofs oil, and of these three are still shut to the public, which leaves us with eleven Wren churches open to us in the City, and precious indeed they are. Under the Archdeacon of London's far- !lighted plan for the City churches, many more will be opened later when they are repaired or rebuilt. Of those which survive for seeing today, I commend St. Benet, VaIPs .Wharf, which is Welsh and'inclined to be locked, St. „ ry-at-Hill, St. Magnus the Martyr, St. Margaret, Lothbury, at. Margaret Pattens, S. Peter, C„Qrnhill, and St. Stephen's, Walbrook, as being the most characteristic Wren churches,, comparatively unmolested by Victorian restoration.' St. Mary- at-Hill, which is nothing to look at outside and susrounded by a smell of fish at Billingsgate, has the most untouched interior of all. Here the box pews, ironwork sword-rests, great west gallery, with its rich organ case, the fine pulpit and sounding board, the carved altar and altar-piece, recall Georgian Lon- don when beadles would hit the charity thildren sitting in the gallery with their staves, when merchants lived over their shops and offices and pageboys carried the prayer books of rich widows before them as they walked to worship, There were more such unrestored churches in the City nearly forty years ago when I first knew it, for as a young boy I delighted to visit City churches, especially on a Sunday evening when single bells beat from moonlit steeples down gas-lit alleys, and choirboys would rush round corners through vestry arch- ways. I can remember the row of fish-tail gas lights all along the triforium of St. BartholOmew the Great; St. Magnus the Martyr, when it had box pews and seemed very dead, unlike the live and coloured place it is today; and St. Alban, Wood Street, with its green gas mantles and sparse congregation. In those days too, aged City Men would come down from their brick. Italianate houses in Highbury or Streatham to worship In the City church where their fathers had worshipped before them. It was always my hope on some dark night to find a church which had escaped all the guide books and was there still in its classic splendour, with candles reflected in polished oak and cedar, with a parson in a black gown and bands, a beadle and the court of a City Company, robed and carrying a mace and swords. Once I thought I really had found the destroyed Wren church of St. Matthew, Friday Street. Where Is the oratory of Prebendary Hine-Haycock, preaching to the ranks of Blue Coat boys, tier upon tier in the galleries of Christ Church, Newgate Street ? Where is the dome of St. Mildred, Bread Street, under which I sat in a high pew to hear the words of the Reverend Mr. Richardson-Eyre, who would come in from some comfortable suburb to preach at Evensong n Sunday evening ? Where is St. Stephen, Colemah Street, plainest,and most despised of Wren's churches ? Where e Evangelical raptures I enjoyed in St. Bride's ? Gone, gone, ad and bombed only their peaceful memory now part of e history of our beautiful City. Yet the bombing has done e service to Wren which makes up for the destruction which buildings and the commercial policy of the Church have none to his forest of steeples gathered round St. Paul's. If you tand at the corner of Wood Street near the back of Goldsmiths Hall, in morning light or at night when the moon is up and there ere is a faint red glow in the sky from the West End, you will ee what must be one of the most beautiful architectural sights n England. In the foreground withered willow-herb almost buries a pile of huge pink stones. Beyond this is Wren's exquisite stone steeple of St. Vedast, Foster Lane, less elaborate but more satisfying than his famous steeple of St. Mary-le-Bow, which stands quite near. Beyond St. Vedast you will see the mighty dome of St. Paul's and to the right the delicate and complicated silhouette of the north-west bell tower. And as you walk down Wood Street to Cheapside, St. Vedast's steeple will glide past them and the hollows in it will open to show the sky beyond. Here architecture does what all the bist architec- ture should do. It moves as you go past it and changes to make another and another and another perfect picture. I have left to the last those City churches built since the time of Wren and which architecturally are some of the best and, though I dare to say it, more impressive and inventive as interiors than those by Wren himself. I think the first indignation at vandalism I ever felt was over the destruction of the eighteenth-century brick church of St. Catherine Coleman, Fenchurch Street, which happened between the wars. In those days people could swallow Wren but nothing later. Georgian was thought little of and St. Catherine's was a com- plete untouched Georgian interior, with all its old woodwork. Since then, thank goodness, our appreciation has widened. But the Church has destroyed eight of the seventeen post-Wren churches in the City of London. Mercifully the Germans did little damage to three of the best, St. Mary Woolnoth, All Hallows, London Wall, and St. Botolph, Aldersgate. Hawks- moor's church of St. "Mary Woolnoth by the Bank, with its twin square towers, is surely one of the most brilliant solutions to an awkwardly shaped site one could hope to see. The windowless side walls are full of interest. The interior, with its top lights, though it is in fact small, seems majestic and enormous.
What is it that makes the City so different from all the rest of London ? Mostly I think the City is different because of its churches, and these are used today more than .ever, not just for concerts but A places in which to pray. If you go into the newly opened church of St. James's, Piccadilly. you will find plenty of people about, but they are most 'of them standing and admiring the ornament. If you go into a City church you will generally find someone on his knees.
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