Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
City churches
The City is crowded with churches (
www.visitthecity.co.uk
) - well over forty at the
last count, the majority of them built or rebuilt by Wren after the Great Fire. Those par-
ticularly worth seeking out include
St Mary Abchurch
(Mon-Fri 11am-3pm; Cannon
Street;
MAP
) on Abchurch Lane, dominated by an unusual and vast dome fresco painted
by a local parishioner and lit by oval lunettes; the superlative lime-wood reredos is by
Gibbons. On Lombard Street,
St Mary Woolnoth
(Mon-Fri 7.15am-5.15pm; Bank;
MAP
) is a typically idiosyncratic creation of Nicholas Hawksmoor, one of Wren's pu-
pils, featuring an ingenious lantern lit by semicircular clerestory windows and a striking
altar canopy held up by barley-sugar columns.
St Mary Aldermary
on Queen Victoria
at Gothic, with fan vaulting in the aisles and a panelled ceiling in the nave; there's also a
café. Finally on Walbrook is Wren's most spectacular church interior after St Paul's,
St
columns are arranged in clusters around a central coffered dome, and the exquisite dark-
wood furnishings are again by Grinling Gibbons.
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
St Paul's.
MAP
The Blitz destroyed the area immediately to the north of St Paul's, incinerating all the book-
sellers' shops and around six million books. In their place a modernist pedestrianized piazza
was built, only to be torn down in the 1980s and replaced with post-classical office blocks in
Portland stone and a Corinthian column topped by a gilded urn. One happy consequence of
the square's redevelopment is that
Temple Bar
, the gateway which used to stand at the top
of Fleet Street, has found its way back to London after over a hundred years of exile in a
park in Hertfordshire. Designed by Wren himself, the triumphal arch, looking weathered but
clean, now forms the entrance to Paternoster Square, with the Stuart monarchs, James I and
Charles II, and their consorts occupying the niches.
