Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
LONDON STONE
Bank may have a good claim to being the heart of the City, or perhaps Guildhall as the
administrative core, but London's real omphalos, its geomantic centre, is the
London Stone
, a
small block of limestone lodged behind an iron grille set low into the exterior wall of 111
Cannon St, at the corner of St Swithin's Lane. Whatever your reaction to this bizarre relic, it has
been around for some considerable time, certainly since the 1450 Peasants' Revolt, when the
Kentish rebel Jack Cade struck it, declaring himself “Lord of the City”.
St Mary Abchurch
Abchurch Lane, off King William St • Mon-Fri 11am-3pm •
!
Cannon Street
St Mary Abchurch
is
set in its own courtyard (the paved-over former graveyard), but
nothing about the dour red-brick exterior prepares you for Wren's spectacular interior,
which is dominated by a vast dome fresco painted by a local parishioner and lit by oval
lunettes, with the name of God in Hebrew centre stage. The lime-wood reredos,
festooned with swags and garlands, and decorated with gilded urns and a pelican,
is a Grinling Gibbons masterpiece.
11
Temple of Mithras
The remains of a
Temple of Mithras
were discovered beside the old stream of the
Walbrook in 1954 during the construction of an of
ce block on Queen Victoria
Street. Mithraism was a male-only cult popular among the Roman legions before the
advent of Christianity. Its Persian deity, Mithras, is always depicted slaying a cosmic
bull, while a scorpion grasps its genitals and a dog licks its wounds - the bull's blood
was seen as life-giving, and initiates had to bathe in it. The site is currently being
redeveloped once more - this time as Bloomberg's Norman Foster-designed European
headquarters - and the temple is due to be returned to its original site. In the
meantime, the reconstruction in the Museum of London gives you a good idea of
what the place was once like.
Bishopsgate to the Tower
Financial institutions predominate in the easterly section of the Square Mile, many of
them housed in the brashest of the City's new architecture.
Bishopsgate
, named after
one of the seven gates in the old City walls, is dominated by bombastic skyscrapers
such as the angular, glass-clad Broadgate Tower, at the northern end, Heron Tower,
halfway along, and the Pinnacle - which aims to be the City's tallest skyscraper, at the
southern end. The area's two most original architectural works are modest by
comparison: the groundbreaking
Lloyd's Building
and the unmissable
Gherkin
. hese,
plus the Victorian splendour of
Leadenhall Market
, the oldest
synagogue
in the
country, several pre-Fire churches and Wren's famous
Monument
to the Great Fire
make for an especially interesting sector of the City to explore.
Liverpool Street Station
Built in 1874
Liverpool Street
Station
stands on the site of the old Bethlem Royal
Hospital (or Bedlam), the infamous lunatic asylum, where the public could pay a
penny and laugh at the inmates. Liverpool Street is now the City's busiest terminus,
renowned for its vibrantly painted wrought-iron Victorian arches. The station's
Liverpool Street entrance features the
Kindertransport memorial
, erected in 2003 and
depicting some of the nearly ten thousand Jewish children who arrived at the station
from central Europe, without their parents, shortly before war broke out.
Adjoining Liverpool Street Station, to the west, are the tra
c-free piazzas
of the very
successful 1980s
Broadgate
complex.
Fulcrum
, Richard Serra's 55ft-high rusting steel
sheets, acts as a kind of gateway to the
Broadgate Circle
, whose arena is used as an
