Month: January 2024

St Botolph without Aldersgate is one of the three remaining medieval churches dedicated to St Botolph in the City of London. It was also one of four churches erected at the City gates, symbolising St. Botolph’s role as the traditional patron saint of travellers before St. Christopher assumed the title. The church’s origins can be traced back to around 1050, with its first documentation appearing in 1291. Remarkably, it withstood the Great Fire of London. From 1788 to 1791, Nathaniel Wright led significant reconstruction, preserving only the old east wall—this effort aimed to fix structural damage and facilitate the adjacent street’s expansion.

This Georgian-era reconstruction introduced wooden galleries, a domed semi-circular apse, and intricate plasterwork alongside an organ installed in 1788 by Samuel Green. Despite these major changes, the church maintained its 16th and 17th-century memorials, including a notable baroque tribute to Sir John Micklethwaite, a physician knighted by Charles II. Integrating memorials from the 16th and 17th centuries within a primarily Georgian architectural framework reflects a profound respect for historical continuity. It bridges the past with the present and future congregations, honouring the contributions and spiritual paths of those who came long before us.

The Church of St Vedast Alias Foster, London

On Foster Lane, a short street running north from Cheapside in the City of London, stands a church whose name carries within it a compressed piece of linguistic history. Saint Vedast-alias-Foster takes its double title from a single source: Vedast, a Frankish bishop who died around 540 and whose name, passing through successive vernacular corruptions (Vastes, Fastes, Faster, Fauster, Forster) settled eventually in medieval English as Foster, so thoroughly that the lane itself was renamed after the saint in the thirteenth century and then renamed after the corruption, the original lost from the street but preserved in the church’s formal designation. There is only one other church in England still dedicated to Vedast, at Tathwell in Lincolnshire, which places the London foundation in a category of genuine rarity even by the standards of the City’s unusually eclectic calendar of medieval dedications.

Vedast’s significance in the early Frankish church rested partly on a single well-documented moment and partly on decades of institutional labour. Around 496, when Clovis I (c. 466–511), king of the Franks, was making his way to Rheims to receive baptism from Saint Remigius (c. 437–c. 533), Vedast accompanied him and helped prepare him for the ceremony. He was then appointed to the see of Arras and Cambrai and spent his episcopate rebuilding a church that prolonged disruption and invasion had reduced to near-desolation. The hagiographic tradition emphasises his patience and practical charity as a bishop, and his tomb at Arras became a pilgrimage site whose reputation spread across northern France and, more selectively, into England.

The foundation of the London church dates by tradition to around 1170, and the most plausible account associates it with the Flemish community then established in the City, possibly connected to a Flemish ancestor of Ralph d’Arras (d. after 1276), Sheriff of London in 1276; the Augustinian clergy of Arras, among whom the Vedast cult was particularly strong, have also been proposed. From at least the twelfth century the patronage of the church lay with the Prior and Convent of Canterbury, passing in 1352 to the Archbishop of that see, an arrangement that made Saint Vedast one of the thirteen ecclesiastical Peculiars of London, exempt from the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London. The medieval building accumulated additions over time: a chapel dedicated to Saint Dunstan was added in the fifteenth century, and altars to the Virgin and to Saint Nicholas followed in the sixteenth.

The Great Fire of London in September 1666 reached Foster Lane on its third day. The church was not entirely destroyed: the roof, pews, pulpit, and fittings were lost, but the walls were thought sufficiently survived that the parishioners undertook repairs and briefly reopened the building. It soon became clear, however, that the structure required more thoroughgoing attention, and Christopher Wren’s (1632–1723) office oversaw a full rebuilding completed between 1670 and 1673. Robert Hooke (1635–1703), Wren’s close colleague and the City Surveyor overseeing much of the post-Fire reconstruction, is also recorded as having been involved in the work, though the precise division of responsibility between the two men at this church remains imprecisely documented.

By the early 1690s structural problems had accumulated again, and the medieval tower, which had survived the Fire largely intact, was pulled down in 1694 and rebuilt between 1695 and 1698, possibly incorporating the lower medieval stages. The three-tier spire was added subsequently, between 1709 and 1712. Its three diminishing stages (the first concave, the second convex, the third an obelisk spire) form a composition of some sophistication in Portland stone. The attribution to Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661–1736) rests on his surviving correspondence with the churchwardens rather than on any extant drawings, and the scholarship has tended to treat it as probable rather than settled. The master mason Edward Strong the Younger (1676–1741) oversaw the construction and was responsible for the cherubs on the west front and bell tower and for the dove in glory sculpture at the east end of the south aisle. With the spire’s completion in 1712, Saint Vedast was probably the last of the post-Fire churches to reach its finished state.

The night of 29 December 1940 gutted the interior of Saint Vedast for the second time in three centuries. German incendiary raids reduced the roof, pews, and fittings to nothing, leaving the external walls, tower, and spire intact. A proposal by Hugh Casson (1910–1999) that Saint Vedast and several other damaged City churches should be preserved as open ruins was rejected, and the restoration begun in 1953 was entrusted to Stephen Dykes Bower (1903–1994), working under a Parochial Church Council that included the poet John Betjeman (1906–1984). Dykes Bower introduced collegiate-style seating, screened off the south aisle, and constructed new internal walls within the east and south faces to regularise the floor plan for a smaller modern congregation. A strong black and white terrazzo floor was laid. The plaster ceiling was modelled on Wren-period precedents and finished with gold leaf and aluminium, the gilding funded by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, whose hall stands a short distance along Foster Lane. The restoration was substantially complete by 1962.

Dykes Bower furnished the interior largely from City churches that had been demolished or had lost their congregations. The font and its cover, the latter attributed to Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721), came from Saint Anne and Saint Agnes on Gresham Street, a surviving Wren church that had ceded its furnishings; both were recovered by the organbuilder Noel Mander (1912–1994), who also rebuilt the organ from a derelict eighteenth-century instrument removed from a church in Fulham. The sword rest at Saint Vedast came from Saint Anne and Saint Agnes as well. The elaborately carved pulpit was made for All Hallows Bread Street, a Wren church demolished in 1876, not lost to bombing but long since gone from the City; it is among the finer pieces of post-Fire carved woodwork to survive in a City interior. The reredos behind the altar came from Saint Christopher-le-Stock in Threadneedle Street, demolished in 1781. The stained glass at the east end, depicting scenes from the life of Vedast, was made after the restoration by Whitefriars Glass, using opaque glass both to conceal the modern buildings behind and to correct the visual distortion caused by the non-perpendicular angle of the east wall. In the rectory courtyard, a carved stone head of Canon Mortlock, who led the parish through the restoration years, was made by Jacob Epstein (1880–1959); a painting by Hans Feibusch (1898–1998) depicting Jacob and the Angel hangs within the rectory itself.

References

Brooke, C. and Keir, G. (1975) London 800–1216: The Shaping of a City. London: Secker & Warburg

Downes, K. (1959) Hawksmoor. London: A. Zwemmer

Downes, K. (1988) The Architecture of Wren. 2nd edn. Reading: Redhedge

Farmer, D.H. (2011) The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. 5th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Harries, J. (2011) Stephen Dykes Bower. London: Merrell

Pevsner, N. and Cherry, B. (1997) The Buildings of England: London 1: The City of London. Revised edn. London: Penguin

Stow, J. (1603) A Survey of London. London: John Wolfe

Wood, I. (1994) The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751. London: Longman

Wren Society (1924–1943) The Wren Society, 20 vols. Oxford: Wren Society

Initially built around 1050, likely as a timber structure, St. Olaf Church was rebuilt in stone in the 13th century and then again in 1450. Despite surviving the Great Fire of London in 1666, it sustained considerable damage during the Blitz of 1941. The restoration efforts that followed blended historical Gothic elements with sophisticated Tudor and Baroque wall memorials while incorporating survived furnishings from other congregations. This approach preserved a connection to the church’s storied past.

Named after Olaf II Haraldsson (c. 995 – 1030), later canonised as Saint Olaf, the church and its London location is a testament to his enigmatic role in aiding King Æthelred II the Unready during the 1014 Battle of London Bridge against the Danes. The historical accuracy of Norwegian King Olaf’s involvement in the London liberation, primarily documented by Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson (1179 –  1241) in his Heimskringla saga, is debated due to its absence in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Nonetheless, the dedication of six medieval churches to Saint Olaf in London signifies his enduring legacy. Saint Olaf’s enigmatic blend of historical, religious, and mythological folk attributes has confounded historians over the centuries. The earliest traces of a liturgical cult of Olaf are found in England already in the 11th century with prayer service, for Olaf is found in the so-called Leofric collectar (c. 1050) in Exeter Cathedral. This English cult seems to have been short-lived though

Located behind the Bank of England, St Margaret Lothbury was first recorded in 1185. Rebuilt in 1440, it was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666 and reconstructed by Christopher Wren between 1683 and 1692. The top stage of the tower, possibly designed by Robert Hooke, was added in 1698–99. Probably the third church on the site, its slightly asymmetrical plan, with a slanted far wall, reflects the constraints imposed by neighbouring buildings during the final rebuilding.

Over the last two centuries, the church has acquired furnishings from several demolished Baroque churches in the area, giving it an exceptional collection of seventeenth-century woodwork. Notable among these are works attributed to the Dutch-English sculptor and carver Grinling Gibbons. The baptismal font, originally in St Olave, Old Jewry, was moved here after that church’s partial demolition in 1887 and is characteristic of Gibbons’ workshop style. The church also houses a rare choir screen — one of only two surviving in Wren churches — along with the tester above the pulpit, both brought from All Hallows the Great, Thames Street, in 1894 following its demolition. The screen is decorated with the Stuart royal arms and surmounted by a seventeenth-century German eagle donated by a member of the congregation. Paintings of Moses and Aaron, dating from around 1700 and formerly in St Christopher-le-Stocks, were added after that church’s demolition in 1781. The organ, made by George England, also came from St Olave, Old Jewry.

St Margaret Lothbury is among the few Wren churches to have sustained only minor damage during the Second World War.