Chapel of St Thomas on the Bridge

The Chapel of St Thomas on the Bridge was one of the most extraordinary places of worship England ever possessed: a two-storey Gothic chapel built into the very fabric of Old London Bridge, rising from a pier in the middle of the Thames, with one door opening onto the bridge street and another onto the river itself. Completed by 1209, dissolved at the Reformation in 1548, and finally swept away with the old bridge in 1832, it survives today only in records, engravings — and in the rhyme and imagination of every generation that has sung "London Bridge Is Falling Down".

Wooden bridges had crossed the Thames between Southwark and the City on this site since the Roman occupation; the last, of elm, was built about 1163 under Peter of Colechurch, priest of St Mary Colechurch in Cheapside. As the City boomed, the timber bridge proved inadequate, and in 1176 work began — again under Peter de Colechurch — on the foundations of a stone London Bridge, possibly at the instigation of Henry II, who levied a tax on wool, sheepskin and leather to help pay for it. The eleventh pier from the Southwark side was built as the largest of the nineteen, designed specifically to carry a chapel dedicated to Thomas Becket, the archbishop murdered by Henry's knights in 1170 and canonised within three years; the king who had done public penance for the crime now honoured the martyr at the heart of London's greatest public work. Bridge-building itself was considered an act of religious piety in the high Middle Ages, and bridge chapels were its natural ornament — but none matched St Thomas on the Bridge.

What the chapel looked like is known largely through a survey by Nicholas Hawksmoor, made while it still stood and published in 1736, from which George Vertue engraved views of the building as it appeared before its secular conversion. It was sixty feet long and twenty wide, built on two levels. The Upper Chapel, entered from the bridge street, rose forty feet above street level behind a plain façade with two doors and a pointed, mullioned window; within, fourteen clustered columns supported a lofty interior lit by eight great arched windows. The Lower Chapel — crypt or undercroft — was built into the pier itself, projecting sixty-five feet downstream, with a rib-vaulted ceiling twenty feet high and a pavement of black and white marble. It could be reached from the street, from the Upper Chapel by spiral stair, or — most remarkably — through a door in the pier opening onto the starling, the artificial island at the pier's base, so that fishermen and watermen could step from their boats directly into church. Both levels ended in three-sided eastern apses.

The chapel was founded before 1205 with two priests and four clerks, burnt in the bridge fire of 1212 and soon rebuilt, then rebuilt and enlarged again between 1384 and 1397. Its clergy, the "Brethren of the Bridge", lived communally at the Bridge House, which evolved into the governing institution of London Bridge itself. Bequests endowed chantries; relics included a supposed fragment of the True Cross; and in 1466 a papal bull confirmed the chapel's privileges, with an indulgence of forty days for those visiting on Becket's feast, 29 December. There were perennial squabbles with the rector of St Magnus the Martyr, in whose parish the bridge lay, over who should pocket the donations. The Reformation ended it all. Henry VIII was determined to extinguish the cult of Becket — the saint who had defied royal authority — and in 1538 the dedication was ordered changed to St Thomas the Apostle, a Southwark painter being hired to cover the Becket images on the walls. It was not enough: in 1548 the last chaplain was ordered to hand over the goods and lock the doors, and in 1549 came the order that "the chapell upon the same bridge be defaced, and be translated into a dwellyng-house".

From 1553 a grocer kept house and shop in the Upper Chapel and warehouse in the Lower. During staircase repairs in 1737 an unmarked tomb was found, assumed to hold Peter de Colechurch himself — though when bones said to come from it were analysed in 1997, only one fragment proved human, the rest belonging to a cow and a goose. The "Chapel House" later passed to the stationers Wright and Gill, both future Lord Mayors. The upper storey was cleared with the bridge's other houses from 1757, but the old Lower Chapel served as a paper store — "safe and dry", a newspaper reported in 1798 — until the new London Bridge opened in 1831 and the old one came down. In early 1832 the demolition exposed the medieval vaults and columns of the Lower Chapel one last time, recorded in an engraving by Edward William Cooke before the river closed over the site of the strangest and most beloved chapel in London.