Church of St Andrew, Holborn

The Church of St Andrew, Holborn, stands on the north-western edge of the City of London, on Holborn above the valley of the old River Fleet. An ancient foundation rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren, it is the largest of all Wren's parish churches, and a building of dignity and grandeur. With a history reaching back to Saxon times, associations with figures from Benjamin Disraeli to Captain Thomas Coram, and a remarkable medieval endowment that still supports it today, St Andrew's is one of the most interesting churches of the City.

The site is of great antiquity: Roman pottery has been found beneath it, and the first written record of the church dates from the middle of the tenth century, when a charter of Westminster Abbey refers to it as the "old wooden church" on top of the hill above the River Fleet. After the Norman Conquest the church passed to St Paul's Cathedral, with its advowson granted to the Cluniac abbey of Bermondsey. In the Middle Ages it was known as St Andrew Holburnestrate, and later as St Andrew de Holeburn. In 1348 a local armourer named John Thavie left a considerable estate "towards the support of the fabric forever" — a legacy that, remarkably, survived the Reformation, was carefully invested over the centuries, and still provides for the upkeep of the church to this day, one of the oldest continuing endowments of any English church. The medieval church was largely rebuilt in the fifteenth century, with a stone tower.

St Andrew's lay just beyond the western edge of the Great Fire of London in 1666, and so it survived the fire that destroyed so many City churches. But the building was in poor condition, and so Sir Christopher Wren rebuilt it anyway, between 1684 and 1690 — and it was the largest of all his parish churches, a spacious and dignified building in the classical style. The medieval tower was retained and refaced, so that the church combines a medieval tower with a Wren body. In the Second World War the church was gutted by bombing in 1941, but it was carefully restored in the 1960s, and fittings were brought in from the demolished Foundling Hospital chapel — fitting, since the founder of the Foundling Hospital, the philanthropic sea-captain Thomas Coram, is buried in the church.

The church has many notable associations. The future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was baptised here in 1817, as a boy, when his family left Judaism for Christianity — an event without which he could never have entered Parliament and become Prime Minister, in an age when Jews were barred from the Commons. The essayist William Hazlitt was married here, with the writer Charles Lamb as a witness, and the poet Richard Savage was baptised here. With its great Wren interior, its tombs and its memories, St Andrew's gathers up many strands of London's history.

Today St Andrew's continues as an active Anglican church in the Diocese of London, on the edge of the City, serving the legal and business community of Holborn. With its ancient origins, its Wren architecture, its Thavie endowment and its famous associations, it is one of the most rewarding of the City churches.

The church stands on Holborn, at the north-western edge of the City of London, near Holborn Circus and the boundary with the legal quarter. The Inns of Court — Gray's Inn and Lincoln's Inn — lie close by, along with Hatton Garden, the centre of London's jewellery trade, the Royal Courts of Justice and the Temple, St Paul's Cathedral and the other City churches a little to the east, and the wider attractions of central London, all within easy reach.

From the "old wooden church" recorded in the tenth century and the medieval endowment of John Thavie, through the rebuilding by Sir Christopher Wren in 1684–90 as the largest of his parish churches, the baptism of Benjamin Disraeli and the grave of Captain Coram, to its destruction in the Blitz and its restoration, St Andrew, Holborn, gathers more than a thousand years of London's history into one building. The largest of Wren's City churches, it remains a living church on the edge of the City — one of the most historic and dignified churches in London.