Church of St Julian, Norwich

St Julian's is a small but world-famous church in the heart of Norwich — for it was here, in a cell attached to the church, that Julian of Norwich, the great medieval mystic and the first known woman to write a book in the English language, lived as an anchoress in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Her Revelations of Divine Love, with its message of hope that "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well", has made St Julian's a place of pilgrimage for Christians from around the world. A Grade I listed building, rebuilt after wartime bombing, it remains a place of quiet prayer and deep spiritual significance.

There has been a church on this site since before the Norman Conquest: the original church was of Saxon and Norman date, with a characteristic East Anglian round tower. In the Middle Ages, when Norwich was one of the largest and most prosperous cities in England — possibly the second city of the kingdom — the church gained its most famous association. Around 1373, a woman known to history only as Julian of Norwich, gravely ill and apparently near death, experienced a series of visions, or "shewings", of the love of God and the Passion of Christ. She recovered, and devoted the rest of her life to prayer and to reflecting on these visions, which she wrote down in her Revelations of Divine Love — the earliest surviving book in English known to have been written by a woman. Julian lived as an anchoress — a religious solitary, walled into a small cell attached to the church, with a window looking into the church and another to the street, through which she gave spiritual counsel to those who sought her out. Her cell was demolished in the 1530s, at the Reformation, but her memory and her writings endured.

Over the following centuries the church fell on hard times. Through lack of funds it became dilapidated during the eighteenth century, and after one side of the building collapsed in 1845 it had to be restored; the round tower, also in danger, was repaired in 1934. The church's greatest disaster came in the Second World War: in June 1942, during the "Baedeker" raids on Norwich, St Julian's received a direct hit and was largely destroyed. It was the only one of the five Norwich churches destroyed in the war to be rebuilt, and it reopened in 1953. The rebuilt church is a modest flint building with stone and brick dressings and a round tower, consisting of a nave, a small chancel and, added in the 1950s, a south chapel and porch; the medieval bell, damaged in 1942, was rehung in 1992. Beside the church, a Julian cell was reconstructed as a shrine and place of prayer, on the site of the original.

Today St Julian's continues as an active Anglican church in the Diocese of Norwich, part of the parish of St John the Baptist Timberhill with St Julian's, and it is open every day as a place of prayer, with Mass celebrated on Sunday mornings. Pilgrims and visitors come from all over the world to the Julian shrine, drawn by the gentle and hopeful spirituality of Julian's writings, which have found a wide and growing readership in modern times. Small and unassuming though it is, St Julian's is one of the most spiritually significant churches in England.

The church stands in a quiet lane off Rouen Road, in the heart of the city of Norwich, in Norfolk. The medieval city, with its magnificent Norman cathedral, its castle, its cobbled lanes and its many ancient churches, lies all around, along with the Norwich Lanes shopping quarter, the market place, the River Wensum, and the wider attractions of one of England's finest medieval cities, with the Norfolk Broads and the coast within easy reach.

From the Saxon and Norman church with its round tower, through the life of Julian of Norwich in her anchoress's cell and the writing of the Revelations of Divine Love, the demolition of her cell at the Reformation, and the destruction of the church in 1942 and its rebuilding in 1953, St Julian's gathers a remarkable spiritual history into one small building. A Grade I listed church and the shrine of Julian of Norwich, it remains a living place of prayer and pilgrimage in the heart of Norwich — one of the most beloved and significant churches in the land.