St Benet Gracechurch

St Benet Gracechurch — sometimes written "Grass Church" — was a parish church in the City of London that packed nearly a thousand years of history into a small corner site at the junction of Gracechurch Street and Fenchurch Street, in Bridge Ward. First recorded in the eleventh century, destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666, rebuilt by the office of Sir Christopher Wren, and finally demolished in 1868 to widen the street, it belongs to that poignant company of lost Wren churches whose absence still shapes the streets of the Square Mile. Its name survives on a plaque and in St Benet's Place, the little passage off Gracechurch Street, and the church enjoys an unusual claim to literary immortality: it is identified as the church in which Lydia Bennet married Mr Wickham in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

The dedication tells its own story. St Benet is the old London short form of St Benedict, and St Benet Gracechurch was one of four churches in the pre-Fire City dedicated to St Benedict of Nursia, the sixth-century founder of Western monasticism. The second half of the name has nothing to do with grace: "Gracechurch" means "Grass Church", a reference — according to the historian of London churches Gerald Cobb — to the hay market that was held nearby, so that the church of St Benedict by the grass market gave its name to the great street that still runs from Bishopsgate down towards London Bridge. The parish registers preserve a touching echo of the name: a foundling child left in the parish's care was christened Grace Church.

The earliest surviving reference to the church appears in the Charter of Brihtmaer of 1053, which conveyed a church in Gracechurch Street to Christ Church, Canterbury — placing St Benet's origins in the reign of Edward the Confessor, more than a decade before the Norman Conquest. The dedication to St Benedict is first explicitly recorded in the reign of Henry III. Through the Middle Ages the church served its small, busy parish in the commercial heart of the City, and like every London church it was swept along by the religious revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1553, at the start of the reign of Mary I, the churchwardens paid three shillings and fourpence to a plasterer to obliterate the biblical texts that had been painted on the walls during the Protestant reign of her brother Edward VI; shortly afterwards the records note a Te Deum sung "for the birth of our Prince (which was thought then to be)" — a reference to one of Queen Mary's phantom pregnancies, a moment of national expectation that came to nothing. The steeple was rebuilt in 1625, and the antiquarian John Strype records that the church was repaired and beautified in 1630 and 1633. The tide turned again in 1642, when the "popish altar cloth" and "superstitious brasses" were sold off, the cross was taken down from the steeple, and a workman was paid "for defacing superstitious things in the church". Among the monuments recorded by Strype and John Stow were the tomb of John Sturgeon, Chamberlain of London, who died in 1571, and a monument to Queen Elizabeth I.

The Great Fire of September 1666 destroyed St Benet Gracechurch along with most of the City's churches. Its tower survived the flames and stood for a time, but it was taken down to make way for the new building. The parish was united with that of St Leonard Eastcheap in 1670, and rebuilding under the direction of Sir Christopher Wren's office began in 1681. The accounts for 1686 contain a very human entry: one pound, fourteen shillings "to wine and sweetmeats for treating the Lord Mayor at the opening of the Church", though work on the spire ran on into the following year. The whole rebuilding cost £4,583.

Wren's St Benet was a compact rectangular church with a tower rising at its north-west corner, and it carried one of the more distinctive steeples in the City. The main north front to Fenchurch Street had five round-headed windows, each with a circular window above it, and the walls were finished with balustrades. The square tower rose to a belfry window crowned by a broken pediment, above which sat a lead-covered dome decorated with cartouches; from the dome rose a square entablature of four arched, pedimented openings, and from that sprang a tall, slender spire finished with a flag finial — the whole composition reaching 149 feet into the City sky. The interior came as a surprise after so commanding an exterior: George Godwin found it "much smaller than would be expected from the external appearance", a single undivided space sixty feet long and thirty wide, without columns, under a vaulted ceiling, with a small gallery at the west end and an east wall above the reredos painted to imitate a crimson-and-gold curtain. One curiosity set it apart from its sisters: St Benet Gracechurch was one of only two Wren churches that never possessed an organ.

The church had its share of notable clergy. In 1791 George Gaskin, secretary of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, became rector of St Benet's; from this small City benefice he coordinated the distribution of Bibles and religious literature throughout the British Isles, and when he took up the rectory of Stoke Newington in 1797 he retained St Benet's alongside it.

What the Fire could not do permanently, demography eventually did. Through the nineteenth century the resident population of the City of London drained away into the new suburbs, leaving the City churches with dwindling congregations while the suburbs went unchurched. Parliament's answer was the Union of Benefices Act of 1860, which permitted the demolition of City churches and the sale of their valuable land to fund church-building where the people now lived. St Benet Gracechurch was demolished in 1868 so that Gracechurch Street could be widened. The site fetched £24,000 — an enormous sum for a small corner of the City — and the proceeds built St Benet Mile End Road in the East End, so that the old church's endowment continued its work under the same name in a new place. The parish was united with neighbouring All Hallows Lombard Street, the furnishings were dispersed among several churches — the pulpit found a home in St Olave Hart Street, where it remains — and the interments from the vaults were reverently moved to the City of London Cemetery at Manor Park. Today the site at the intersection of Gracechurch and Fenchurch Streets is occupied by a seven-storey office block built in 1997, with a plaque and the alley name of St Benet's Place to mark what stood there.

Ecclesiastically the old parish lives on in one of those wonderfully accumulated City titles: it now forms part of the combined parish of St Edmund the King and Martyr, and St Mary Woolnoth Lombard Street with St Nicholas Acons, All Hallows Lombard Street, St Benet Gracechurch, St Leonard Eastcheap, St Dionis Backchurch and St Mary Woolchurch Haw — mercifully shortened in everyday use to "St Edmund & St Mary Woolnoth" — within the Church of England's Diocese of London.

The story of St Benet Gracechurch is, in compressed form, the story of the City's churches as a whole: a Saxon foundation by the grass market, recorded in a charter of 1053; the upheavals of Reformation and counter-Reformation written in plasterers' and workmen's bills; destruction by fire and resurrection by Wren with a dome and needle spire; slow emptying as London exploded outward; and a Victorian demolition that converted its stones into a street-widening and its value into a new church for the East End. Add a foundling named Grace Church, a rector who supplied Bibles to an entire kingdom, a missing organ, and a fictional wedding that every reader of Jane Austen knows, and this vanished corner church proves to have one of the best stories on Gracechurch Street — a street that, fittingly, still bears its name.