St Botolph's Aldgate

St Botolph's Aldgate is a Church of England parish church standing at the junction of Houndsditch and Aldgate High Street — about thirty yards outside the former position of Aldgate, the defensive barbican in the London Wall, which makes it at once a church of the City of London and part of the East End. Its full name is St Botolph without Aldgate and Holy Trinity Minories, though it is often known simply as Aldgate Church, and its ancient parish included the extramural Portsoken Ward of the City and East Smithfield beyond. The present Georgian building of brick with stone quoins, its square tower crowned by an obelisk spire, is a Grade I listed building containing what has been called the oldest church organ in the United Kingdom.

The dedication tells a story of medieval London's geography of faith. St Botolph's was one of four churches in the medieval City dedicated to Botolph, or Botwulf, the seventh-century East Anglian saint, each standing by one of the City gates: the others were St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, St Botolph's Aldersgate, and St Botolph's Billingsgate by the river, destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and never rebuilt. The Aldgate church is believed to be the first in London dedicated to Botolph, the others following. The connection runs through Colchester: the priory just inside Aldgate was founded by clergy from St Botolph's Priory there, fifty miles up the Roman road, and the Colchester priory — like the Aldgate church — stood just outside its city's South Gate, also called St Botolph's Gate. The priors of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, held the land of the Portsoken outside the wall and are thought to have built and dedicated the church that served it. By the end of the eleventh century Botolph was regarded as the patron saint of boundaries, and by extension of trade and travel — an association especially strong before the legend of St Christopher became popular — which is why the churches at the City's gates bear his name.

The earliest written record dates from 1115, when the church was received by Holy Trinity Priory, recently founded by Matilda, wife of Henry I, though the parochial foundations may well predate 1066. The church was rebuilt in the sixteenth century at the priors' cost, renovated in 1621, and escaped the Great Fire; at the start of the eighteenth century it was described as "an old church, built of Brick, Rubble and Stone, rendered over, and ... of the Gothick order", seventy-eight feet long and fifty-three wide, with a hundred-foot tower holding six bells. Between 1741 and 1744 it was completely rebuilt to a design by George Dance the Elder, architect of the Mansion House: brick with projecting quoins, stone window surrounds and cornice, a brick tower with rusticated quoins under a stone spire, and an interior divided into nave and aisles by four widely spaced piers beneath a flat ceiling, with galleries on three sides and two rows of windows in each wall. The monuments from the old church were preserved and reinstalled. The interior was redecorated in the late nineteenth century by John Francis Bentley, architect of Westminster Cathedral.

The church's history has its share of London colour. It appears in the eighteenth-century rhyme "Oranges and Lemons" — "Old Father Baldpate, Say the slow bells at Aldgate" — bald-pate referring to Botolph's monastic tonsure, though the nickname carried a bawdier double meaning, for in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries St Botolph's was notorious as a meeting-place for prostitutes and their clients, earning it the name "Church of Prostitutes". The church stands on an island surrounded by roadways, and in late Victorian times, when women standing on street corners were easy targets for police, prostitutes would evade arrest by parading continuously around the island now occupied by the church and Aldgate tube station. The churchyard, first recorded in 1230 and a public open space by 1875, was laid out as a public garden in 1892 by the pioneering landscape gardener Fanny Wilkinson, and a drinking fountain of 1906, still extant, commemorates the philanthropist Frederic Mocatta. When the parish was united with Holy Trinity, Minories, on that church's closure in 1899, St Botolph's inherited a macabre relic: a preserved head reputed to be that of Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk — father of Lady Jane Grey — executed for treason by Mary I in 1554. Rediscovered during an archaeological investigation of the crypt in 1990, the head was buried in the churchyard.

The twentieth century tested the building severely. Bombed at intervals during the Blitz, it was designated Grade I on 4 January 1950 and restored by Rodney Tatchell — only to be badly damaged by an unexplained fire in 1965, necessitating further restoration. The church was rehallowed on 8 November 1966 by the Bishop of London in the presence of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Robert Bellinger, attending in state. True to its East End setting, in the early 1970s the crypt served as a homeless shelter by night and a youth club for Asian boys by day.

The organ is the church's greatest treasure. Donated by Thomas Whiting in 1676 and built between 1702 and 1704 by Renatus Harris, the great organ builder of his age, it was enhanced for the new church in 1740 by Harris's son-in-law John Byfield, enlarged several times in the nineteenth century and rebuilt by Mander in the 1960s. In 2002 the church resolved on a historical restoration, and after a fundraising campaign the work was carried out over nine months by Goetze and Gwynn of Welbeck, Nottinghamshire, under the consultancy of Ian Bell, returning the instrument to its 1744 specification using many original components; it was reinstalled in May 2006. Though older pipes and cases exist elsewhere, this is the oldest collection of pipes in their original positions on their original wind chests in the United Kingdom — historic enough to be filmed and recorded for the documentary The Elusive English Organ.

The parish roll has its distinctions: Daniel Defoe was married in the church in 1683; Thomas Bray, founder of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, was rector from 1706 to 1730; and among the burials is Thomas Darcy, 1st Baron Darcy de Darcy. From Saxon gate-shrine to Georgian preaching box, from the "Church of Prostitutes" to crypt shelter for the homeless, St Botolph's Aldgate has kept the boundary-saint's watch over the threshold between City and East End for nine hundred recorded years.