St Bride's Church, City of London

St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, is one of the most storied churches in the City of London: the journalists' church, the cathedral of the press, whose tiered steeple by Sir Christopher Wren inspired the modern wedding cake and whose site has carried Christian worship for perhaps fourteen centuries. Likely dedicated to Saint Bridget of Ireland, possibly as early as the sixth century, the present building is Wren's church of 1672, gutted by fire-bombs in the Blitz of 1940 and reborn in the 1950s at the expense of the newspaper industry it had served for four and a half centuries. At 226 feet, its spire is the second tallest of all Wren's church towers, surpassed only by the dome of St Paul's itself.

The present St Bride's is at least the seventh church on the spot. Tradition makes Saint Bridget herself its founder, and the first church may have been raised by Irish missionary monks, the only Celtic Irish foundation known in the east of Britain, with apparent similarities to a church of the same era at Kildare. Modern historians offer another possibility: Christopher Brooke argued that the dedication came not from Irish missionaries but from Norse settlers of the tenth or eleventh century, the partially Christianised Vikings of the Dublin trade routes who took a particular shine to Brigid, scattering churches of St Bride across the Wirral, Cumbria, the Isle of Man and Orkney, and who spread fastest through the district west of the City near the old Lundenwic; St Clement Danes, another Norse favourite, stands just down the road. Beneath everything lies the holy well, or wells, that gave the neighbouring Bridewell Palace its name, and which the archaeologist Gustav Milne believed was the true reason the church was built here: excavations found a chalk-lined well shaft beneath the fifteenth-century chapel of St Anne, patroness of springs, beside the chapel of John the Baptist, an arrangement echoing in miniature the church of St Anne beside the healing Pools of Bethesda in Jerusalem, and suggesting a water cult that endured until the Reformation.

Archaeology, made possible by the wartime destruction, has recovered the church's whole buried biography. The post-war excavations directed by W. F. Grimes from 1952, reassessed by the Museum of London in the 1990s, found the north-west corner built over an infilled Roman gravel quarry, and beneath the east end the remains of a second- or third-century Roman building with a tessellated floor and painted wall plaster, abandoned before the Romans left. The earliest identifiable church was a late Saxon single-cell masonry building, larger than most Saxon parish churches in London, extended before the Norman Conquest with a square chancel and apse, dated by the broken handle of a Thetford-ware jug dropped by the builders between 1000 and 1040. The Norman church mattered in the world: King John held a curia regis, a royal council, here in 1205. A massive free-standing twelfth-century bell tower, its quoins of expensive dressed Caen stone, stood against the south wall, one of the earliest parish church towers in London; probably shaken by the earthquake of 1382, it was replaced between 1409 and 1419 by a west tower on whose foundations Wren's famous steeple still stands. The twelfth century also extended the chancel, beneath whose high altar archaeologists found the prestigious stone-lined tomb of a heavily built man of wealth, surely the rebuilding's chief benefactor, and after a fire in 1135 the church received one of London's first fire-resistant ceramic tile roofs, the best collection of such early tiles yet recovered. The thirteenth century added a north aisle, a Lady Chapel with a chalk-vaulted crypt, and a chapel of John the Baptist; the fifteenth rebuilt nearly everything, with new aisles, clerestory, the west tower and the chapel of St Anne, so that the medieval church reached almost exactly the footprint of the building standing today. At one period fourteen chantry priests served its guild chapels, dissolved under Edward VI in 1547.

Fleet Street's destiny arrived in 1500, when Wynkyn de Worde, apprentice and successor of Caxton, set up his printing press beside the church, beginning the association with printing and journalism that defines St Bride's to this day; until 1695 London was the only English city where printing was lawful. The parish registers record a poignant American connection: in the late 1580s Eleanor White married the bricklayer Ananias Dare at St Bride's, and their daughter Virginia Dare, born on Roanoke Island on 18 August 1587, was the first English child born in North America, vanishing with the Lost Colony; a modern bust of Virginia stands near the font, itself one of the few survivals of the pre-Fire church. Among parishioners were John Milton, John Dryden and Samuel Pepys, who was baptised here and who in 1664, finding the vaults overfull for his brother Tom's burial, bribed the gravedigger to justle together the corpses to make room.

Disaster came twice in two years. The Great Plague of 1665 killed 238 parishioners in a single week, and in 1666 the Great Fire of London consumed the church entirely. Wren's replacement, one of his largest and most expensive churches, reopened on 19 December 1675, and the celebrated spire followed in 1701 to 1703: four octagonal stages of diminishing height capped by an obelisk, ball and vane, its design, drawn in the hand of Nicholas Hawksmoor in Wren's office, loosely recalling a Roman lighthouse. Lightning carried off the top eight feet in 1764, and the damaged stone was bought by the owner of Park Place in Berkshire, where it remains. Around 1703 a baker's apprentice from Ludgate Hill, Thomas Rich, wanting an extravagant cake for his own wedding, took the tiered steeple as his model, and the traditional wedding cake was born. In 1710 Abraham Rudhall of Gloucester cast ten bells for the tower, augmented to twelve in 1719, among the first diatonic rings of twelve anywhere, and the tower hosted the first ever full peal on twelve bells. The churchyard received the composer Thomas Weelkes, the poet Richard Lovelace, the novelist Samuel Richardson, the steam pioneer Denis Papin, and Robert Levet, the humble physician of London's poor whom Samuel Johnson sheltered for years and mourned in his famous elegy.

On the night of 29 December 1940, the Second Great Fire of London, the Luftwaffe's incendiaries gutted Wren's church and destroyed all twelve bells, one of fifteen hundred fires started that night while St Paul's was saved by its firewatchers. From the calamity came knowledge: the cleared ruin allowed the excavation of the Saxon foundations and the discovery of nearly 230 lead coffins of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, whose occupants' lives and deaths the Museum of London has studied; the crypt is now open to the public as a museum of the site's two thousand years, displaying Roman pavement, coins and medieval glass. The church was rebuilt in a warm neo-baroque by Godfrey Allen, paid for by newspaper proprietors and journalists, with collegiate seating facing inward like a choir, and rededicated in 1957 in the presence of the press it serves; a single Taylor bell, hung for full-circle ringing and designed to anchor a future ring of twelve, took the place of the lost peal. The Compton organ of 1957, with four manuals, ninety-eight speaking stops and nearly four thousand pipes, is arguably that firm's finest work, and the professional choir of twelve, formed for the rededication, still sings two services every Sunday.

Grade I listed since 1950, St Bride's remains the spiritual home of journalism even after the newspapers left Fleet Street. Its north aisle altar keeps a continuing vigil for journalists killed, imprisoned or missing around the world, and since 2012 the annual Journalists' Commemorative Service each November gathers the profession to honour its dead. Queen Elizabeth II attended the fiftieth anniversary of the post-war restoration in 2007, the Inspire appeal of 2012 raised millions to repair the crumbling spire, and in 2016 the church hosted the wedding celebration of Jerry Hall and Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of the trade the church has watched over since Wynkyn de Worde first inked his press beside the holy well of St Bride.