St Clement Danes

St Clement Danes is an Anglican church standing on its own island in the middle of the Strand in the City of Westminster, beside the Victorian Royal Courts of Justice at Aldwych, one of the two famous "island churches" of the Strand together with St Mary-le-Strand. Reputedly founded by the Danes in the ninth century, rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren in 1682, gutted by the Luftwaffe in 1941 and restored in 1958 as the Central Church of the Royal Air Force, it carries one of the longest and most layered histories of any London church, and may be the very church of the nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons": its bells play the tune daily at nine, noon, three and six, though St Clement's Eastcheap in the City also claims the rhyme.

The Danish connection that gives the church its name is wrapped in competing theories. The most popular holds that in the ninth century, during the Danelaw, when London sat on the dividing line between English and Danes, Danish settlers colonised the riverside village of Aldwych between the City and the future Westminster and founded a church there, known in Latin as Ecclesia Clementes Danorum; being a seafaring people, they dedicated it to St Clement, patron saint of mariners. An alternative tradition says that after Alfred the Great drove the Danes from the City and required them to accept Christianity, he stipulated the building of the church. Other accounts connect the name to Danes buried in a nearby field after Siward, Earl of Northumbria, killed Tosti, Earl of Huntingdon, and his men; to a massacre recorded in the Jómsvíkinga saga of unarmed Danes gathered for a church service; or to the burial in the church, in March 1040, of King Harold I "Harefoot", son of Cnut, whose Danish royal blood may have attached the name. The twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury wrote that the Danes burnt the church on this site before being slain in the vicinity. Whatever the truth, a king of England lies somewhere beneath it, without a memorial.

The medieval church was rebuilt first by William the Conqueror and again later in the Middle Ages. A new chancel was built over part of the churchyard in 1608 at a cost of more than £1,000, with further repairs to the tower in 1618. After the Great Fire of 1666, which spared the church itself, attempted repairs to the steeple proved impractical and the whole tower was rebuilt from the foundations by 1669; soon afterwards the rest of the fabric was judged so poor that it too should be replaced. Sir Christopher Wren rebuilt St Clement Danes between 1680 and 1682 in Portland stone, recladding the existing tower and giving the church an apse at the east end, with Edward Pierce, his collaborator on many churches, creating the ornate interior: galleries on three sides carried on square pillars that rise as Corinthian columns to a barrel-vaulted ceiling, each gallery bay cross-vaulted to admit light through large round-headed windows, a scheme Wren repeated at St James's Piccadilly two years later. James Gibbs added the elegant steeple to the tower in 1719.

The parish gathered remarkable lives around it. Katherine de Roet, later mistress and third wife of John of Gaunt and ancestress of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs, married Sir Hugh Swynford here around 1366. John Layfield, one of the translators of the King James Bible, was rector from 1602 to 1617; the playwright Thomas Otway was buried in the churchyard in 1685, the explorer Pierre Radisson, driving force behind the Hudson's Bay Company, in 1710, and James Weddell, discoverer of the Weddell Sea, in 1834. The Twinings tea family lived and traded in the parish and baptised generations in the church, including the social reformer Louisa Twining in 1820; James Burton, the great property developer of Georgian London, married here in 1783. Dr Samuel Johnson worshipped at St Clement Danes, and his statue stands at the east end of the church land, brought to life as the character "Dictionary" in Charlie Fletcher's 2006 novel Stoneheart, while the Gladstone Memorial rises in the plaza before the west front. William Webb Ellis, credited with inventing rugby football in 1823, was once rector and is commemorated by a tablet. The parish founded schools that still flourish: a primary school of 1700 on Drury Lane, and a secondary school opened in Holborn in 1862 that migrated through Hammersmith to Chorleywood in Hertfordshire, where it continues as St Clement Danes School. A Masonic lodge bearing the church's name was consecrated in 1871, its first meeting held at the King's Head at 265 Strand with the rector as first chaplain. In 1919 the rector William Pennington-Bickford, devoted with his wife Louisa to the parish's welfare, celebrated the restoration of the bells and carillon, altered to ring out "Oranges and Lemons", by founding the annual children's service held each spring, which still ends with the distribution of oranges and lemons to the boys and girls.

On 10 May 1941 the Luftwaffe all but destroyed the church. The outer walls, tower and Gibbs steeple survived, but fire gutted Wren's interior and the ten bells crashed to the ground, to be stored and recast after the war; Pennington-Bickford died that same year. George Orwell, writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1948, had Winston Smith encounter a picture of the church as it stood before the war, a building he had known only as a ruin. Reality was kinder than the novel: after an appeal for funds by the Royal Air Force, the church was completely restored under the supervision of Sam Lloyd, and in 1958 it was reconsecrated in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip as the Central Church of the Royal Air Force. Beneath the restored royal coat of arms a Latin inscription summarises the story: Christopher Wren built it, the thunderbolts of aerial warfare destroyed it in 1941, the Royal Air Force restored it in 1958, though the carver erred in dating Wren's work 1672 rather than 1682.

The church is now a shrine of the air force as much as a parish church. Its floor of Welsh slate is inlaid with the badges of more than eight hundred RAF commands, groups, stations and squadrons, ringed near the door by the badges of the Commonwealth air forces around that of the RAF, with a memorial in the north aisle to the Polish airmen and squadrons who fought in the defence of Britain and the liberation of Europe. Books of Remembrance record every member of the RAF who has died in service, together with the American airmen based in Britain who died in the Second World War, and plaques near the altar name the holders of the Victoria Cross and George Cross from the RAF, Royal Flying Corps, Royal Naval Air Service and Commonwealth air forces. Retired Queen's Colours and squadron standards hang in the galleries with the Royal Banner of the Royal Observer Corps. The furnishings themselves are gifts of the air-minded world: the lectern from the Royal Australian Air Force, the cross from the Air Training Corps, the altar from the Dutch embassy, the crypt font from the Royal Norwegian Air Force, the Paschal Candle from the Royal Belgian Air Force, pews and pulpits presented by past Chiefs of the Air Staff, Sir Douglas Bader and the Guinea Pig Club of burned airmen treated by Sir Archibald McIndoe, whose ashes rest here along with those of Marshals of the Royal Air Force Lord Tedder and Lord Douglas of Kirtleside. Lord Trenchard's armorial achievement hangs above the west entrance, and the Garter Banner of Lord Portal of Hungerford was transferred here from St George's Chapel, Windsor, after his death in 1971. The organ, replacing the Bernard Smith instrument of 1690 destroyed in the war, was built by Harrison and Harrison in 1958 as a gift from the United States Air Force, its case a replica of the lost Father Smith original. Outside stand Faith Winter's statues of the RAF's wartime leaders Hugh Dowding and Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the latter unveiled by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in 1992 amid protests over the bombing of Dresden, and guarded day and night for a time against graffiti.

St Clement Danes maintains a fine Anglican choral tradition of Eucharist and Matins, with musical support from Royal Air Force Music Services and directors of music from Martindale Sidwell, who served from the 1958 reconsecration until 1992, to Simon Over today, and the King's Colour Squadron attends great ceremonies as keeper of the King's Colour for the RAF. The church is a member of Coventry Cathedral's Community of the Cross of Nails, committed to healing the wounds of history and building a culture of justice and peace. It has marked the great moments of national and air force life: Margaret Thatcher's funeral procession paused here in 2013 as her coffin was transferred to a gun carriage for the journey to St Paul's, the RAF's centenary was celebrated here in 2018, and in 2025 the church hosted a service marking twenty-five years since the lifting of the ban on LGBTQ+ personnel in the armed forces, broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Through it all, four times a day, the bells still ring out "Oranges and Lemons" over the Strand.