St Dunstan-in-the-West

The Guild Church of St Dunstan-in-the-West stands on Fleet Street in the City of London, dedicated to St Dunstan, the tenth-century Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury. A church of medieval origin rebuilt in the 1830s with a striking octagonal nave, and famous for its chiming clock with club-wielding giants, it is a Grade I listed building and one of the best-loved churches of the old "street of newspapers". Today it is also shared with London's Romanian Orthodox community, a living link between the Christian East and West.

A church on this site is first recorded in 1185, though its origins may be far older — there is speculation that it was founded by St Dunstan himself or by priests who knew him, and that it may have been one of the early strand settlement churches of Anglo-Saxon Lundenwic, predating the churches within the City walls. King Henry III took possession of it from Westminster Abbey by 1237 and granted it to the Domus Conversorum, the House of Converts for converted Jews. Over the centuries the medieval church gathered remarkable associations: William Tyndale, the pioneering translator of the Bible into English, was a lecturer here; the great poet John Donne held the living from 1624 to 1631 while Dean of St Paul's; the diarist Samuel Pepys was a regular worshipper; and Izaak Walton served as a sidesman. The church narrowly escaped the Great Fire of London in 1666, when forty boys roused from Westminster School formed a bucket-chain that halted the flames just three doors away.

By the early nineteenth century the medieval church, much altered and hemmed in by small shops, stood in the way of the widening of Fleet Street, and an Act of Parliament of 1829 authorised its demolition. A new church was built on the old burial ground to the designs of John Shaw Senior, the first stone laid in 1831. Faced with a cramped site, Shaw produced an ingenious plan with an octagonal central space: seven of its eight sides open into arched recesses, the northernmost holding the altar, while the eighth leads to the entrance porch beneath the tower. The square tower is crowned by an open octagonal lantern, modelled on those of St Botolph's, Boston, and All Saints', York. Shaw died in 1833 before the work was finished, and it was completed by his son, John Shaw Junior. From the old church were saved several monuments and the communion rail, carved by the great Grinling Gibbons during Donne's time as vicar.

The church's most celebrated feature is its clock, set high on the Fleet Street façade. Installed on the old church in 1671 — perhaps to celebrate its escape from the Great Fire — it was the first public clock in London to have a minute hand, and its two giant figures, often taken to represent Gog and Magog, strike the hours and quarters with their clubs and turn their heads as they do so. The clock became a London landmark, mentioned by Dickens in Barnaby Rudge and David Copperfield's world, by Goldsmith, Trollope and Cowper, and in the penny dreadful that first introduced Sweeney Todd, the "demon barber of Fleet Street", with whom the church has long been popularly associated. When the medieval church was demolished the clock was carried off to the Marquess of Hertford's villa in Regent's Park, which became known as St Dunstan's — a name later taken by the charity for blinded soldiers, now Blind Veterans UK — and it was returned to Fleet Street in 1935 to mark the Silver Jubilee of King George V.

The church is rich in statues and memorials. Above the entrance to the old parish school stands a statue of Queen Elizabeth I, carved in 1586 and brought from the old Ludgate when it was demolished in 1760 — thought to be the oldest outdoor statue in London. Below it in the porch are three figures of ancient Britons, probably King Lud and his sons, also from the gate. Reflecting Fleet Street's history as the home of the British press, there is a memorial to the newspaper proprietor Lord Northcliffe, an obelisk designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens with a bronze bust by Kathleen Scott, and a tablet to the journalist James Louis Garvin. Near the font, a plaque commemorates Thomas Mudge, the watchmaker to George III who invented the lever escapement — one of several memorials reflecting the church's long links with London's clockmakers.

Since 1966 the chapel to the left of the main altar has been closed off by a magnificent iconostasis brought from the Antim Monastery in Bucharest, for St Dunstan's is one of the English churches to share its building with the Romanian Orthodox community, whose church of St George worships here. Apart from the loss of its stained glass and some damage to its lantern in the Blitz, the church survived the Second World War largely intact, was restored in 1950, and in 2012 received a new ring of ten bells.

From its possibly Saxon origins, through Tyndale, Donne and Pepys, its giant-striking clock and its oldest-in-London statue, to its shared life today with the Orthodox Church, St Dunstan-in-the-West remains one of the most fascinating churches in the City of London — a treasury of the history of Fleet Street and of the capital itself.