St Magnus-the-Martyr, City of London

St Magnus the Martyr, by London Bridge, is one of the most historic and beautiful of all the churches of the City of London — a masterpiece of Sir Christopher Wren standing at the very point where, for centuries, the only bridge between the sea and Kingston carried all the traffic of the south into the capital. A Grade I listed building in the Diocese of London, it is the guild church of the Worshipful Companies of Fishmongers and Plumbers and the ward church of Bridge, and its interior so moved T. S. Eliot that he gave it a line in The Waste Land. Its rector bears the title "Cardinal Rector", and since the abolition of the College of Minor Canons of St Paul's in 2016 is the only cleric in the Church of England to use the word "cardinal" — one of many singularities of a church that has stood at the bridgehead of London for nearly a thousand years.

St Magnus was built in the eleventh century to serve the growing population of the bridgehead, on the narrow strip of waterfront south of the old Roman riverside wall, beside the wooden bridge that preceded the famous medieval one. The church is supposedly recorded in a charter of William I granting it to Westminster Abbey in 1067 — generally thought a later forgery, but perhaps preserving genuine memory of an eleventh-century foundation — and references to it multiply through the twelfth century, when the advowson was disputed between the Abbot of Westminster and the Prior of Bermondsey and finally divided between them. Its dedication is itself a historical puzzle: the church is now dedicated to St Magnus Erlendsson, Earl of Orkney, martyred around 1116, but since the church pre-dated his sanctification by a century, scholars increasingly believe the original patron was an earlier saint, probably St Magnus of Anagni, a putative second-century Italian bishop whose feast on 19 August appears in English liturgical calendars from the eighth century onward. The link to the Orkney earl was a nineteenth-century idea, promoted by the Danish archaeologist J. J. A. Worsaae as he formulated the very concept of the "Viking Age", and confirmed by the Bishop of London only in 1926.

For most of its history the church stood at the head of Old London Bridge, which until 1831 was aligned on Fish Street Hill, so that everyone entering the City from Southwark passed the west door of St Magnus. The medieval bridge carried a chapel dedicated to St Thomas Becket for pilgrims bound for Canterbury, and two-thirds of the bridge — chapel included — lay within the parish of St Magnus, a source of both prestige and, at times, of rivalry over the pilgrims' offerings. The church grew rich and important in the medieval City: it received grants of land, gave sanctuary to fleeing felons, and was closely tied to the Fishmongers, whose shops stood on Fish Wharf to the south and who, in 1293, staged a great civic procession with a knight "representing St Magnus, because it was upon St Magnus' day". Among those buried here was Miles Coverdale, the scholar who in 1535 produced the first complete printed translation of the Bible into English, and who was rector of the church in the 1560s — a figure of the first importance in the history of the English Bible, commemorated here to this day.

St Magnus stood barely three hundred yards from the bakehouse of Thomas Farriner in Pudding Lane where the Great Fire of London began in September 1666, and it was one of the very first buildings the fire destroyed. There is a grim irony in the fact that Farriner himself, the baker in whose premises the fire started, had been a churchwarden of St Magnus, and was buried in the middle aisle of his ruined parish church in 1670. The rebuilding was entrusted to the office of Sir Christopher Wren, and it produced one of his finest City churches. The body of the church was rebuilt from 1671, and the tower crowned between 1703 and 1706 with a lantern and cupola closely modelled on the steeple of St Carolus Borromeus in Antwerp — a soaring composition reckoned among the very best of the tall steeples with which Wren transformed the London skyline. From the tower projected a great clock, a famous landmark that hung over the roadway of Old London Bridge, presented to the church in 1709 by Sir Charles Duncombe, Lord Mayor of London, who according to tradition gave it in fulfilment of a vow made when, as a young man, he had once been kept waiting for want of a clock to tell the time.

The church's intimacy with the bridge shaped it physically in a way unique among London churches. In 1762, when the buildings on London Bridge were demolished to widen the roadway, an Act of Parliament opened up the lower storey of Wren's tower, removing windows and piercing the arches so that pedestrians could pass beneath the tower as they walked onto the bridge — turning the base of the steeple into a public footway and external porch. The arrangement survives, so that the visitor still enters St Magnus, as Londoners did for centuries, through the foot of Wren's tower; and stored in the churchyard are timbers from the medieval bridge and a Roman wharf piling, fragments of the very waterfront the church was built to serve. The churchwardens' accounts record, with painful vividness, the dangers of the old bridge — payments to those injured in its crush, and the death of a man crushed between two carts in 1752.

The interior is the church's glory, and its most famous admirer was a poet. In The Waste Land (1922), T. S. Eliot wrote that "the walls of Magnus Martyr hold / Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold", and added in a note that "the interior of St Magnus Martyr is to my mind one of the finest among Wren's interiors". The church is richly fitted, with a fine organ, woodwork and ironwork, and freestone-flagged floors, and it has kept alive a tradition of Anglo-Catholic worship and music that draws visitors from far beyond its tiny parish. It came close to being lost more than once — in the great Tooley Street fire of 1827, which consumed the warehouses around it, and again in the early twentieth century, when it was among the City churches threatened with demolition, a threat Eliot himself protested, writing that the loss of "these towers, to meet the eye down a grimy lane, and of these empty naves, to receive the solitary visitor at noon from the dust and tumult of Lombard Street, will be irreparable".

Today St Magnus the Martyr stands on Lower Thames Street near the Monument to the Great Fire, a few steps from the modern London Bridge and the bustle of the City's riverside. Three ancient parishes are united in it — St Magnus itself, St Margaret New Fish Street and St Michael Crooked Lane — and it is twinned with the Church of the Resurrection in New York. From an eleventh-century church at the head of the only bridge into London, through a medieval parish rich with fishmongers and pilgrims, the grave of the man who first printed the Bible in English, destruction in the Great Fire and resurrection by Wren, to Eliot's "Ionian white and gold", St Magnus the Martyr gathers a thousand years of the history of London into one small, splendid church beside the Thames — and remains, beneath Wren's great steeple, a living church of the City.