St Mary Aldermary

St Mary Aldermary is an Anglican church on Bow Lane at its junction with Watling Street in the City of London — a Grade I listed building whose name is usually taken to mean it is the oldest of the City churches dedicated to the Virgin Mary ("Elder Mary"), or perhaps simply the elder St Mary's of Bow Lane with respect to its neighbour St Mary-le-Bow. Of medieval origin, twice rebuilt across two centuries of fire and slow fundraising, it holds a unique place in architectural history: rebuilt after the Great Fire by the office of Sir Christopher Wren not in his usual classical manner but in Gothic — making it, in Pevsner's judgement, "the chief surviving monument of the 17th-century Gothic revival in the City and, with Warwick, the most important late 17th-century Gothic church in England."

A church has occupied the site since the eleventh century or earlier, its rectory in the patronage of the prior and chapter of Canterbury until 1400, when it passed to the Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1510 Sir Henry Keeble, grocer and Lord Mayor, financed a new church — but the tower was still unfinished when he died in 1518, and only two legacies of 1629 enabled its completion, the work begun a hundred and twenty years earlier being finished within three. Keeble's reward was shabby: buried in a vault beneath the church floor, he was not allowed to rest. As Richard Newcourt recorded, Sir William Laxton (died 1556) and Sir Thomas Lodge (died 1583) — both grocers and Lord Mayors, Lodge the father of the writer Thomas Lodge who inspired Shakespeare's As You Like It — were buried in Keeble's vault, "his bones unkindly cast out, and his Monument pull'd down", with their monuments set up in its place. John Stow's 1598 Survey of London lists other dignitaries buried in the early church, including Richard Chaucer, vintner — said by Stow to be the father of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. And in 1663 John Milton married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, in the church — having, curiously, married his second at the similarly named St Mary Aldermanbury. The parish registers date from 1558 and are deposited in the Guildhall Library.

The Great Fire of 1666 badly damaged the church only thirty-three years after its long rebuilding was finished, though parts of the walls and tower survived. The Wren office reconstruction owed its Gothic form to a bequest: Henry Rogers had left £5,000 for the rebuilding of a church, and his widow agreed to fund St Mary's — stipulating, according to some sources, that the new church be an exact imitation of the one largely destroyed. The result is an aisled nave of six bays with a clerestory and short chancel, the tower attached at the south-west corner and entered through a western lobby, its corners rising to octagonal turrets terminating in what George Godwin called "carved finials of impure design". Arcades of clustered columns carry somewhat flattened Gothic arches — and above them spreads the church's glory: ceilings of elaborate plaster fan vaulting, a shimmering seventeenth-century recreation of the Tudor masons' art, unique among the City churches. The parish of St Thomas the Apostle, destroyed in the Fire and not rebuilt, was united with St Mary's, and in 1781 a new organ by George England was installed.

The church also inherited one of the City's great Puritan institutions: the St Antholin's lectureship, founded in 1599 by citizens who gave London property to fund a daily lecture in St Antholin's pulpit, making that church famous as a lecture theatre. The Fire burned St Antholin's but the lectures carried on; when the rebuilt church was demolished in 1870, the lecture transferred to St Mary Aldermary, where it is now organised by the Church Society. Victorian restorers reworked the interior in 1876–77 — inserting an oak screen between lobby and church, replacing pews and stalls, moving the organ from the western gallery to the chancel, repaving the floor, adding stained glass and a new reredos. The church was damaged by German bombs in the Blitz, listed Grade I on 4 January 1950, and its role changed in 1952 from parish church to guild church, serving the City's commuters and non-resident workers. The latest restoration, completed in April 2005 with attention to the plaster ceilings and north-wall memorials, was celebrated at a service presided over by Richard Chartres, Bishop of London. Among those buried in the church is Charles Blount, 5th Baron Mountjoy.

The church's modern life is as distinctive as its vaulting. In January 2010 the Bishop and Archdeacon of London invited the Moot Community — a Church of England community in the spirit of the Fresh Expressions initiative, whose members commit to a "rhythm of life" of prayer, meditation and presence, with values of acceptance, balance, creativity and hospitality — to make their home at St Mary Aldermary. In 2012 Moot opened Host Café in the nave, which continues to sell fair trade coffee and goods: the main church space acts as a public café during weekday business hours, with religious and meditative sessions morning and evening — silent meditation on Mondays, Taizé worship on Wednesday and Friday mornings, and Still Point contemplation on Wednesday evenings. Since 2007 the church has been the Regimental Church of the Royal Tank Regiment; it hosts the Moldovan Orthodox church in London, which designates the building by the name of St Nicholas, and previously hosted the Malankara Orthodox Syrian congregation as their church of St Gregorios, combining Keralan styles of South Indian worship with ancient Syriac in the tradition of St Thomas the Apostle, missionary to India. Under fan vaults raised by Wren's masons in imitation of the Tudor past, the Elder Mary of Bow Lane now serves espresso, silence, and the liturgies of three continents.