St Mary-le-Bow

St Mary-le-Bow is a Church of England parish church on Cheapside, one of the oldest thoroughfares of the City of London, and the home of the most famous bells in the world: the Bow Bells of the nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons, the bells that legend says called Dick Whittington back to London in 1392 to become Lord Mayor, and the bells within whose sound, by long tradition, every true Cockney must be born. Founded in 1080 by Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, destroyed by tornado, fire, the Great Fire and the Blitz, and rebuilt each time, the present church is the work of Sir Christopher Wren, whose steeple, the third tallest of any of his churches after St Paul's and St Bride's, remains a defining landmark of the Square Mile. It was Wren's second most expensive church after the cathedral itself, and was awarded Grade I listed status in 1950 while it still stood a bombed-out shell.

The church was born of the Norman conquest of London. Lanfranc, William the Conqueror's archbishop brought from Normandy, founded it in 1080 as part of the trio of great Norman statements in the capital, with St Paul's Cathedral and the Tower of London, and built it of the same Caen stone as the Tower; Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester and architect of the White Tower, may have designed it. The church rose on two levels, an undercroft partly below the street and an upper church above, and the round stone arches of the lower church, a novelty in England, gave it the name Sancta Maria de Arcubus, St Mary of the Arches, which time wore down to St Mary-le-Bow, bow being an old word for arch. Disaster came almost at once: in 1091, with the church nearing completion, one of the most violent tornadoes ever to strike England tore it apart, hurling roof rafters twenty-seven feet long into the ground so hard that only their tips showed. Rebuilt, it burned again in 1196, when supporters of the Archbishop of Canterbury set fire to the church to smoke out the fugitive William Fitz Osbert, who had taken refuge in the tower and was stabbed as he fled.

Rebuilt once more in the early thirteenth century, the church became a peculiar of the Archbishops of Canterbury, their London headquarters, and from 1251 the seat of the Court of Arches, the ecclesiastical court of appeal for the whole Province of Canterbury, which takes its name from the church and sits there to this day; the connection made St Mary-le-Bow the second most important church in London after St Paul's. The medieval tower had a troubled life, its south-west corner collapsing in 1271 and killing a citizen, Laurence Ducket, in Cheapside below. From 1363 it housed the city's curfew bell, rung at nine each evening and audible as far as Hackney Marshes, and after slow campaigns of repair it was completed in 1512 with a spectacular crown of five stone lanterns, four at the corners and one suspended in the centre on arches, designed to light the streets beneath. All of it perished in the Great Fire of September 1666, which gutted the church and left the tower too weakened ever to bear ringing bells again.

In Wren's great rebuilding of the City's fifty-one burned churches, a document of June 1670 placed St Mary-le-Bow at the head of the list, second in importance only to St Paul's. The body of the church, inspired by the Basilica of Maxentius in Rome, was finished by 1673, built of brick with Portland stone dressings, and the tower, moved by Wren to stand directly on Cheapside, took until 1680; digging its foundations, Wren struck a Roman causeway eighteen feet down, which gave him solid footing, and rediscovered the eleventh-century undercroft, which he took for Roman and dismissed with a trapdoor and ladder. The whole cost £15,421, and the tower, 221 feet 9 inches of Portland stone crowned by a spire of circular colonnade, flying buttresses and tapering pinnacle topped with a great winged-dragon weathervane, became so celebrated it was called the Cheapside pillar. Christopher Hodson cast a ring of eight for it from 1669, the tenor of some fifty-two hundredweight waiting in the churchyard until the tower was ready; Lester and Pack made the ring ten in 1762, and Mears and Stainbank twelve in 1881, London's fifth ring of twelve. After the bells fell silent in 1927, declared unringable to public outcry, the department-store magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge paid for their restoration by Gillett and Johnston in 1933, a recasting so contested that the Province of Canterbury's ecclesiastical court had to rule on the cracked tenor; the restored bells were recorded by the BBC World Service as a time signal heard around the globe.

Then came the night of 10 to 11 May 1941, the last and worst of the Blitz, when incendiaries gutted the church and the tower acted like a furnace, its floors and frame burning until the famous bells crashed more than a hundred feet to the ground, broken beyond repair. The shell stood for fifteen years before Laurence King restored the church to Wren's designs between 1956 and 1964, the reconsecration coming in 1964. A new ring of twelve, cast by Mears and Stainbank in 1956 partly from the salvaged metal of the old bells and funded in great part by the Bernard Sunley Charitable Foundation and Trinity Church, Wall Street, was hung in a frame of Javanese jang timber and dedicated on 21 December 1961, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh tolling the tenor at the start of the service. Each bell is named and bears a verse from the Psalms or St Luke whose initial letters spell the acrostic D. WHITTINGTON; the tenor, at nearly forty-two hundredweight, is the third heaviest in London after St Paul's and Southwark. The link with Trinity Church, Wall Street, is old: in 1914 a stone from the crypt was set in the New York church to mark William III's grant to its vestry of the same privileges as St Mary-le-Bow's.

The post-war interior is one of the City's most striking. John Hayward's nine stained glass windows of 1963-64 combine bold colour and sharp geometry with figurative power: in the east, Christ in Majesty flanked by the Virgin, who cradles the church itself in her lap, and St Paul, against tapestries of the spires of the City churches; in the west, the heraldry of the Great Twelve Livery Companies. The Norman crypt beneath, three bays of round arches set with Roman bricks under a groined vault, the survivor of tornado, fires and bombs, now houses the Café Below. The organ, descended from instruments by Hugh Russell of 1802 and Walker and Sons of 1880, was replaced in 2010 by a new two-manual instrument of thirty-four stops by Kenneth Tickell, retaining the 1964 case inspired by the Silbermann family of Alsace; Thomas Trotter gave the opening recital. Serving the financial industry and livery companies of the City, the church keeps its services on weekdays rather than Sundays, with daily prayers morning and evening and Eucharists on Wednesday lunchtime and Thursday evening, while the Academy of St Mary-le-Bow chamber orchestra, founded in 2016, performs as resident ensemble.

The bells still define a tribe. In 1851 they could be heard across north and east London, from Hackney Marshes to Stratford and even over the river in Southwark; a 2012 acoustic study found their range shrunk by traffic noise and soundproofing to the eastern Square Mile and Shoreditch, where no maternity hospital stands, so that the birth of a true Cockney is now, arguably, a vanishing possibility. Yet the great bell of Bow still answers in the old rhyme, mileposts on the Lewes road still carry the rebus of a bow and four bells measuring distance from the church door, David Bowie sang of Bow Bells striking another night in The London Boys, and West Ham United wove the church into its away shirt for 2024-25. Nine and a half centuries after Lanfranc raised his arches on Cheapside, the church of the bows remains what it has always been: the sound of London itself.