St Mary Woolnoth

St Mary Woolnoth stands at the corner of Lombard Street and King William Street, hard by Bank junction in the heart of the City of London — Nicholas Hawksmoor's only church in the Square Mile, an English Baroque masterpiece of the Queen Anne Churches, Grade I listed, and the church whose bell tolls "with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine" in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. It remains an active Anglican parish church in the Diocese of London, in the ward of Langbourn.

The site may be among the oldest places of worship in London. Roman remains were found beneath the church during Hawksmoor's rebuilding, prompting speculation that a large Roman building stood in the immediate vicinity — and, if the remains were religious in nature and lay under an Anglo-Saxon wooden structure as some have guessed, that worship has continued here for at least two thousand years. The documented record begins in 1191, when the name is first written down as Wilnotmaricherche. "Woolnoth" is believed to commemorate a benefactor — possibly Wulnoth de Walebrok, who lived in the area earlier in the twelfth century, or perhaps Wulfnoth Cild, the South Saxon nobleman who died around 1014 and was grandfather of King Harold Godwinson. The full and unusual dedication is to Saint Mary of the Nativity.

The present building is at least the third church on the site. The Norman church survived until 1445, when it was rebuilt, a spire following in 1485. That medieval church was badly damaged in the Great Fire of London in 1666 and repaired by Sir Christopher Wren — two new bells, the treble and tenor, were cast in 1670 and the middle bell in 1672 — but the patched-up structure proved unsafe and had to be demolished in 1711. The parish registers of the old church preserve some remarkable entries: the baptisms of two men of African origin in 1629, Andrew Blackmore and Timothy, the latter described as a "heathen blackamoore"; and the marriage in 1612 of Anne Marbury to William Hutchinson — the future Anne Hutchinson, the celebrated and controversial religious thinker of colonial New England.

The new church was commissioned from Nicholas Hawksmoor by the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches. Work began in 1716 and the church reopened for worship on Easter Day 1727. Hawksmoor responded with one of his most distinctive and original designs, and he enjoyed an advantage rare among City churches: the shops and houses that had hemmed in the old building were demolished along with it, leaving him an unusually open site whose unobstructed frontage he exploited to the full. The result was an architectural statement. The unusually imposing façade is dominated by two flat-topped turrets carried on columns of the Corinthian order — the order used throughout the church — while the west side facing Lombard Street has distinctive recesses bearing an inset forward-curving pediment resting on skewed columns. The interior is surprisingly spacious for the building's modest size, laid out in characteristic Hawksmoor fashion as a "cube within a cube": a square defined by three rows of four Corinthian columns, enclosed within a wider square. Over all presides a great baroque baldaquin modelled on Bernini's in St Peter's Basilica in Rome.

The Victorian era nearly destroyed the church more than once. It was proposed for demolition on several occasions and saved each time. In 1876 William Butterfield removed the galleries, which he thought unsafe, making a number of other significant — and not entirely successful — changes at the same time. Then, between 1897 and 1900, the City & South London Railway built Bank Underground station directly beneath the church. The railway company was actually given permission to demolish St Mary Woolnoth, but public outcry forced a reconsideration, and the company undertook to use only the subsoil. The crypt was sold to the railway and the bones removed for reburial at the City of London Cemetery in Manor Park; the walls and internal columns were carried on steel girders while the lift shafts and staircase shaft of Bank station were constructed directly beneath the church floor, and the bells were rehung with new fittings. The engineering proved flawless — no cracks formed in the plasterwork and no settlement occurred, the company later claiming that the church was considerably stronger than before. Hawksmoor's Baroque masterpiece thus stands, almost uniquely, on top of a Tube station.

St Mary Woolnoth was designated a Grade I listed building on 4 January 1950 and became a guild church in 1952. Its roll of associated names is long and resonant. Sir Martin Bowes, Lord Mayor of London in 1545–46 and Master of the Mint, was married and buried here, his children and grandchildren baptised in the church. Thomas Kyd, the Elizabethan dramatist of The Spanish Tragedy, was baptised here, where his father Francis served as churchwarden. Josias Shute became rector in 1611, Ralph Robinson was Presbyterian minister in the 1640s, William Owtram and later the theologian William Josiah Irons (from 1872) held the rectory, and the composer Thomas Busby was organist from 1798. Sir William Phips, the colonial governor of Massachusetts, was buried here in February 1695. Edward Lloyd, founder of Lloyd's of London — born of the coffee house on this very Lombard Street — is memorialised in the church. Greatest of all is the association with John Newton, the former slave-ship captain turned evangelical clergyman, anti-slavery campaigner and author of "Amazing Grace," who was incumbent from 1780 to 1807; William Wilberforce, whom Newton counselled and encouraged in the long parliamentary fight against the slave trade, worshipped here.

The church holds a singular place in literature. In The Waste Land (1922), Eliot — who worked nearby in a Lombard Street bank — set the church at the centre of his vision of the City's morning crowd flowing over London Bridge: "Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, / To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine." In his notes to the poem Eliot remarked that the dead sound on the final stroke was "a phenomenon which I have often noticed." Sixty years later the church figured again in Peter Ackroyd's 1985 novel Hawksmoor, as the scene of one of a series of murders at churches designed by the architect, fictionalised as Nicholas Dyer.

Today St Mary Woolnoth is the active parish church of the combined parish of St Edmund the King and Martyr and St Mary Woolnoth Lombard Street with St Nicholas Acons, All Hallows Lombard Street, St Benet Gracechurch, St Leonard Eastcheap, St Dionis Backchurch and St Mary Woolchurch Haw — usually shortened to "St Edmund & St Mary Woolnoth," after the only two survivors of that roll-call of lost City parishes. It is used by London's German-speaking Swiss community and serves as the official London church of the government of British Columbia, Canada. When the City's ward boundaries were redrawn in 2013, the church was deliberately kept within Langbourn — even as the buildings around it passed to Candlewick and Walbrook — because of its strong connections with the ward: a fitting courtesy to a church that has kept the hours at this corner, in one form or another, for more than eight hundred recorded years.