St Michael Paternoster Royal

St Michael Paternoster Royal is a church on College Hill in the City of London, beside Whittington Garden on Upper Thames Street — the church of Dick Whittington, the fabled Lord Mayor of London, who rebuilt it, founded a college in it, and was buried in it in 1423, though his tomb is now lost. First recorded in the thirteenth century, destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, rebuilt under Sir Christopher Wren, gutted by a V-1 flying bomb in 1944 and restored between 1966 and 1968, it is a Grade I listed building and the last of the City churches to be restored after the war.

Pre-Fire London had seven churches dedicated to the Archangel Michael, and this one's resounding name is pure City geography. The earliest record, of 1219, calls it "St Michael of Paternosterchierch", from its location on Paternoster Lane — now College Hill — named for the sellers of paternosters, or rosaries, based there. The suffix "Royal", first recorded in the following century, has nothing to do with kings: it refers to a nearby vanished street called Le Ryole, a corruption of La Réole, the town near Bordeaux — the street of the wine merchants. The church thus carries the rosary-makers and the vintners of medieval London in its very name.

Richard Whittington — four times Lord Mayor — was a local resident in the early fifteenth century, and in 1409 one of his earlier philanthropic acts was to pay for the rebuilding and extension of St Michael's after a vacant plot was acquired in Le Ryole. He later founded the College of St Spirit and St Mary within the church, making St Michael's a collegiate church administered by five priests instead of a rector — commonly known as Whittington College, the origin of the names College Street and College Hill (the college moved to Highgate Hill around the 1820s and to Felbridge in West Sussex in 1966). Whittington also founded an adjacent almshouse, which moved to Highgate in 1808 and to East Grinstead in 1966; the college was dissolved by Edward VI in 1548 and re-established under Queen Mary. Sir Richard was buried in St Michael's in 1423, on the south side of the altar near his wife Alice — and then his bones had adventures of their own. John Stow records that during the reign of Edward VI the rector, Thomas Mountain, dug Whittington's body up in the belief he had been buried with treasure; finding none, Mountain took his leaden shroud. The grave was opened again under Mary I and the body re-covered in lead. An attempt to find the grave in 1949 uncovered — with perfect storybook irony — a mummified cat, but no Lord Mayor. Other worthies buried in the pre-Fire church included William Oldhall (died 1459), Speaker of the House of Commons; the Lord Mayors John Yonge (died 1466) and William Bayley (died 1524); Peter Blundell (died 1601), founder of Blundell's School of Lorna Doone fame; and the Cavalier poet John Cleveland (died 1658).

After the Fire destroyed the church, its parish was united with that of St Martin Vintry, also destroyed but never rebuilt. Construction of the new church began in 1685 — one of the last of the fifty-one to be rebuilt — stopped in 1688 amid the financial uncertainty of the Glorious Revolution, resumed the next year under Wren's master mason Edward Strong the Elder, and finished in 1694, at a total cost of £8,937. The steeple followed between 1713 and 1717, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor: an open octagon of eight Ionic columns, each with its own entablature topped by an urn, carrying a second, smaller octagon of eight more columns and urns, crowned by a tiny dome and pennant vane — a sister to the steeples of St Stephen Walbrook and St James Garlickhythe, and cousin to the west towers of St Paul's. Tower and steeple together rise 128 feet. The church is rectangular, only its west front on College Hill slightly out of true; the south front of Portland stone has six round-headed windows with cherub keystones, the north and east fronts are brick, and the roof is balustraded. Before the war the south side was hemmed in by buildings; after the bombing these were cleared and Whittington Garden laid out, so the main façade now faces south along Upper Thames Street.

Victorian renovations by James Elmes (1820), William Butterfield (1866) and Ewan Christian (1894) were all lost on 23 July 1944, when the V-1 left only the walls and tower. Services continued in the shell until 1955; a diocesan proposal to demolish the walls and keep only the tower was successfully opposed by the City of London Corporation, and Elidir Davies restored the church between 1966 and 1968. The Duke of Edinburgh reopened it on 19 December 1968 as the headquarters of the Mission to Seamen — now the Mission to Seafarers, the Anglican organisation supporting chaplains in ports around the world, fittingly housed in the church of the wine-wharf quarter, with the support of City livery companies. The interior is partitioned to reflect this dual purpose: the west of the building, roughly on the plan of the original thirteenth-century church, holds a hall, vestibule and the Mission's offices, while the chapel occupies the larger eastern part. St Michael's is a chapel within the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London, whose office has been based there since 2018 — though in 2024 the building was put up for sale, the marketing material describing it as a "former Wren church" that "benefits from three floors of open plan offices", the latest uncertain chapter in its long story.

The chapel's furnishings blend survival and salvage. The east wall holds three stained glass windows designed by John Hayward in 1968 — St Michael trampling a red-winged Satan in the centre, the Virgin and Child to one side, Adam and Eve with St Gabriel and the serpent to the other — while a south window shows Dick Whittington with his cat. The reredos is original Wren-era work with four Corinthian columns and two flaming urns, fronted by seventeenth-century Baroque statues of Moses and Aaron brought from All-Hallows-the-Great on that church's demolition in 1894 — their hands blown off in the war and replaced, so that Aaron, who once held a censer, now raises his hands in blessing. From the same church came the elaborate chandelier marked "Birmingham 1644"; the organ case is a replica of All-Hallows' 1749 case destroyed in the war, housing a Noel Mander organ, with a rare contemporary representation of William III's arms before the gallery. The pulpit, communion rails and lectern are seventeenth-century; the rest of the woodwork is of the 1960s. A monument by Michael Rysbrack survives from 1750 to yet another Lord Mayor, Sir Samuel Pennant — who died of jail fever caught from prisoners in the court dock. From Whittington's cat to the chaplains of the world's ports, St Michael Paternoster Royal remains the City's great church of second chances.