St Nicholas Cole Abbey

St Nicholas Cole Abbey is a Church of England church in the City of London, standing on Queen Victoria Street in the heart of the old city. Recorded since the twelfth century, destroyed in the Great Fire of London and rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren, gutted in the Blitz and restored again in the twentieth century, it is a church that has risen repeatedly from disaster — and it holds a unique distinction among the City churches, for it was the very first of the fifty-one churches lost in the Great Fire to be rebuilt. Its long and colourful history, bound up with fishmongers and boy bishops, regicides and Christian Socialists, makes it one of the most characterful of all the Wren churches.

The church's curious name has nothing to do with any abbey. It is dedicated to St Nicholas of Myra, the fourth-century bishop who is the patron saint of children and of fishermen, while "Cole Abbey" is a corruption of "coldharbour", a medieval word for a traveller's shelter or refuge from the cold. The earliest reference to the church appears in a letter of Pope Lucius II of 1144–45, but its associations with St Nicholas's two great groups of patronage run deep. An inventory taken at the Reformation lists vestments for children, suggesting the church kept the medieval custom of electing a boy bishop on St Nicholas's Day; and its ties to the fish trade were close, for deeds from the reign of Richard I mention a new fish market nearby, and a charter of 1272 refers to the church as "St Nick's behind Fish Street". Several fishmongers were buried here, and the antiquary John Stow records that in Elizabeth I's reign a lead and stone cistern, fed by the Thames, was set up against the north wall "for the care and commodity of the Fishmongers in and about Old Fish Street".

The church witnessed its share of the religious dramas of the age. Like all English churches it became Protestant at the Reformation, but on the accession of the Catholic Queen Mary I it had the distinction of being the first church to celebrate Mass once more, on 23 August 1553. Its rector, Thomas Sowdley, had taken advantage of the brief Protestant freedom to marry during the reign of Edward VI, and was deprived of his living under Mary; nicknamed "Parson Chicken", he was publicly humiliated, carted through Cheapside and pelted with chamber-pots and rotten eggs, before regaining his living when Elizabeth I came to the throne. A century later, in the time of the Civil War, the living of the church was held by Colonel Francis Hacker, the Puritan officer who commanded the guard at the execution of King Charles I — a startling connection between this quiet City parish and one of the most momentous events in English history.

Then came the catastrophe of 1666. St Nicholas Cole Abbey was consumed in the Great Fire of London, along with so much of the medieval city. King Charles II promised the site to the city's Lutheran community, but lobbying prevented the grant, and instead the parish was combined with that of the neighbouring St Nicholas Olave, also burned but never rebuilt. The church was reconstructed by the office of Sir Christopher Wren between 1672 and 1678, at a cost of £5,042 — and it has the honour of being the first of all the fire-lost churches to be rebuilt. The building accounts preserve some delightful human details of the project, including the entries "Dinner for Dr Wren and other Company – £2 14s 0d" and "Half a pint of canary for Dr Wren's coachmen – 6d", glimpses of the great architect at work. In 1737 the famous early Methodist preacher George Whitefield delivered a sermon here on the sin of "profane swearing in church".

The Victorian age reshaped the church's surroundings and the building itself. Wren had set its principal façade towards the north, on what was then Fish Street, but the construction of Queen Victoria Street and the wholesale redevelopment of the area left the south wall newly exposed, overlooking the broad new thoroughfare. This led to a reordering in 1874, when windows were opened up on the south side and the main doorway was moved from the north-west tower to the south. So thoroughly did the smoke of the nearby underground railway blacken the building that it acquired the wry nickname "St Nicholas Cole Hole Abbey". By 1881 the congregation had dwindled almost to nothing — a single man and a single woman attending under the Reverend Henry Stebbing — but a dramatic revival followed the appointment in 1883 of the Reverend Henry Cary Shuttleworth, a Christian Socialist who installed a bar, built up a remarkable musical programme and turned the church into a centre for debate. By 1891 St Nicholas Cole Abbey boasted the largest congregation of any church in the City, with up to 450 worshippers on a Sunday evening.

The twentieth century brought fresh destruction. On 10 May 1941 London suffered its single worst air raid of the entire Second World War, in which 1,436 people were killed and many great buildings ruined; among them was St Nicholas Cole Abbey, which was reduced to a roofless shell. It stood gutted for two decades until it was restored under the architect Arthur Bailey and reconsecrated in 1962, rising once again from the ashes as it had after 1666. The parish was combined with that of St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe, and the church served for a time as the headquarters of the Diocesan Council for Mission and Unity; between 1982 and 2003 it was leased to the Free Church of Scotland.

In recent years the church has found a new role. In 2014 it reopened as the St Nicholas Cole Abbey Centre for Workplace Ministry, with a supporting café aptly named The Wren, and in November 2016 regular Sunday services resumed under the name St Nick's Church. The parish belongs to the conservative evangelical tradition of the Church of England, and continues to minister to the workers and residents of the modern City.

St Nicholas Cole Abbey stands close to the River Thames in the historic centre of London, a short walk from St Paul's Cathedral and the Millennium Bridge. The Tate Modern across the river, the City of London's ancient streets and livery halls, the College of Arms, and a host of other Wren churches lie all around, while the riverside walks of the Thames Path pass nearby — placing this much-rebuilt church in the very heart of London's history.

From a medieval church of the fishmongers "behind Fish Street", through the religious turmoil of the Reformation and Civil War, its destruction in the Great Fire and its honour as the first church rebuilt by Wren, the Victorian revival under Shuttleworth, the devastation of the Blitz and Arthur Bailey's restoration, to its new life as St Nick's Church and the Centre for Workplace Ministry, St Nicholas Cole Abbey gathers more than eight centuries of London's history into one resilient building. Twice rebuilt from ruin and still serving the City, it remains a living Church of England church and one of the most storied of all Sir Christopher Wren's churches.