St Olave's Church

St Olave's Church, Southwark was one of the most ancient churches on the south bank of the Thames in London, a foundation believed to be recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 and quite possibly older still. For more than eight centuries it stood at the southern end of London Bridge on the street that still carries its memory: Tooley Street is nothing more than a worn-down corruption of "St Olave's" — "t'olous" — so that millions of Londoners and visitors speak the church's name every day without knowing it. The church was declared redundant in 1926 and demolished soon afterwards, and its site on Tooley Street is now occupied by St Olaf House, the celebrated Art Deco building that today forms part of London Bridge Hospital and carries a plaque telling the story of the vanished church and its remarkable patron saint.

That patron was Olav Haraldsson, the Norwegian king who laboured to convert his people to Christianity and was martyred in 1030. Before his crown and his sainthood, in 1014, Olav was a young prince fighting as an ally — in practice a mercenary — of the English king Æthelred the Unready against the Danes. The Danes held the wooden London Bridge, and according to the famous story Olav rowed his longboats beneath it, lashed them to the bridge supports, and pulled the whole structure down into the Thames. Whatever the truth of the tale, Olav became a hugely popular saint in England after his death: five churches in the City of London were dedicated to him, in addition to this church across the river in Southwark. The Southwark church probably began as the private chapel of Godwin, Earl of Wessex, who held an interest in Southwark from at least 1018, and who in all likelihood had known Olav personally — making the dedication a strikingly personal one, a church named by a man for a saint he had met.

The Domesday Book entry for Southwark suggests that the church enjoyed royal patronage even before the Norman Conquest of 1066, the royal connection probably running through Godwin's eldest son Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England. The Domesday statements concerning the interests of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent — William the Conqueror's half-brother, who appears to have succeeded to the Godwin interest in Southwark — are tantalisingly vague: one records that "he who had the church held it from the king", another that the bishop gave the church and its "tidal stream" first to Adelold and then to Ralph in exchange for a house. That tidal stream was almost certainly the later "Watergate", the small dock beside St Olave's which probably formed its endowment; the dock was progressively filled in over the centuries and had effectively disappeared by 1747, though a landing stairs survived well into the nineteenth century. Adelold and Ralph are the earliest priests of the church whose names we know, and the church is first mentioned by name in 1096, when its priest "Peter de St Olavo" appears in a land transaction involving Bermondsey Priory.

In the years between 1090 and 1121 the Warenne family, successors to Odo's interest, gave the church and neighbouring property to Lewes Priory in Sussex. The parish that grew around it took in the north-east end of Southwark High Street and stretched east and south until it met Bermondsey parish. The Saxon church, which may have been a timber building, was replaced by a Norman church of stone — and that building stood perilously close to the river. When a terrible flood struck the banks of the Thames in 1327, the water damaged the church walls and washed bodies out of the churchyard, a grim reminder of how intimately this parish lived with the tides.

The Norman building survived, patched and altered, until the eighteenth century, when age, neglect and the subsidence of the riverside ground brought part of it down in 1736. A new church rose in 1737, designed by the architect Henry Flitcroft and built by the master mason John Deval, with sculptural work by Christopher Horsnaile and Deval himself. Flitcroft's church was severely damaged in the great Tooley Street fire of 1843 but was restored and continued in use. Its music had a distinguished chapter of its own: Henry Gauntlett, one of the great Victorian organists and hymn-tune composers, served as organist of St Olave's from 1827 to 1846, and during his tenure designed a grand new organ for the church.

The parish registers of St Olave's read like a cross-section of London life across the centuries. Paul Bayning, later 1st Viscount Bayning, was baptised here in 1588. Reasonable Blackman, a silk weaver of African descent working in Elizabethan Southwark and one of the best-documented Black craftsmen of the age, baptised his children at St Olave's. William Collier, a colonist of Plymouth Colony in New England, and the Puritan ministers William Cooper and Ralph Venning are associated with the church, as are the marine painter Peter Monamy and the heiress Sarah Coysh. One entry carries an extraordinary transatlantic echo: Sarah Walker Warren, born in 1622, married Nathaniel Warren, son of the Mayflower passenger Richard Warren. Their daughter Mercy married into the Delano family, descendants of Philippe de la Noye, who had arrived with the Leiden separatists on the Mayflower's companion ship, the Fortune — and among the many notable descendants of that line was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States. A church by London Bridge thus holds a thread of the ancestry of one of America's greatest presidents.

The parish's name spread far beyond its boundaries. From 1855 the civil parishes of Southwark St Olave, St John Horsleydown and St Thomas were administered together by the St Olave District Board of Works, and the parish gave its name to the St Olave's Poor Law Union, which took in Bermondsey and Rotherhithe and in 1900 became the Metropolitan Borough of Bermondsey. The parish also founded St Olave's Grammar School for boys, renamed St Olave's and St Saviour's Grammar School in 1896, and from 1902 its foundation funded the St Saviour's and St Olave's Church of England School for girls as well; both schools flourish today, and a separate St Olave's Foundation Fund still makes grants supporting the education and training of local young people. The St Olave's United Charities, based in nearby Druid Street, remains one of the best-endowed of the Southwark parish charities, providing for the local poor and elderly, its endowment supplemented until the mid-1990s by a parish rate levied across the old parish.

The end of the church itself came quietly. St Olave's had become very much a Docklands church, hemmed in by wharves and warehouses, and as industry expanded the resident population drained away. With its congregation gone, the church was declared redundant in 1926 and the nave was demolished, leaving the tower standing forlorn above Tooley Street for two more years until it too was taken down in 1928. One fragment escaped: the turret that capped the tower was carried off to Tanner Street Park in Bermondsey and converted into a drinking fountain, where it still stands, recognised by English Heritage in 1998 as a Grade II listed structure — surely one of the more unusual afterlives of any London church.

The site was sold and redeveloped with the Art Deco headquarters of the Hay's Wharf Company, completed on Lower Tooley Street and now known as St Olaf House. With its gilded lettering, river frontage and sleek 1930s lines, it is a listed landmark in its own right, and its name and plaque keep faith with the nine-hundred-year-old dedication. For anyone exploring the history of Southwark, London Bridge, the Docklands parishes or the Norse saints of England, the story of St Olave's — the king who pulled down London Bridge, the Domesday church beside the Watergate, Flitcroft's Georgian rebuilding, the Mayflower connections and the Roosevelt ancestry, the tower turret turned drinking fountain — is one of the richest of all the capital's lost churches, hiding in plain sight in the name of Tooley Street.