St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, Holborn

Holy Sepulchre London, formally Saint Sepulchre-without-Newgate, is the largest parish church in the City of London, standing at the top of Snow Hill on the north side of Holborn Viaduct, at the crossroads beside the Old Bailey. A church of medieval foundation, rebuilt after the Great Fire of London, it has a wealth of remarkable associations — with the Crusades, with the executions at the nearby gallows of Newgate, with the explorer Captain John Smith, and above all with music, for it is the National Musicians' Church, where the ashes of Sir Henry Wood, founder of the Proms, are buried. Few churches in London carry so many strands of the city's history.

The church has ancient origins. The original, pre-Norman, church on the site was dedicated to St Edmund the King and Martyr, before it was given in 1137 by Bishop Roger of Salisbury to the nearby Priory of St Bartholomew in Smithfield. After the Second Crusade the church was re-dedicated to St Edmund and the Holy Sepulchre, in veneration of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem — the holiest site in Christendom — and knights setting out to crusade in the Holy Land would attend Mass here, led by a Canon of St Bartholomew's Priory. Over time the name was contracted to St Sepulchre, from the Latin Sanctum Sepulchrum, though there is of course no saint of that name. The parish, lying in the ward of Farringdon Without and including the historic Smithfield Market, was in the Middle Ages outside ("without") the city wall, just west of the City's "New Gate".

The church stands at the very centre of one of the darkest chapters of London's history, for it was intimately connected with the executions at Newgate. The great bell of St Sepulchre was tolled to mark the executions at the nearby gallows, and it is these bells that are immortalised as the "bells of Old Bailey" in the nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons". More chilling still is the Execution Bell — a handbell that survives, displayed in a glass case in the nave. In 1605 a Merchant Taylor named Robert Dowe gave the parish £50 to provide for a solemn custom: on the night before an execution, the parish bellman would walk through the underground passage to Newgate Prison and ring the handbell outside the condemned prisoner's cell, reciting a verse of "wholesome advice" urging the condemned to repent before they died.

The church has known religious turbulence too. In 1555, during the persecutions under Queen Mary I, the vicar of St Sepulchre, the Reverend John Rogers — a scholar and Reader of St Paul's who had helped to produce an early English Bible — was burned at the stake at Smithfield as a heretic, the first of the Protestant martyrs to die in the Marian persecution. The church was rebuilt in the fifteenth century, but it was gutted by the Great Fire of London in 1666, which left standing only the outer walls, the medieval tower and the porch. It was rebuilt between 1667 and 1679 by Joshua Marshall, the King's Master Mason, who appears to have remodelled it to his own design, and it was further restored in later centuries; the fine Perpendicular tower survives from the medieval church.

Among those buried at St Sepulchre is Captain John Smith, the soldier and explorer who led the founding of the colony of Jamestown in Virginia, and who was famously rescued — according to his own account — by the Native American princess Pocahontas; he was buried in the south aisle in 1631, and is commemorated by a stained-glass window installed in 1968. But it is for music that St Sepulchre is best known today. Sir Henry Wood, the conductor who founded the Promenade Concerts — the Proms — learned to play the organ at this church as a boy, and after his death his ashes were interred in the church's chapel of St Stephen. On 2 January 1955 that chapel was re-dedicated as the Musicians' Chapel by the Dean of St Paul's, and St Sepulchre became known as the National Musicians' Church; it holds a book of remembrance for musicians and a requiem each late autumn. Since 1950 the church has also been home to the Memorial Chapel of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers.

Today Holy Sepulchre continues as an active Anglican church in the Diocese of London, serving its City parish and the wider community of musicians, and welcoming visitors drawn by its extraordinary history. Its Execution Bell, its associations with the Crusades and with Captain John Smith, and above all its devotion to music make it one of the most fascinating churches in the City.

The church stands at the top of Snow Hill by Holborn Viaduct, in the City of London, directly opposite the Old Bailey — the Central Criminal Court, built on the site of Newgate Prison. Nearby are Smithfield Market, the ancient church and priory of St Bartholomew-the-Great, St Paul's Cathedral a little to the east, the Museum of London, and the historic streets of the City, with the legal quarter of Holborn and the wider sights of London within easy reach.

From its dedication to the Holy Sepulchre in the age of the Crusades, through the martyrdom of John Rogers, the tolling of its bells for the condemned of Newgate, its rebuilding after the Great Fire, and its modern role as the National Musicians' Church, Holy Sepulchre London gathers nearly nine centuries of the city's history into one building. The largest parish church in the City of London, it remains a living church at the heart of the capital — a place where the history of London, of faith, of justice and of music all meet.