St Stephen Walbrook, City of London

St Stephen Walbrook is a Church of England parish church in the heart of the City of London, in the Diocese of London, standing on the street called Walbrook next to the Mansion House and a short walk from Bank and Monument Underground stations. The present domed building, raised by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London destroyed its medieval predecessor in 1666, contains what many consider one of Wren's finest church interiors — Sir Nikolaus Pevsner ranked it among the ten most important buildings in England — and in the twentieth century it added a remarkable modern claim to fame as the birthplace of the Samaritans.

The original church of St Stephen stood on the west side of the street, on the east bank of the Walbrook itself — once an important fresh-water stream for the Romans, running south-westerly across the City from the wall near Moorfields to the Thames, and later diverted into a brick culvert beneath Walbrook Street and Dowgate Hill. The first church, built some time between AD 700 and 980, is thought to have risen directly over the remains of a Roman temple of Mithras, following the common Christian practice of hallowing former heathen places of worship. In 1090 it was given to Clerkenwell Priory by Eudo Dapifer. In the fifteenth century the church moved to its present, higher site across the street: Robert Chichele, as executor of the will of the former Lord Mayor William Standon, bought a plot near the Stocks Market — the site of the later Mansion House — and presented it to the parish in 1429. Foundation stones were laid on 11 May 1429 and the church was consecrated a decade later, on 30 April 1439; at 125 feet long and 67 wide it was considerably larger than the building that stands today. That medieval church, which held a memorial to the great composer John Dunstaple, perished in the Great Fire of 1666 — though Dunstaple's epitaph, recorded in the early seventeenth century, was reinstated in 1904, some 450 years after his death. The nearby church of St Benet Sherehog, also lost in the Fire, was never rebuilt, its parish united with St Stephen's instead.

Wren's church was constructed between 1672 and 1679 at a cost of £7,692, with Thomas Strong — brother of Edward Strong the Elder — as mason and a spire by Edward Strong the Younger. Rectangular in plan, with an attached north-west tower, it is entered up a flight of sixteen steps enclosed in a porch on the west front; Wren designed a second porch for the north side that was never built, and the north door that did exist was bricked up in 1685 because it let in the offensive smells of the slaughterhouses in the neighbouring Stocks Market. The walls, tower and internal columns are of stone, but the celebrated dome is of timber and plaster sheathed externally in copper. Sixty-three feet high and based on Wren's original design for St Paul's Cathedral, it is centred over a square of twelve Corinthian columns — yet its circular base is not carried on conventional pendentives above the arches of the square, but on a circle formed by eight arches springing from eight of the twelve columns, cutting across each corner in the manner of the Byzantine squinch. The effect is an interior of floating geometry that has dazzled visitors for three centuries. The contemporary carved furnishings — the altarpiece and Royal Arms, the pulpit and font cover — are attributed to the carpenters Thomas Creecher and Stephen Colledge and the carvers William Newman and Jonathan Maine, and a new organ by George England arrived in 1760.

The church has had its share of eighteenth-century drama. In 1776 the central east window was bricked up to take a painting the rector, Thomas Wilson, had commissioned from Benjamin West — Devout Men Taking Away the Body of St Stephen — and the following year Wilson installed a statue of the radical historian Catharine Macaulay, then still alive, whose political ideas he admired; it was removed after protests. The east window was unblocked and West's painting moved to the north wall during extensive restorations in 1850. The painting's later history proved no less contentious: put into storage after the reordering of the 1980s — a removal that was initially illegal — it was controversially sold in 2013 to a foundation, over the opposition of the London Diocesan Advisory Committee and the Church of England's Church Buildings Council; after a temporary export bar gave it a last chance to remain in Britain, the foundation loaned it to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which has restored it.

The church suffered slight bomb damage in the Blitz of 1941 and was subsequently restored, was designated Grade I on 4 January 1950, and in 1954 absorbed the united parishes of St Mary Bothaw and St Swithin London Stone, themselves merged since 1670. Then, in 1953, came the moment that gave St Stephen Walbrook a place in social history: its rector, Dr Chad Varah, founded the Samaritans, the voluntary organisation whose 24-hour telephone line supports people in emotional need. The first branch — the Central London Branch — operated from a crypt beneath the church before moving to Marshall Street in Soho, and the telephone with which it all began is preserved in a glass box in the church. Varah served until 2003, retiring at ninety-two as the oldest serving incumbent in the Church of England.

The boldest modern intervention came in 1987, when, as part of a major programme of repairs and reordering, a massive white polished stone altar by the sculptor Henry Moore — commissioned by the churchwarden Peter Palumbo — was installed at the very centre of the church beneath Wren's dome. Its unusual central position required the authorisation of a rare judgement of the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved, and in 1993 a circle of brightly coloured kneelers designed by the abstract painter Patrick Heron was added around it, completing one of the most striking marriages of Baroque architecture and modern art in any English church. On 14 July 1994 the church hosted the wedding of Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, daughter of Princess Margaret, to Daniel Chatto.

Those buried here over the centuries include Sir Rowland Hill of Soulton, publisher of the Geneva Bible and styled the "First Protestant Lord Mayor of London", whose monument was lost in the Great Fire and restated at Hawkstone; the composer John Dunstaple; the diarist Elizabeth Jekyll; and the architect and playwright Sir John Vanbrugh, creator of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard. From a Saxon church over a Mithraic temple to Wren's dome, Moore's altar and Chad Varah's telephone, St Stephen Walbrook compresses thirteen centuries of London's spiritual life into a single, perfect square of Corinthian columns beside the Mansion House.