St Vedast Foster Lane

St Vedast Foster Lane — or St Vedast-alias-Foster — is a church in Foster Lane in the City of London, a few steps from St Paul's Cathedral, dedicated to St Vedast, a French saint who died about AD 540 and whose cult arrived in England through contacts with Augustinian clergy. "Foster" is simply an Anglicisation of "Vaast", as the saint is known in continental Europe — making this one of the most curiously named churches in London, a Grade I listed building famous for its lively baroque steeple, its secluded courtyard, and an interior reborn twice from fire.

The original church was founded before 1308 and extensively repaired by 1662 on parochial initiative. The poet Robert Herrick — author of "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" — was baptised here in 1591, the son of a Cheapside goldsmith in this goldsmiths' quarter, where the Goldsmiths' Hall still stands across the lane. Though not completely destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, the church was so badly damaged that it joined the fifty or so churches requiring reconstruction by the office of Sir Christopher Wren. The main body was rebuilt in 1670–73 on the old walls at a cost of £1,853 15s 6d — the cheapest of all Wren's City commissions — incorporating parts of the medieval fabric, most noticeably the south wall, revealed by restoration in 1992–93. The medieval tower survived until 1694, when it was pulled down and a new one erected in 1695–98, possibly on the medieval lower stages, built by Edward Strong the Younger, a friend of Christopher Wren the Younger. The crowning glory came in 1709–12: the three-tier spire, considered one of the most baroque of all the City spires, costing £2,958 and possibly designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor — his correspondence with the churchwardens survives, though his drawings do not. With this late completion, St Vedast's was possibly the last of Wren's City churches to be finished.

Wren's church was gutted a second time by firebombs during the Blitz of 1940 and 1941, which destroyed all the fittings and cracked the bells. A proposal by Sir Hugh Casson to leave this and several other churches as roofless ruins to serve as war memorials was not implemented; instead, from 1953, under the new rector Canon Charles B. Mortlock, the architect Stephen Dykes Bower restored the church within the old walls — with a Parochial Church Council that included Sir John Betjeman and the organ builder Noel Mander. Dykes Bower's restoration, completed in 1962, is one of the subtlest in the City. He reordered the interior in collegiate chapel style, with seating facing inward down each side and a side chapel in the former south aisle, and squared up the old walls — which were not rectangular in plan — so the altar now faces the nave squarely. Most ingeniously, he built an almost imperceptible taper into the pews and floor pattern, creating a false perspective toward the altar that makes the church look longer than it is. His fine plaster ceiling, in late seventeenth-century style, is embellished with gold and varnished aluminium leaf. Fittings rescued from other destroyed City churches were woven into the design: the richly carved pulpit from All Hallows Bread Street, and the font and cover from St Anne and St Agnes. The Whitefriars glass windows of the east end, commissioned by Dykes Bower, show scenes from the life of St Vedast — their opaque glass serving the practical double purpose of hiding the tall buildings behind and disguising the fact that the east wall is a wedge in plan. An aumbry above the south chapel altar is by Bernard Merry.

Dykes Bower also built a small parish room north-east of the church in seventeenth-century style, and a Georgian-style rectory on Foster Lane in 1959, whose first-floor room contains an important mural by Hans Feibusch on the subject of Jacob and the Angel. In the rectory's internal courtyard — the secluded little court that is one of the City's hidden delights — a niche contains a carved stone head of Canon Mortlock by Jacob Epstein; Mortlock gave the eulogy at Epstein's funeral in 1959. The tower holds a ring of six bells cast by Mears and Stainbank in 1960, recast from the mixed peal — the earliest dating back to 1671 — that had all cracked in the bombing of 1941.

The organ has a pedigree as wandering as the church's name. Built by John Harris (son of the great Renatus Harris) and John Byfield in 1731 for St Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange, it moved when that church was demolished in 1840 to its replacement, St Bartholomew Moor Lane, in 1841; when that church was demolished in 1902, the organ went in 1904 to St Alban-the-Martyr in Fulham; and finally, in 1959, it came to St Vedast's, where Noel Mander restored and enlarged it in 1962, re-using the Harris case. It possesses one of the oldest soundboards still in use in the country. Its predecessor — a J. W. Walker organ of 1853, enlarged and moved to the east end in 1885, which had itself replaced a Crang & Hancock instrument of 1774 — was destroyed in the incendiary raid of 10 May 1941.

Designated Grade I on 4 January 1950, with the rectory listed Grade II in 1998, St Vedast-alias-Foster remains an active church of the City: Hawksmoor's dancing spire above, Dykes Bower's gilded ceiling and trompe-l'oeil perspective within, Epstein and Feibusch in the courtyard and rectory — three centuries of London's best artists gathered under the name of a French saint nobody can quite pronounce.