The Pepys Connection

On my final morning in London I walked to the City again but this time I had two definite objectives in mind. The photo above shows Lovat Lane which runs from Eastcheap down to Lower Thames St and gives a real feel of the historic City. It is still cobbled and down the centre where there are two lines of cobblestones would once have run an open sewer. All the photos will enlarge if you click on them.

My first objective was the church of St Olave, Hart St. My reason for visiting it was that the sister of one of my husband's ancestors was baptized here in 1794. Once inside I discovered that it had much more important connections than 4xGt Aunt Matilda!

St Olave's was the church that Samuel Pepys attended when he lived and worked at the Navy Office on Seething Lane which runs along the back of St Olave's. The photograph shows the Pepys Memorial which marks the site of the Navy Office pew, this was in a gallery above the main church. At the end of May each year there is a Commemoration service (Pepys died on May 26th 1703) and a laurel wreath is placed on the Memorial.

This is the memorial that Pepys commissioned after the death of his wife Elizabeth in 1669 at the age of 29. She is looking directly across to the Navy Office pew where her husband would have sat each Sunday. Samuel and Elizabeth are buried together at the East end of the church 'under the Communion table' according to the burial register.

This lovely monument is to Dame Anne Radcliffe who died in 1585.

A rather splendid memorial to Sir James Deane with his three wives. He was a merchant adventurer who made a fortune in India,China and the Spice Islands. He was a very generous benefactor to the poor of all the parishes he had lived in. He died in 1608 and was survived by his third wife .

A detail of the pulpit which is believed to have been carved by the renowned sculptor and wood carver Grinling Gibbons

The rear of the church is a pleasant little refuge from the City streets. Look at the photo closely and notice that there are steps leading down to the South door - this is because the level of the churchyard has risen due to the thousands of burials that have taken place here! There is a plague pit here too, during the Great Plague of London (1665-1666) people were dying at such a rate that there was no time for individual burials and bodies were simply thrown into a pit. A nicer story though is an entry in the burial register in 1586 for a lady known as 'Mother Goose'. She used to knit little boots for her geese so that their feet wouldn't get sore as they were herded to market. Isn't that a lovely story?

The somewhat forbidding entrance into the churchyard from Seething Lane. Built in 1658 these became the gates of 'St Ghastly Grim' in Charles Dickens' book The Uncommercial Traveller. It was fine on a hot, sunny day but I don't think I'd fancy going through there on a dark, wet winter's night!

Directly across the road from the skull ornamented gate is the little garden that marks the site of the Navy Office where Samuel Pepys worked and lived. The stone with the blue plaque on is virtually hidden by the shrubs so I thought I'd better do a close up of it.

St Botolph Bishopsgate was the second of my objectives, my husbands ancestors were being baptized and buried here for over 100 years, the earliest baptism is in 1715 and the latest burial in 1846. The burial ground was turned into a garden in 1863 so there are no graves to find unfortunately.

This is the interior which survived both the Great Fire and the Blitz but was badly damaged by an IRA bomb in 1993 which opened up the roof and destroyed all the doors and windows.

This lovely window was commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Bowyers to mark the restoration of the church.

The eighteenth century font where so many of my husband's ancestors were baptized. The poet John Keats was baptized here as well in 1795.

St Stephen Walbrook is tucked away on a little side street and though it was closed when I passed by on Sunday I was able to go inside on Monday morning. This is another of Wren's churches and he actually lived next door to this one.

The interior is spacious and full of light, the altar in the centre of the church is by Henry Moore and is a rather controversial addition. I really like it which is rather odd as I'm not usually an admirer of modern art. It's utter simplicity seems to fit beautifully into this particular interior though. The marble for the altar came from the quarry near Rome that was used by Michelangelo.

The lovely dome was the first of its kind in any English church and was a sort of trial run for Wren's masterpiece - the dome of St Paul's Cathedral.

Just around the corner from St Stephen's Walbrook is the Temple of Mithras. It was only discovered in 1954 and was actually on Walbrook originally but it was moved to Queen Victoria St as the original site was destined to become office blocks.

By this time I needed to be heading back to my hotel to pick up my suitcase ready for the journey home. On the way though I wanted to try and find Ely Place which is technically still part of Cambridgeshire as it was originally the site of the London Palace of the Bishops of Ely. The entrance to Ely Place is gated and a beadle oversees the comings and goings of people and traffic. As you walk down there is a tiny alley on the left and if you go down the alley you will find this tiny pub. The Mitre was originally built for the servants from the Bishop's Palace but the present building dates from the 1700s in spite of the date on the lantern.

Tucked away at the end of Ely Place is the 13th century church of St Etheldreda once the private chapel of the Bishop's Palace. It is the oldest Roman Catholic church in England.

Around the walls of the church are the statues of eight martyrs who died for their faith during the Reformation. This is St Anne Line, a seamstress executed at Tyburn in 1601 for sheltering a priest.

Here we have John Roche, a Thames waterman executed at Tyburn in 1588 for helping a priest to escape.

The Crypt is thought to date back to the 6th century, there are massive wooden beams and the walls are eight feet thick. It is still in use as a chapel and the font is down here.I think that the two statues in the window embrasures are St Francis and Our Lady.  It was very dark down there so the other photos I took  are too murky to post.
You'll be glad to know that this is the final London post:) It's rather long but as I said in my previous post I use my blog as a record of the places I've visited.

This will be my last post for 3 weeks or so as on Saturday I'm off to visit my elder son and his family in South Africa. If you look for White River on the map that's where my daughter and I will be staying. DH gets to stay home with B Baggins:)

We're hoping to see plenty of these....

.....and lots of spectacular places like this - Mac Mac Falls near Sabie. I'll be back towards the end of March and hopefully will have some interesting photos to share with you.

Fleet St to The Strand

This is yet another of Sir Christopher Wren's London churches - St Bride's, Fleet St. It's often known as the Wedding Cake church because the spire is said to be the inspiration for the tiered wedding cakes that have graced so many wedding receptions over the years. Samuel Pepys lived nearby as a child and he and his eight brothers and sisters were all baptized here. St Bride's was another victim of the bombing on December 29th 1940. Firebombs reduced it to a shell and only the spire and the outer walls remain from Wren's church. As ever you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

The interior was rebuilt after the war using Wren's original plans and the church is now light and pleasant and has a well known choir who were practising when I went in. I didn't go right into the church because of this.

Instead I went down into the crypt where there is a fascinating museum. The first church on this site was built in the 6th century and before that there had been a Roman building, you can see a section of Roman pavement and remains of all the churches that have stood here over the last 1500 years - archaeologists discovered all this during excavations done when St Bride's was being rebuilt in the 1960s. The crypt was, of course, originally a medieval charnel house and the bones of several thousand people are still there in a bricked up chamber.

On that rather gruesome note we'll move on to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, this famous old pub has been here since 1667 when it replaced the original inn which was burned down in the Great Fire. Unfortunately it is closed on Sundays so I wasn't able to get any photos of the interior which I gather is well worth seeing. Among those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese in their time are Samuel Pepys, Charles Dickens, Voltaire, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde and US President  Theodore  Roosevelt. This view is of the side entrance which is on a narrow alley leading off Fleet St.

When you turn into the alley called Wine Office Court you will see this sign fixed on to the wall of the Cheshire Cheese. Dr Johnson's advice is very sound, exploring the little alleys and courts leads to all kinds of interesting discoveries.

Wine Office Court opens out into Gough Square where Dr Johnson lived. He was the author of the very first English Dictionary published in 1755. This is a memorial to his cat Hodge ' a very fine cat indeed'. Regrettably the best photo of Hodge is also graced by my shadow:) Dr Johnson's house was covered in scaffolding and closed for renovations so what with that and the Cheshire Cheese being closed I think another visit to Fleet St on a Saturday is indicated!

Another reason to return to Fleet St. This is the entrance to the Temple church which is open between 1pm and 4pm Sunday afternoons and it was much later than that by the time I passed by.   I would really love to go in here, it was built by the Knights Templar in the 12th century and I believe there are some wonderful 13th century effigies inside. It featured in the Da Vinci Code too. It's no use - I've just got to go London again!

"Oranges and Lemons say the bells of St Clement's"
The spire of St Clement Danes which stands on a little island in the middle of the Strand. The bells of this church ring out the tune of the old nursery rhyme. St Clement's was another victim of the Blitz and all except one of the bells had to be recast. The sole survivor was the Sanctus Bell which was cast in 1588 and it is still ringing out over London 400 years later.

I don't know how well the name Twinings is known overseas but in the UK it's been associated with high quality tea for over 300 years. Thomas Twining (1675-1741) founded Twinings by purchasing the original Toms Coffee House at the back of this site in 1706, where he introduced tea. In 1717 he opened the Golden Lyon here as a shop to sell tea and coffee and Twinings has been been here ever since.

Thomas Twining's grandson was responsible for the building of this doorway which incorporated the golden lion symbol. You can also see the Royal Warrant - Twinings are suppliers of tea and coffee to the Queen.
By this time it was 6pm and  I'd been walking since 9am with just a short break to have some lunch so I turned up Chancery Lane and made my way back to my hotel in Bloomsbury for a nice refreshing shower  and then a leisurely dinner.

The Square Mile and Beyond

This is yet another post about my visit to London last year, I thought I'd better try and get the rest of them done before I go away in a couple of weeks. I use my blog as a record of places I've visited and things I've done so this is for my benefit really while I can still remember it:) It's worth clicking on many of the photographs as you will see much more detail that way.

The area around St Paul's Cathedral is always busy whatever the season or day of the week but if you walk round to the back you will find yourself in the quiet oasis of Paternoster Square. Prior to WW2 a street called Paternoster Row stood here, it was the centre of the London publishing trade and had been since the early eighteenth century. However on the night of December 29th 1940 the whole of this area was devastated during the Blitz and the offices and stores of twenty-seven publishing firms were destroyed and several million books went up in flames. Paternoster Square was part of the post war rebuilding programme and the elegant Corinthian coloumn you can see in the photo above is, I believe,  a memorial to the books that were lost.

This famous photograph of St Paul's Cathedral was taken on the same night that Paternoster Row was destroyed.

 Paternoster Square is now home to  the original Temple Bar a stone arch built of Portland stone completed in 1672 and reputedly designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Temple Bar was one of the entrances or gates through which people and traffic had to pass into the City. If you look you can see the gates (replicas I should think) which were closed at curfew every night. It originally stood where Fleet Street now meets the Strand, the photograph at the beginning of an earlier post shows the dragon that marks the boundary these days.

I don't suppose that Smithfield is the first place you'd think of heading to after leaving the area around St Paul's but if you pass under Temple Bar, cross Newgate St and walk down King Edward St and Little Britain you will eventually see this lovely old building. It is the entrance to one of London's hidden gems - The Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great. The stone archway was the entrance to the south aisle of the original 13th century church. This part of the church was destroyed on the orders of Henry VIII during the Dissolution of the Monasteries but the choir and transepts were allowed to remain as the parish church.

This is the other side of the gateway showing the back of the little Tudor house that was built on top of the original stone archway in 1559. It was one of the few timber-framed buildings to survive The Great Fire of London. I love this little house.

The font dates from 1405 and the painter William Hogarth was baptized here in 1697. His works include The Rake's Progress and Marriage a la Mode, he is very famous and much admired but not by me:) The architect Inigo Jones was also baptized here in 1573.

This is the tomb of Prior Rahere, former courtier and minstrel to Henry I, who founded an Augustinian priory on this site in 1123.At the same time he founded a hospital for the sick poor nearby and that became the world famous St Bartholomew's Hospital. Better known as Bart's, it still stands on its original site and is the oldest hospital in London.

Part of the original cloister still survives and is now in use as a small cafe which was unfortunately closed during my visit - it was a very hot day and a cold drink would have been welcome.

St Bartholomew's has one of the finest Norman interiors in London, this is the ambulatory with its wonderful Norman pillars and vaulted ceiling. It encircles the main body of the church, the high altar is on the right and the entrance to the Lady Chapel is on the left. The church has had a somewhat chequered history over the years and at one point the Lady Chapel housed a printers where Benjamin Franklin, one of the men who drafted the American Declaration of Independence, was employed.

To north  side of St Bartholomew's is a street called Cloth Fair once the site of the  St Bartholomew Fair which was one of the great annual events of medieval London and a source of considerable income for the Priory from tolls levied on the goods for sale. Originally the fair was just for clothiers and drapers (from which came the name Cloth Fair) but after the Dissolution the fair moved into Smithfield and became a more of a funfair with a very dubious reputation. It was finally closed down in 1855 because it 'encouraged debauchery and disorder' - so much for the Good Old Days! The two houses in the photo are Nos 41 & 42 Cloth Fair built between 1592 and 1614 and they too are survivors of the Fire of London.

I think that quite a lot of people know that the Great Fire of London started in Pudding Lane near the Monument but I wonder how many are aware of this monument marking the place where it finally burned itself out? This is the junction of Cock Lane and Giltspur St and originally the monument was fixed to the front of an ancient pub called The Fortune of War which was demolished in 1910. I had no idea it existed until I walked past it and stopped to read the inscriptions.

This is close up of The Golden Boy, you will need to click on the photo and also the one below if you want to read the words of the inscription.

This is well worth enlarging and reading! Bear in mind that both the churchyard and Barts Hospital are very close by - Barts is literally just across the road.

If you walk down to the bottom of Giltspur St you are back on Newgate with the Old Bailey opposite. This is the Central Criminal Court of England, it was built in the early 1900s and stands on the site of the infamous Newgate Prison. To the right of the modern building is the street called Old Bailey and it is here that public executions took place until 1868. These executions drew huge crowds and they were regarded as a source of considerable entertainment.

The golden statue of Justice on the top of the Old Bailey, she carries a double edged sword in her right hand and the scales of justice in her left. A walk down Old Bailey will bring us back onto Lugate Hill where we turn right and head towards Fleet St but that had better be for next time:)