Discovery of a Roman pavement under the church in 1953 enabled archaeologists to set up a timeline for St Bride’s.
ST BRIDE’S CHURCH, FLEET STREET
St Bride’s Church is the embodiment of London history. It is the site of at least seven buildings of worship, the first Roman, then Saxon, followed by Norman churches. The largest and last of these, built in the fourteenth century, was destroyed by the Great Fire in 1666. Replaced triumphantly by a Wren masterpiece, this church was wrecked in the Blitz on the night of 29 December 1940.
St Bride’s timeline is long and its layers are deep, but they were only revealed in detail when work began to rebuild the ruined Wren church. This led to the first proper archaeological excavation of any City of London church. Under St Bride’s, a fragment of Roman pavement and wall were found, as well as the nave of the Saxon church. At the same time, the crypts were found to contain more than 200 skeletons, some of them victims of the Great Plague of 1665, others from the cholera epidemic of 1854, following which the crypts were sealed by Act of Parliament. Another separate set of remains, numbering thousands of bones, was uncovered and this was identified as the site of a medieval charnel house. The bones and the metal coffins from the crypt are still being analysed today.
Discovery of a Roman pavement under the church in 1953 enabled archaeologists to set up a timeline for St Bride’s.
St Bride’s position as the journalists’ and printers’ church dates back to 1500, just after the death of William Caxton, inventor of the moveable type printing press. An apprentice of his, Wynkyn de Worde, acquired his master’s press, and set up shop in the churchyard of St Bride’s. It was a good location to supply printed pages to nearby offices of the legal profession and to publishers of plays and books. Newspapers came two hundred years after that. St Brides, just a few paces from Fleet Street, became the parish church of the local industry: printing and journalism.
Restoration of the ruined St Bride’s started in 1954. The octagonal wedding cake steeple had survived, and the walls still stood but the rest of the church was gutted, and the bells had melted. Only the medieval gospel lectern, which had survived the Great Fire of 1666, was rescued by parishioners in 1940. Restoration by Wren expert Godfrey Allen was faithful to the original but not slavish. The galleries over the aisles were not replaced. The scientifically minded Wren favoured plain glass and this style was followed, only one significant new window being stained glass.
The floor of the nave is paved with black marble from Belgium and white marble from Italy. The entire interior was built during the 1954–7 restoration.
As St Bride’s was completed and rededicated in December 1957, Fleet Street was approaching its high-water mark. Newspaper circulation was booming. The street and the area around were a densely packed concentration of print journalism. National newspapers with roaring presses in the basements stood alongside humming wire services and outposts of provincial newspapers and foreign publications. In smaller offices lurked picture bureaux and features agencies, and obscure trade publications were seemingly packed into broom cupboards. The support infrastructure, in the form of drinking establishments and feeding stations, was highly active, witness to long lunches and scoops celebrated. Close to the middle of it all, St Bride’s fitted rather well into the teeming scene, a spiritual home of a sometimes unspiritual profession.
But by the end of the 1970s, new print technology caused a convulsion, which forced the media occupants of Fleet Street and the nearby areas to disperse and decline. In Fleet Street proper, the Daily Telegraph and Daily Express had left before the end of the 1980s, and accountants and corporate lawyers started moving in. St Bride’s closest journalistic neighbour, the Reuters news agency, lingered until 2005. That building is now Lutyens Restaurant. Across the street, the Daily Express building is now occupied by investment bank Goldman Sachs. St Bride’s the journalists’ church has outlived most journalism in Fleet Street, but thrives as a place of worship, and continues as spiritual home of the media through a charitable trust, memorials to reporters killed in action and a permanent exhibition in the crypt.
St Bride’s is riddled with so much history across 1,500 years that it is surprising how many artefacts remain, some from Roman times. Its name is Celtic, from St Bridget of Kildare, a fifth-century Irish saint famous for her hospitality. An early American connection is visible by the font in the form of the bust of a girl, Virginia Dare, the first child born to English emigrants to North Carolina in August 1585, who were married at the church. Another is the altarpiece memorial to the Pilgrim Fathers; one of the passengers aboard the Mayflower was Edward Winslow, later three-times Governor of Plymouth Massachusetts, who was a former Fleet Street printer’s apprentice, and would have known St Bride’s well. Some elements are unseen, however, and must be imagined. These include illustrious parishioners John Milton, John Dryden and Samuel Pepys, who was baptized there, and also Benjamin Franklin, who acted as a technical consultant on the design of the lightning conductors for the spire when it was being built.