The City
The City is where London began. It was here, nearly two thousand years ago that the Romans first established a settlement on the Thames; later the medieval city emerged as the country’s most important trading centre; and it remains one of the world’s leading financial hubs. When you consider what’s happened here, it’s amazing that anything has survived. Yet there are Roman remains, Wren’s spires still punctuate the skyline, as does his masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral. Other relics, such as the City’s few remaining medieval alleyways are less conspicuous, and even the locals have problems finding the Museum of London and the Barbican arts complex. By contrast, the City’s modern architecture is difficult to miss, from Richard Rogers’ mould-breaking Lloyd’s Building and Norman Foster’s eye-catching Gherkin to the latest batch of skyscrapers.
The City currently stretches from Temple Bar in the west to the Tower of London in the east – administrative boundaries only slightly larger than those marked by the Roman walls and their medieval successors. However, in this Square Mile (as the City is often called) you’ll have to dig hard to find leftovers of London’s early days: four-fifths of the area burnt down in the Great Fire. What you see on the ground is mostly the product of three fairly recent building phases: the Victorian construction boom; the rapid reconstruction that followed the Blitz; and the building frenzy that began in the late1980s, and which has since seen over half the City’s office space rebuilt.
The biggest change of all, though, has been in the City’s population. Until the eighteenth century, the vast majority of Londoners lived and worked in or around the City; nowadays, while more than 350,000 commuters spend Monday to Friday here, only ten thousand actually live here, mostly cooped up in the Barbican complex. The result of this shift is that the City is only fully alive during office hours, with many pubs, restaurants and even some tube stations and tourist sights closing at the weekend.
THE CORPORATION
The one unchanging aspect of the City is its special status, conferred on the
area by William the Conqueror to win favour with London’s powerful burghers, and
extended and reaffirmed by successive rulers ever since. Even today, with its
own Lord Mayor, its Beadles, Sheriffs and Aldermen, its separate police force
and its select electorate of freemen and liverymen, the City is an
anachronistic, one-party mini-state. It’s run by the City
of London Corporation (
cityoflondon.gov.uk), an unreconstructed old-boys network whose
medievalist pageantry camouflages the very real power and wealth that it holds.
Its anomalous status is all the more baffling when you consider that the area
was an early bastion of British democracy: it was the City that traditionally
stood up to bullying sovereigns.
Fleet Street
Fleet Street offers one of the grandest approaches to the City, thanks to the view across to Ludgate Hill and beyond to St Paul’s Cathedral, but it’s best known for its associations with the printed press and particularly the newspaper industry.
THE FLEET STREET PRESS
Fleet Street’s associations with the printed press began in 1500, when Wynkyn de Worde, William Caxton’s apprentice (and the first man to print italics), moved the Caxton presses from Westminster to Fleet Street to be close to the lawyers of the Inns of Court (his best customers) and to the clergy of St Paul’s, London’s largest literate group. In 1702, the world’s first daily newspaper, the now defunct Daily Courant, began publishing here, and by the nineteenth century, all the major national and provincial dailies had moved their presses to the area. Then in 1985, Britain’s first colour tabloid, Today, appeared, using computer technology that rendered the Fleet Street presses obsolete. It was left to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch to take on the printers’ unions in a bitter year-long dispute that changed the newspaper industry for ever.
The press headquarters that once dominated the area have all now relocated, leaving just a handful of small publications and a few architectural landmarks to testify to five hundred years of printing history. The former Daily Telegraph building, at nos. 135–141, is one of London’s few truly Art Deco edifices, built in a Greco-Egyptian style in 1928, with a striking polychrome clock and a great stone relief above the doorway depicting Mercury’s messengers sending news around the world. It was upstaged a few years later, however, by the city’s first glass curtain-wall construction, the former Daily Express building at no. 127, with its sleek black Vitrolite facade. It’s worth peering inside the cinema-like foyer, which features a silver-leaf sunburst ceiling, ocean-wave floor tiles, shiny silver serpent handrails and remarkable chrome and gold relief panels extolling the British Empire.
There’s a tiled wall in Magpie Alley, off Bouverie Street, which
illustrates the history of Fleet Street’s presses, and some metal
information panels nearby in the windows of the old Daily
Mail building at Ashentree Court, off Whitefriars Street.
Another account of Fleet Street’s history is the exhibition in the crypt of
St Bride’s Church (Mon–Fri 9am–6pm, Sat
11am–3pm, Sun 10am–6.30pm; free; 
020 7427 0133, stbrides.com), the “journalists’
and printers’ cathedral”, situated behind the former Reuters building. The
church also boasts Wren’s tallest, and most exquisite, spire (said to be the
inspiration for the traditional tiered wedding cake).
Temple Bar
Temple Bar, at the western end of Fleet Street, is the latest in a long line of structures marking the boundary between the City of Westminster and the City of London. It began as a simple chain between two posts, but a Wren-designed triumphal arch stood here by the 1670s. The heads of executed traitors were displayed on the arch until the mid-eighteenth century – one could even rent a telescope for a closer look. Then, in 1878, the arch was removed to ease traffic, exiled for over a century to a park in Hertfordshire, only to be re-erected recently near St Paul’s. The current monument, topped by a winged dragon, marks the spot where the sovereign must ask for the Lord Mayor’s permission to enter the City, a tradition that began when Elizabeth I passed through on her way to St Paul’s to give thanks for the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
St Dunstan-in-the-West
186a Fleet St • Mon–Fri 9.30am–5pm • 020 7405 1929, stdunstaninthewest.org • _test777
Temple or Blackfriars
The church of St Dunstan-in-the-West, with a distinctive neo-Gothic tower and lantern, from the 1830s, dominates the top of Fleet Street. To the side is the much earlier clock temple, erected in 1671 by the parishioners in thanks for escaping the Great Fire, which stopped just short of the church; inside the temple, the legendary British giants Gog and Magog, in gilded loincloths, nod their heads and clang their bells on the hour. The statue of Queen Elizabeth I, in a niche in the vestry wall, and the crumbling statues of the legendary King Lud and his two sons in the porch, originally stood over Ludgate, the City gateway that once stood halfway up Ludgate Hill. The church’s unusual, octagonal, neo-Gothic interior features a huge wooden iconostasis, used during the regular Romanian Orthodox services.
Dr Johnson’s House
17 Gough Square • Mon–Sat: May–Sept 11am–5.30pm; Oct–April
11am–5pm • £4.50 • 020 7353 3745, drjohnsonshouse.org • _test777 Blackfriars
Numerous narrow alleyways lead off the north side of Fleet Street beyond Fetter Lane, concealing legal chambers and offices. Two of the narrow alleyways that lead north off Fleet Street – Bolt Court and Hind Court – eventually open out into cobbled Gough Square, which features a statue of Dr Johnson’s cat, Hodge, enjoying an oyster. The square’s one authentic eighteenth-century building is Dr Johnson’s House, where the great savant, writer and lexicographer lived from 1748 to 1759 while compiling the 41,000 entries for his very successful English dictionary.
Johnson rented the house on Gough Square with the £1575 advance he received for the dictionary. Despite his subsequent fame, Johnson was in and out of debt all his life – his bestselling romance, Rasselas, was written in less than a week to raise funds for his mother’s funeral. The house itself is a lovely Georgian period piece peppered with quotes by the great man and portraits of his contemporaries, including Johnson’s servant Francis Barber, to whom he left most of his worldly goods. On the second floor, you can watch a film on Johnson’s life, after which you get to see the open-plan attic, in which Johnson and his six clerks put together the dictionary, and where kids can try on some replica Georgian garb.
Ludgate Circus
Fleet Street terminates at Ludgate Circus, built in the 1870s to replace a bridge over the River Fleet, which had already been buried under the roads after a drunken butcher got stuck in the river mud and froze to death. The Fleet originally marked the western boundary of the walled City, and was once an unmissable feature of the landscape, as the tanneries and slaughterhouses of Smithfield, to the north, used to turn the water red with entrails. The Fleet’s western bank was the site of the notoriously inhumane Fleet Prison, where the poet John Donne was imprisoned in 1601 for marrying without his father-in-law’s consent. Until 1754, Fleet Prison was renowned for its clandestine “Fleet Marriages”, performed by priests (or impostors) who were imprisoned there for debt. These marriages, in which couples could marry without a licence, attracted people of all classes, and took place in the prison chapel until 1710, when they were banished to the neighbouring taverns, the fee being split between clergyman and innkeeper.
St Paul’s Cathedral
Cathedral Mon–Sat 8.30am–4.30pm; galleries Mon–Sat 9.30am–4.15pm • £16 (£14.50 online) • 020 7236 4128, stpauls.co.uk • _test777 St Paul’s
The enormous lead-covered dome of St Paul’s Cathedral has dominated the City skyline since it was built after the Great Fire – and remains so despite the encroaching tower blocks. Its showpiece west facade is particularly magnificent, fronted by a wide flight of steps, a double-storey portico and two of London’s most Baroque towers. While it can’t compete with Westminster Abbey for celebrity corpses, pre-Reformation sculpture, royal connections and sheer atmosphere, St Paul’s is nevertheless a perfectly calculated architectural space, a burial place for captains rather than kings, artists not poets, and a popular wedding venue for the privileged few (including Charles and Diana).
The current building is the fifth on this site, its immediate predecessor being Old St Paul’s, a huge Gothic cathedral built by the Normans, whose 489ft spire (destroyed by lightning in 1561) was one of the wonders of medieval Europe. St Paul’s was just one of over fifty church commissions Christopher Wren received in the wake of the Great Fire. Hassles over his initial plans, and wrangles over money plagued the project throughout, but Wren remained unruffled and the world’s first Protestant cathedral was officially completed in 1710 under Queen Anne, whose statue stands below the steps. The cathedral achieved iconic status during the Blitz, when it stood defiantly unscathed amid the carnage (as in the famous wartime propaganda photo), and a monument to the south of the cathedral commemorates both the St Paul’s Watch –volunteers who patrolled the cathedral roof every night to combat the incendiary bombs – and all those firefighters who have died since while carrying out their duties.
SAMUEL PEPYS
Born to a humble tailor and a laundress in Salisbury Court, off Fleet Street, Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) was baptized in St Bride’s and buried in St Olave’s, having spent virtually his entire life in London. Family connections secured an education at St Paul’s School, a scholarship to Cambridge and a career in the civil service. He was an MP, served as Secretary to the Admiralty, and was instrumental in the establishment of a professional British navy. In 1679 he was imprisoned for six weeks in the Tower on suspicion of treason, but returned to office, only to be forced out again in 1689, following the overthrow of James II.
Of course, it’s not Pepys’ career, but his diaries, written between 1660 and 1669, that have immortalized him. This rollicking journal includes eyewitness accounts of the Restoration, the Great Plague and the Great Fire, giving an unparalleled insight into London life at the time. Ultimately, Pepys emerges from the pages, warts and all, as an eminently likeable character, who seems almost imperturbable – he gives as much space to details of his pub meals as he does to the Great Fire, and finishes most entries with his catchphrase “and so to bed”.
Pepys was also a notorious womanizer, detailing his philanderings in his diary in a mixture of Spanish, Italian and French so as to avoid detection by his French Huguenot wife. Nevertheless he was caught in flagrante with their maid, and his slow reconciliation with his spouse is recorded in a novelist’s detail, the diary ending in 1669 as they sail off to the Continent to patch things up. In the event, his wife died later that year and he never remarried. Pepys bequeathed his vast library to his old college in Cambridge, where his diaries lay undiscovered until the nineteenth century, when they were finally published (with the erotic passages omitted) in 1825.
INFORMATION AND TOURS
Entry Admission charges are nothing new at St Paul’s – they were first introduced in 1709, before the cathedral was even finished. Once inside, pick up a free plan, and simply ask the vergers if you’re having trouble locating a particular monument; alternatively, multimedia guides are available free of charge.
Tours Introductory talks run regularly throughout the day, and there are
longer guided tours (1hr 30min) that allow you access to one or two
areas off limits to the public, setting off at 10.45am, 11.15am, 1.30pm
and 2pm. If you’re in a group of five or more, you can also pay an extra
£8 each to go on a full-on behind-the-scenes triforium tour (Mon &
Tues 11.30am & 2pm, Fri 2pm; book in advance on 020 7246
8357).
Services It’s worth attending one of the cathedral’s services, if only to hear the choir, who perform during most evensongs (Mon–Sat 5pm), and on Sundays at 10.15am, 11.30am and 3.15pm. Strictly speaking, on Sundays St Paul’s is only open for services and consequently there’s no admission charge. However, in between services, you’re free to wander round the cathedral and crypt (though not the galleries).
The Interior
Queen Victoria thought the nave “dirty, dark and undevotional”, though since the destruction of the stained glass in the Blitz, it is once again light and airy, as Wren intended. Burials are confined to the crypt, and memorials were only permitted after 1790 when overcrowding at Westminster Abbey had become intolerable. Unfortunately, what followed was a series of overblown funerary monuments to the military heroes of the Napoleonic Wars. Some are simply ludicrous, like the virtually naked statue of Captain Burges, in the south aisle, holding hands with an angel over a naval cannon; others are more offensive, such as the monument to Thomas Fanshaw Middleton, first Protestant Bishop of India, depicted baptizing “heathen” locals. The best of the bunch are Flaxman’s Nelson memorial, in the south transept, with its seasick lion, and, in the north aisle, the bombastic bronze and marble monument – the cathedral’s largest – to the Duke of Wellington, begun in 1857 but only topped with the statue of the duke astride his faithful steed, Copenhagen, in 1912. Both men are buried in the crypt.
The best place from which to appreciate the glory of St Paul’s is beneath the dome, which was decorated (against Wren’s wishes) by Thornhill’s monochrome trompe-l’oeil frescoes, now rather upstaged by the adjacent gilded spandrels. St Paul’s most famous work of art, however, hangs in the north transept: the crushingly symbolic Light of the World by the Pre-Raphaelite Holman Hunt, depicting Christ knocking at the handleless, bramble-strewn door of the human soul, which must be opened from within. The original is actually in Keble College, Oxford, though this copy was executed by the artist himself, some fifty years later in 1900.
ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL
The chancel
By far the most richly decorated section of the cathedral is the chancel, in particular the spectacular, swirling, gilded Byzantine-style mosaics of birds, fish, animals and greenery, from the 1890s. The intricately carved oak and limewood choir stalls, and the imposing organ case, are the work of Grinling Gibbons. The north choir-aisle contains Henry Moore’s Mother and Child sculpture and allows you to admire Jean Tijou’s ornate black-and-gold wrought-iron gates that separate the aisles from the high altar. The latter features an extravagant Baroque baldachin, held up by barley-sugar columns and wrapped round with gilded laurel, created after the war to a design by Wren. Behind the high altar stands the American Memorial Chapel, dedicated to the 28,000 Americans based in Britain who lost their lives in World War II (check out the space rocket hidden in the carved wooden foliage of the far right-hand panel, a tribute to America’s postwar space exploration). Leaving via the south choir-aisle, you’ll find the upstanding shroud of John Donne, poet, preacher and one-time Dean of St Paul’s, the only complete effigy to have survived from Old St Paul’s.
The galleries
From the south transept, a series of stairs lead to the dome’s three galleries, and they’re well worth the climb. The initial 259 steps take you to the Whispering Gallery, so called because of its acoustic properties – words whispered to the wall on one side are audible 100ft away on the other, though it’s often so busy you can’t hear much above the hubbub. Another 119 steps up bring you to the exterior Stone Gallery, around the base of the dome, while the final 152 steel steps take you inside the dome’s inner structure to the Golden Gallery, just below the golden ball and cross which top the cathedral. The views of the City and along the Thames are surprisingly good – you should be able to identify the distinctive white facade of Wren’s London house, next to the Globe Theatre, from which he could contemplate his masterpiece. Before you ascend the last flight of stairs, be sure to look through the peephole in the floor, onto the monochrome marble floor beneath the dome, a truly terrifying sight.
The crypt
The entrance to the cathedral’s vast crypt is on your left as you leave the south choir-aisle. The whitewashed walls make this one of the least atmospheric mausoleums you could imagine – a far cry from the nineteenth century, when visitors were shown around the tombs by candlelight.
The crypt boasts as many painters and architects as Westminster Abbey has poets, most of them stuffed into the southern aisle, known as Artists’ Corner. Appropriately enough, it was Wren himself who started the trend, with a tomb inscribed: “lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice” (reader, if you seek his monument, look around). Close to Wren are the graves of Reynolds, Turner, Millais, Holman Hunt, Lord Leighton and Alma-Tadema; nearby there’s a bust of Van Dyck, whose monument perished along with Old St Paul’s. Over in the north aisle is the grave of Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin.
The crypt’s two star tombs – those of Nelson and Wellington – occupy centre stage. Wellington’s porphyry and granite monstrosity is set in its own mini-chapel, surrounded by memorials to illustrious British field marshals, while Nelson lies in a black marble sarcophagus originally designed for Cardinal Wolsey and later intended for Henry VIII and his third wife, Jane Seymour. As at Trafalgar Square, Nelson lies close to later admirals Jellicoe and Beatty (the last person to be buried in the cathedral, in 1936). Beyond are the cathedral shop, a café and the exit.
THE CITY’S CHURCHES
The City of London is crowded with churches, the majority of them built or rebuilt by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire. Prompted by the decline in the City’s population, the Victorians demolished a fair few, but over forty remain intact. The opening times given in the text should be taken with a pinch of salt, since most rely on volunteers to keep their doors open. As a general rule, weekday lunchtimes are the best time to visit, since many City churches put on free lunchtime concerts. Here is a list of the six most interesting:
St Bartholomew-the-Great Cloth Fair. This is the oldest surviving pre-Fire church in the City and by far the most atmospheric. It was also the first church in the country to charge an entrance fee.
St Mary Abchurch Abchurch Lane. Uniquely for Wren’s City churches, the interior features a huge, painted, domed ceiling, plus the only authenticated Gibbons reredos.
St Mary Aldermary Bow Lane/Queen Victoria St. Wren’s most successful stab at Gothic, with fan vaulting in the aisles and a panelled ceiling in the nave.
St Mary Woolnoth King William St. Hawksmoor’s only City church, sporting an unusually broad, bulky tower and a Baroque clerestory that floods the church with light from its semicircular windows.
St Olave Hart Street. Built in the fifteenth century, and one of the few pre-Fire Gothic churches in the City.
St Stephen Walbrook Walbrook. Wren’s dress rehearsal for St Paul’s, with a wonderful central dome and plenty of original woodcarving.
St Paul’s Churchyard
St Paul’s Churchyard, to the northeast of the cathedral, was also destroyed in the Blitz. The churchyard’s most arresting feature now is a column, erected in 1910, topped by a gilded statue of St Paul, and diplomatically inscribed “amid such scenes of good and evil as make up human affairs, the conscience of the church and nation through five centuries found public utterance”. This is a reference to Paul’s Cross, a polygonal open-air pulpit – its groundplan is marked out in the paving – from which official proclamations and religious speeches were made. Heretics were regularly executed on this spot, and in 1519 Luther’s works were publicly burnt here, before Henry VIII changed sides and demanded the “preaching down” of papal authority from the same spot. The cross was destroyed by the Puritans in 1643.
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
The Blitz destroyed the area immediately to the north of St Paul’s, including Paternoster Row, which had been the centre of the book trade since 1500. The postwar office complex that replaced it was torn down in the 1980s and supplanted by the softer, post-classical development of Paternoster Square, centred on a Corinthian column topped by a gilded urn, and, since 2004, home to the London Stock Exchange. One happy consequence of the square’s redevelopment is that Temple Bar, the last surviving City gateway which once stood at the top of Fleet Street, found its way back to London after a century of languishing in a park in Hertfordshire. Designed by Wren himself, the triumphal arch now forms the entrance to Paternoster Square from St Paul’s, with the Stuart monarchs, James I and Charles II, and their consorts, occupying the niches.
Cheapside
It’s difficult to believe that Cheapside, which connects St Paul’s with Bank, was once London’s foremost shopping street, the widest thoroughfare in the City, and site of the medieval marketplace. Nowadays only the names of the nearby streets – Bread Street, Milk Street, Honey Lane, Poultry – recall its former prominence, which faded when the shops and their customers moved to the West End from the eighteenth century onwards.
One New Change
1 New Change • Mon–Fri 10am–7pm, Sat 10am–6pm, Sun
noon–6pm • onenewchange.com • _test777 St Paul’s
Commerce has recently returned to Cheapside in the form of One New Change, an uncompromisingly modern building by Jean Nouvel, whose opaque brown glass facade is reminiscent of a Stealth bomber. Even if you’ve no interest in the formulaic franchises which fill this multistorey shopping mall, it has one great thing going for it: a sixth-floor, sun-trap roof terrace that’s open to the public, has a few mosaics by Boris Anrep and views over to St Paul’s, Tate Modern and the Shard.
St Mary-le-Bow
Cheapside • Mon–Thurs 7am–6pm, Fri 7am–4pm • 020 7248 5139, stmarylebow.co.uk • _test777 St Paul’s
One of the distinguishing features of Cheapside is Wren’s church of St Mary-le-Bow, whose handsome tower features a conglomeration of pilasters, a circular colonnade, a granite obelisk and a dragon weather vane. The tower also contains postwar replicas of the famous “Bow Bells”, which sounded the 9pm curfew for Londoners from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and within whose earshot all true Cockneys are born. The original interior was totally destroyed in the Blitz and is a postwar re-creation, but the church’s medieval crypt survived and is home to the atmospheric Café Below.
St Mary Aldermary
Bow Lane • Mon–Fri 9am–4.45pm • 020 7248 9902, stmaryaldermary.co.uk • _test777 Mansion House or Bank
At the southern end of Bow Lane lies the church of St Mary Aldermary, whose interior is a rare foray into the perpendicular Gothic style by Wren, based on the original church – the plaster fan-vaults and saucer domes in the aisles are the highlight and, as a bonus, there’s now a great café called Host in the nave. Bow Lane itself is a lovely, narrow, pedestrianized street redolent of the pre-Fire City, jam-packed at weekday lunchtimes with office workers heading for its sandwich bars and pubs.
Blackfriars
Most folk heading south from St Paul’s are aiming for the Millennium Bridge, to cross over the river to Tate Modern and Bankside. However, instead of simply heading for the bridge, it’s worth taking time to venture into the backstreets and alleyways, or go for a stroll along the Riverside Walk which now extends all the way from Blackfriars railway bridge to Tower Bridge.
Blackfriars, the district between Ludgate Hill and the river, is named after the Dominican monastery that stood here until the Dissolution. The monks’ old refectory became Blackfriars Theatre, where Shakespeare and his fellow actors performed in the winter months. Although the area was destroyed in the Great Fire, it suffered little from wartime bombing and remains a warren of alleyways, courtyards and narrow streets, conveying something of the plan of the City before the Victorians, the German bombers and the 1960s brutalists did their worst. The best place to go for a taste of the monastic is The Black Friar, 174 Queen Victoria St, which boasts a fantastically ornate Arts and Crafts pub interior.
Church of Scientology
146 Queen Victoria St • Mon–Fri 9.30am–10pm, Sat & Sun
9.30am–6pm • Free • 020 7246 2700, scientology-london.org • _test777 Blackfriars
Built in the 1860s for the British and Foreign Bible Society, the London headquarters of the Church of Scientology look like an Italian palazzo. If you’re prepared to put up with the slightly creepy attendants, the building itself is worth admiring, and there’s a whole exhibition on L. Ron Hubbard, the American pulp-fiction writer and hypnotist who founded the Scientology cult.
College of Arms
Queen Victoria St • Mon–Fri 10am–4pm • Free • 020 7248 2762, college-of-arms.gov.uk • _test777 Blackfriars or Mansion House
Originally built round a courtyard in the 1670s, the red-brick mansion of the College of Arms was opened up to the south with the building of Queen Victoria Street in the 1870s. The college is the headquarters of heraldry in England, and even today is in charge of granting coats of arms to those who can prove they’ve been “a benefit to the community”. The Earl Marshal’s Court – featuring a gallery, copious wooden panelling and a modest throne – is the only room open to the public, unless you apply to trace your family or study heraldry in the college library.
Old Bailey
Old Bailey • Mon–Fri 10am–1pm & 2–5pm • Free • 020 7248 3277, cityoflondon.gov.uk • _test777 St Paul’s
The Central Criminal Court is better known as the Old Bailey, after the street on which it stands, which used to run along the medieval city walls. The court’s pompous, domed, Edwardian building – “Defend the Children of the Poor & Punish the Wrongdoer” the entrance proclaims – is topped by a gilded statue of Justice, depicted without blindfold, holding her sword and scales. The country’s most serious criminal cases are heard here, and have included, in the past, the trials of Lord Haw-Haw, the Kray Twins, the Angry Brigade, plus all Britain’s multiple murderers. You can watch the proceedings from the visitors’ gallery (no under-14s), but you’re not allowed to take anything into the court (and that includes mobiles) and there’s no cloakroom. Sadly, visitors do not get to see the Grand Hall, with its swirling marble floor and walls, succession of domes and grandiloquent frescoes.
The site of the Old Bailey was originally occupied by Newgate Prison, which began life as a small lock-up above the medieval gateway of Newgate. Burnt down in the 1780 Gordon Riots, it was rebuilt as “a veritable Hell, worthy of the imagination of Dante”, as one of its more famous inmates, Casanova, put it. Earlier well-known temporary residents included Thomas Malory, who wrote Le Morte d’Arthur while imprisoned here for murder (among other things); Daniel Defoe, who was put inside for his The Shortest Way with Dissenters; Ben Jonson, who served time for murder; and Christopher Marlowe, who was on a charge of atheism.
PUBLIC EXECUTIONS AND BODY SNATCHERS
After 1783, when hangings at Tyburn were stopped, public
executions at Newgate began to draw crowds of one hundred
thousand and more. The last public beheading took place here in 1820 when
five Cato Street Conspirators were hanged and decapitated with a surgeon’s knife. It
was in hanging, however, that Newgate excelled, its most efficient gallows
dispatching twenty criminals simultaneously. Unease over the “robbery and
violence, loud laughing, oaths, fighting, obscene conduct and still more
filthy language” that accompanied public hangings drove the executions
inside the prison walls in 1868. The night before an execution, a handbell
was tolled outside the condemned’s cell, while the jailer recited the
Newgate verse that ended: “All you that in the condemned hole do lie/Prepare
you, for tomorrow you shall die… And when St Sepulchre’s bell in the morning
tolls/The Lord above have mercy on your souls.” Until Newgate got its own
bell, the “Great Bell of Old Bailey” was in the church of St Sepulchre (Mon–Fri 11am–3pm; st-sepulchre.org.uk), and
tolled the condemned to the scaffold at eight in the morning. The handbell
and verse are displayed inside the church, opposite the Old Bailey.
The bodies of the executed were handed over to the surgeons of St Bartholomew’s for dissection, but body snatchers also preyed on non-criminals buried in St Sepulchre churchyard. Such was the demand for corpses that relatives were forced to pay a nightwatchman to guard the graveyard in a specially built watch-house – still visible to the north of the church – to prevent the “Resurrection Men” from retrieving their quarry. Successfully stolen stiffs were taken to the nearby Fortune of War tavern, which stood on Pie Corner, by Cock Lane, to be sold to the surgeons. Today, Pie Corner is marked by a gilded overfed cherub known as Fat Boy, who commemorates the “staying of the Great Fire” of 1666, which, when it wasn’t blamed on the Catholics, was ascribed to the sin of gluttony, since it had begun in Pudding Lane and ended at Pie Corner.
Smithfield
The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep with filth and mire; a thick steam perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog.
Originally open ground outside the City walls, Smithfield is a corruption of “Smooth Field”. It was used as a horse fair in Norman times, and later became the site for Bartholomew Fair, established in 1133 by Rahere, prior and founder of St Bartholomew’s priory and hospice to raise funds. Rahere himself used to perform juggling tricks, while Pepys reports seeing a horse counting sixpences and, more reliably, a puppet show of Ben Jonson’s play Bartholomew Fair. Predictably enough, it was the Victorians who closed it down to protect public morals.
The meat market, with which Smithfield is now synonymous, grew up as a kind of adjunct to the fair. Live cattle continued to be herded into Smithfield until 1852, when the fair was suppressed and the abattoirs moved out to Islington. A new covered market hall was erected in 1868, along with the “Winkle”, a spiral ramp at the centre of West Smithfield, linked to the market’s very own (now defunct) tube station. Smithfield subsequently tripled in size and remains London’s main meat market – the action starts around 4am and is all over by noon.
BLOOD AND GUTS AT SMITHFIELD
Blood was spilled at Smithfield long before the meat market was legally sanctioned here in the seventeenth century. The Scottish hero, William Wallace, was dragged behind a horse from the Tower, then hanged, drawn and quartered here in 1305. Most famously, during the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, the poll-tax rebels under Wat Tyler assembled here to negotiate with the boy-king Richard II. At the meeting, Lord Mayor Walworth pulled Tyler from his horse and stabbed him, after which he was bustled into St Bartholomew’s for treatment, only to be dragged out by the king’s men and beheaded.
Smithfield subsequently became a regular venue for public executions. The Bishop of Rochester’s cook was boiled alive in 1531, after being found guilty of poisoning, but the local speciality was burnings. These reached a peak during the reign of “Bloody” Mary in the 1550s, when hundreds of Protestants were burnt at the stake for their beliefs, in revenge for the Catholics who had suffered a similar fate under Henry VIII and Edward VI; a plaque on the side of Bart’s commemorates some of those who died.
St Bartholomew’s Hospital
West Smithfield • Museum Tues–Fri 10am–4pm • Free • Guided tours Fri 2pm; • £5 • 020 3465 5798 • www.bartsandthelondon.nhs.uk • _test777 St Paul’s
St Bartholomew’s Hospital – affectionately known as Bart’s – is the oldest hospital in London. It began as an Augustinian priory and hospice in 1123, founded by Rahere, courtier, clerk and even court jester to Henry I, on the orders of St Bartholomew, who appeared to him in a vision while he was in malarial delirium on a pilgrimage to Rome. The priory was dissolved by Henry VIII, but in 1546, with just two weeks left to live, the king agreed to re-found the hospital.
The Henry VIII Gate, built in 1702, features a statue of the king, with a lame man on the right and a diseased man on the left lounging on the broken pediment above.
Further along, you can make out shrapnel marks left from a 1916 Zeppelin air raid. Behind the Henry VIII Gate stands the church of St Bartholomew-the-Less (daily 7am–8pm), sole survivor of the priory’s four chapels. The tower and vestry are fifteenth century, the octagonal interior is neo-Gothic, though it does contain a Tudor memorial to Elizabeth I’s surgeon. Beyond the church lies three-quarters of The Square created for the hospital by James Gibbs in the mid-eighteenth century, with the Great Hall on the north side, accessed by the Grand Staircase, its walls decorated with biblical murals that were painted free of charge by Hogarth, who was born and baptized nearby and served as one of the hospital’s governors.
You can get a glimpse of the hospital’s Grand Staircase from inside St Bartholomew’s Museum, on the left, under the archway into the courtyard. Among the medical artefacts, there are some fearsome amputation instruments, a pair of leather “lunatic restrainers”, some great jars with labels such as “poison – for external use only”, and a cricket bat autographed by W.G. Grace, who was a student at Bart’s in the 1870s. To see the Great Hall join one of the fascinating weekly guided tours, which take in the surrounding area as well; the meeting point is the Henry VIII Gate.
St Bartholomew-the-Great
Cloth Fair • Mon–Fri 8.30am–5pm, Sat 10.30am–4pm, Sun
8.30am–8pm; mid-Nov to mid-Feb Mon–Sat closes 4pm • £4 • 020 7606 5171, greatstbarts.com • _test777 Barbican
Hidden in the backstreets north of the hospital, St Bartholomew-the-Great is London’s oldest and most atmospheric parish church. Begun in 1123 as the main church of St Bartholomew’s priory and hospice, it was partly demolished in the Reformation, and gradually fell into ruins: the cloisters were used as a stable, there was a boys’ school in the triforium, a coal and wine cellar in the crypt, a blacksmith’s in the north transept and a printing press (where Benjamin Franklin once worked) in the Lady Chapel. From 1887, Aston Webb restored what remained, and added the chequered patterning and flintwork that now characterizes the exterior. Much beloved of film companies, it is one of the few parish churches in the country to charge an entrance fee.
To get an idea of the scale of the original church, approach it through the half-timbered Tudor gatehouse, on Little Britain Street. A wooden statue of St Bartholomew stands in a niche; below is the thirteenth-century arch that once formed the entrance to the nave. The churchyard now stands where the nave itself would have been, and one side of the cloisters survives to the south, now housing the delightful Cloister Café (closed Sat). The rest of the church is a confusion of elements, including portions of the transepts and, most impressively, the chancel, where thick Norman pillars separate the main body from the ambulatory. There are various pre-Fire monuments, the most prominent being the tomb of Rahere, which shelters under a fifteenth-century canopy north of the altar, with an angel at his feet and two canons kneeling beside him reading from the prophets. Beyond the ambulatory lies the large Lady Chapel, mostly nineteenth century, though with original stonework here and there.
DICK WHITTINGTON
The City’s Lord Mayor is elected on an annual basis, and the most famous Lord Mayor of the lot is Dick Whittington (c.1350–1423) of pantomime fame. The third son of a wealthy Gloucestershire family, Whittington was an apprentice mercer, dealing in silks and velvets, who rose to become one of the richest men in the City by the age of just 21. He was an early philanthropist, establishing a library at Greyfriars’ monastery and a refuge for single mothers at St Thomas’s Hospital, and building one of the city’s first public lavatories, a unisex 128-seater known as “Whittington’s Night Soil House of Easement”. The pantomime story appeared some two hundred years after Whittington’s death, though quite how he became the fictional ragamuffin who comes to London after hearing the streets are paved with gold, no one seems to know. Traditionally, Whittington is leaving London with his knapsack and cat, when he hears the Bow Bells ring out “Turn again, Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London” (he was, in fact, mayor on four occasions and was never knighted as the story claims). The theory on the cat is that it was a common name for a coal barge at the time, and Whittington is thought to have made much of his fortune in the coal trade. There’s a statue on Highgate Hill commemorating the very spot where Dick allegedly heard the Bow Bells, and a stained-glass window in St Michael Paternoster Royal, on Skinner’s Lane, near where he lived.
Barbican
Silk St • Arts Centre Mon–Sat 9am–11pm, Sun noon–11pm • Free • 020 7638 8891, barbican.org.uk • _test777 Barbican
The City’s only large residential complex is the concrete brutalist ghetto of the Barbican, built on the heavily bombed Cripplegate area. It’s a classic 1970s urban dystopia, a maze of pedestrian walkways and underground car parks, pinioned by three 400ft tower blocks. At the centre of the complex is the Barbican Arts Centre, home to the London Symphony Orchestra, two performance spaces, a three-screen cinema, a rooftop garden, a public library and an art gallery. Sadly, the arts centre’s obtusely confusing layout continues to prove user-repellent; just finding the main entrance on Silk Street is quite a feat, even for Londoners.
St Giles-without-Cripplegate
Fore St • Mon–Fri 11am–4pm • Free • 020 7638 1997, stgilescripplegate.com • _test777 Barbican
The Barbican’s solitary prewar building is the heavily restored early Tudor church of St Giles-without-Cripplegate, now bracketed between a pair of artificial lakes, and overlooking an impressive corner bastion of the old Roman fort. It was in this church that Oliver Cromwell was married in 1620 and John Milton buried in 1674 – he was subsequently exhumed in 1793, his teeth knocked out as souvenirs and his corpse exhibited to the public until the novelty wore off.
Museum of London
150 London Wall • Daily 10am–6pm • Free • 020 7001 9844, museumoflondon.org.uk • _test777 Barbican or St Paul’s
Hidden in the southwestern corner of the Barbican complex is the Museum of London, whose permanent galleries are basically an educational trot through London’s past from prehistory to the present day, illustrated by the city’s major archeological finds and some great scale models. The real strength of the museum, however, lies in the excellent temporary exhibitions, gallery tours, lectures, walks and videos it organizes throughout the year.
London until 1666
The permanent displays start on floor E (where visitors enter), with a section on London before London. Here, you’ll find a cave-bear skull from half a million years ago, Neolithic flint tools, not to mention a lion skull, a hippo’s tooth, an auroch’s skull and an elephant’s foot. The Roman London section includes the Bucklersbury mosaic floor, displayed in a mock-up of a wealthy Roman dining room, gold coins, marble busts from the Temple of Mithras and mock-up Roman shop displays. Highlights in the Medieval London section include a reconstructed Saxon home, a model of Old St Paul’s and a wonderfully over-the-top video on the Black Death. Look out, too, for the Cheapside Hoard, found by workmen in 1912, and containing the finest collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewels in the world.
LONDON’S WALLS
London was a bona fide walled city from the time of the Romans until the Great Fire of 1666. For another hundred years, it still had its seven gateways – the last one, Temple Bar, was only removed in 1878, and now stands near St Paul’s Cathedral. Sections of wall were still being dismantled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and, if you know where to look, there are still several substantial slices of the city walls in situ today.
In 120 AD, the Romans built a grid-plan military fort to house around one thousand soldiers, just east of the Museum of London – the wall is visible from the museum, and one of the corner bastions (complete with section of moat) can be seen from St Giles Cripplegate in the Barbican. However, it wasn’t until 200 AD that the Romans threw up a proper two-mile long curtain wall, 20ft high and 9ft thick. The walls fell into decay in Saxon times, but were repaired and restored in the medieval and Tudor periods. On Noble Street, just southeast of the museum, one of the most interesting sections came to light after the Blitz, showing where the new city walls joined the older wall of the military fort.
There’s an official London Wall Walk, which starts outside Tower Hill tube, by the remains of the medieval Postern Gate, although the only other really impressive sections of wall are in nearby Cooper’s Row.
Modern London
The museum’s post-1666 galleries are all on the ground floor (L2), and begin with Expanding City, which includes revealing sections on how slavery helped increase the city’s wealth, an original Newgate Prison door and a recreation of a pleasure garden. The People’s City section traces the history of the suffragette movement and the political struggles of the 1930s and features one of the most popular sections, the Victorian Walk, with several streets of reconstructed period shops from a toyshop to a barber’s. You can relax in a mock-up interwar cinema and watch old footage of prewar London, admire the wonderful Art Deco bronze lifts from Selfridges, or play on the interactive Charles Booth map which plotted the city’s poverty in 1889.
The postwar section features snapshots from each decade: a model of the Skylon from the 1951 Festival of Britain, some groovy Swinging Sixties clothes, punk and Silver Jubilee memorabilia from 1977. There’s a great section paying tribute to London’s ethnic diversity and a vast model of some 1990s squats on Hackney’s London Fields. Finally, you reach the space reserved for the Lord Mayor’s Coach, which rivals the Queen’s in sheer weight of gold decoration. Built in 1757, it’s still used to parade the new Lord Mayor at the annual Lord Mayor’s Show.
POSTMAN’S PARK
Opposite the former General Post Office building, south of the Museum of London, lies Postman’s Park, one of the most curious and little-visited corners of the City. Here, in 1900, in the churchyard of St Botolph, Aldersgate, the painter and sculptor George Frederick Watts paid for a national memorial to “heroes of everyday life”, a patchwork wall of majolica tiles protected by a canopy and inscribed with the names of ordinary folk who had died in the course of some act of bravery. It exhibits the classic Victorian sentimental fascination with death, and makes for macabre but compelling reading: “Drowned in attempting to save his brother after he himself had just been rescued” or “Saved a lunatic woman from suicide at Woolwich Arsenal station, but was himself run over by the train”. In 2009, the first new addition for 78 years was added to the wall.
Guildhall
Gresham St • Daily 10am–5pm; Oct–April closed Sun • Free • 020 7606 3030, cityoflondon.gov.uk • _test777 Bank
Despite being the seat of the City governance for over eight hundred years, Guildhall doesn’t exactly exude municipal wealth. Nevertheless, it’s worth popping inside the Great Hall which miraculously survived both the Great Fire and Blitz – you must approach from the reception on the west side of the courtyard, not the quasi-Indian porch, tacked on by George Dance the Elder in the eighteenth century, to the north. The hall is lined with statues of worthies and is still used for functions, though only the walls survive from the original fifteenth-century building, which was the venue for several high-treason trials, including those of Lady Jane Grey and her husband, Lord Dudley, and, three years later, Archbishop Cranmer. As you leave, be sure to check out the crazy pagan giants Gog and Magog, who look down from the minstrels’ gallery, and who feature every year in the Lord Mayor’s Show.
Guildhall Art Gallery
Mon–Sat 10am–5pm, Sun noon–4pm • Free • 020 7332 3700, cityoflondon.gov.uk • _test777 Bank
Occupying the eastern side of the Guildhall courtyard is the Guildhall Art Gallery. Some of the best works are the Pre-Raphaelite pictures displayed in the first gallery you enter: Holman Hunt’s The Eve of St Agnes (inspired by Keats’ poem), painted while he was still a student, and bought by the gallery’s first director out of his own pocket; Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata, a typically lush portrait, in intense blues and greens, of a model who’s a dead ringer for Jane Morris, with whom the artist was infatuated; Millais’ two portraits of his daughter Effie in her Sunday best – My First Sermon, in which she sits attentively listening, and My Second Sermon, when the novelty has worn off and she has dozed off.
Also hiding up here is Constable’s full-sized oil sketch of Salisbury Cathedral, characterized by loose brushwork and an air of foreboding, and a marble statue of Margaret Thatcher, now surrounded by a protective glass cabinet after the head was knocked off by a protester in 2002.
The Copley painting, London pictures and Victorian galleries
The layout of the entire gallery is designed around the gigantic and very dramatic painting The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782 by John Singleton Copley, depicting the Brits magnanimously saving the drowning enemy from flaming barques. Commissioned by the Corporation, poor old Copley had to redo the entire thing when the garrison officers insisted on having more prominence.
One of the gallery’s strengths is its wide range of London pictures – depicting City ceremonies, bygone vistas of old London, postwar bomb sites and so on – which you’ll find sprinkled throughout the collection. On the ground floor, you’ll also find a small sample of works by the English artist Matthew Smith (1879–1959), who was heavily influenced by Cézanne’s late works and Matisse’s Fauvist phase. Confusingly, it’s in the Victorian galleries that you’ll find one of the 22 portraits, commissioned by the Corporation, of the Fire Judges who assessed property claims in the wake of the Great Fire.
Roman amphitheatre
During the gallery’s construction in the 1990s, a Roman amphitheatre, dating from around 120 AD, was discovered in the Guildhall courtyard. The foundations of the eastern entrance are all that remain, displayed in the basement, but they give you a hint of the vast size of the original arena, which would have held up to six thousand. (The outline of the amphitheatre is marked out on the pavement in the courtyard.)
Clockmakers’ Museum
Aldermanbury • Mon–Sat 9.30am–4.45pm • Free • 020 7332 1868, clockmakers.org • _test777 Bank
Access to the Clockmakers’ Museum, run by the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, is from Aldermanbury, on the west side of Guildhall. Here, you’ll find everything from Tudor pocket watches to grandfather clocks, which ring out in unison on the hour. Highlights include an orrery clock, a rolling ball clock (of the kind invented by William Congreve), a water clock, the ghoulish skull watch, once believed to have been given by Mary Queen of Scots to her maid-of-honour, and the watch used by Edmund Hillary on Everest. Of particular interest is the collection of marine chronometers including the earliest known clock made by John Harrison (1693–1776), along with his brother, when he was only 20. Pride of place, though, goes to H5, which looks like an oversized pocket watch, was tested by George III himself at Richmond observatory, and won Harrison the Longitude Prize.
St Lawrence Jewry
Mon–Fri 8am–4pm • Recitals Mon & Tues 1pm • 020 7600 9478, stlawrencejewry.org.uk • _test777 Bank
Across the courtyard from the Guildhall stands Wren’s church of St Lawrence Jewry, whose smart interior reflects its role as the official City of London Corporation church. Opened in 1677 in the presence of Charles II, but gutted during the Blitz, the church’s handsome, wide, open-plan interior is well worth a peek for its richly gilded plasterwork ceiling. The church’s gilded gridiron weathervane recalls St Lawrence’s martyrdom – he was slow-roasted, but still managed to crack jokes, hence why he’s the patron saint of comedians. The name “Jewry” recalls the site of London’s Jewish ghetto. Old Jewry, the street two blocks east, was the nucleus of the community, who suffered a bloody expulsion on the orders of Edward I.
Bank and around
Bank lies at the heart of the City’s financial district and is the busy meeting point of eight streets. It’s an impressive architectural ensemble, overlooked by a handsome collection of Neoclassical buildings – among them the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange and Mansion House – each one faced in Portland stone.
Royal Exchange
Mon–Fri: shops 10am–6pm; cafés, bars and restaurants 8am–11pm • theroyalexchange.co.uk • _test777 Bank
By far the most graceful of Bank’s buildings is the Royal Exchange, first built in 1570 at the personal expense of the fabulously wealthy businessman, Thomas Gresham (his gilded grasshopper flies from the roof), as a meeting place for City merchants. The current building, fronted by a massive eight-column portico and a very convenient set of steps for lunching office workers, is the third on the site and was built in the 1840s. Nowadays, the building is filled with expense account shops, but it’s still worth exploring the inner courtyard, with its beautifully tiled floor, glazed roof and half-columns in three classical orders. The swish Grand Café occupies both the courtyard and the mezzanine floor, from which you can view a series of frescoes illustrating the history of the City.
Mansion House
Guided tours Tues 2pm; closed Aug • £7 • 020 7937 9307, cityoflondon.gov.uk • _test777 Bank
Mansion House, the Lord Mayor’s sumptuous Neoclassical lodgings during his or – on the odd, rare occasion – her term of office, is open to the public once a week. Designed in 1753 by George Dance the Elder, the building’s grandest room is the columned Egyptian Hall, with its high, barrel-vaulted, coffered ceiling. Also impressive is the vast collection of gold and silver tableware, the mayor’s 36-pound gold mace and the pearl sword given by Elizabeth I and held out to the sovereign on visits to the City. Scattered about the rooms are an impressive array of Dutch and Flemish paintings by the likes of Hals, Ruisdael, Cuyp, Hobbema and de Hooch. Places are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, so turn up at the Walbrook entrance in good time.
Bank of England
Threadneedle St • Mon–Fri 10am–5pm • Free • 020 7601 5545, bankofengland.co.uk • _test777 Bank
Established by William III in 1694 to raise funds for his costly war against France, the Bank of England – the so-called “Grand Old Lady of Threadneedle Street” – wasn’t erected on its present site until 1734. The bank was attacked during the 1780 Gordon Riots, but never sacked thanks to the bank’s clerks, who melted down their inkwells into bullets. Subsequently a detachment of the Foot Guards, known as the Bank Picquet, was stationed overnight here until 1973. Security remains pretty tight at the bank, which still acts as a giant safe-deposit box, storing the official gold reserves of many of the world’s central banks, as well the UK’s, in its basement vaults.
The windowless, outer curtain wall, which wraps itself round the 3.5-acre island site, is pretty much all that remains of John Soane’s late eighteenth-century design. However, you can view a reconstruction of Soane’s Bank Stock Office, with its characteristic domed skylight, in the museum, whose entrance is on Bartholomew Lane. The exhibition traces the history of the bank, banknotes and banking in general. Beyond, beneath a reconstruction of Herbert Baker’s interwar rotunda (wrecked in the Blitz), you can caress a 13kg gold bar, worth over £250,000, and, elsewhere, view specimens of every note issued by the Royal Mint over the centuries (including a million pound note).
THE CITY LIVERY COMPANIES
The hundred or so City Livery Companies in the Square Mile are descended from the craft guilds of the Middle Ages, whose purpose was to administer apprenticeships and take charge of quality control, in return for which they were granted monopolies. Over time, the guilds grew prodigiously wealthy, built themselves ever more opulent halls and staged lavish banquets at which they would wear elaborate “livery” (or uniforms). Most – though not all – of the old guilds now have very little to do with their original trade, though this is not the case with the guilds that have been formed in the last hundred years. It’s fair to say the livery companies remain deeply undemocratic and anomalous, but their prodigious wealth and charitable works have helped pacify the critics. As with the Freemasons, the elaborate ceremonies serve to hide the very real power that these companies still hold. Liverymen dominate the Court of Common Council, the City’s ruling body, and as Aldermen, they take it in turns to be first a Sheriff, and eventually Lord Mayor – a knighthood is virtually guaranteed.
The City boasts numerous Livery Company halls, many with enticing names
such as the Tallow Chandlers and Cordwainers. Few survived the Great Fire,
fewer still the Blitz, but a handful are worth visiting for their ornate
interiors. The problem is gaining admission. The
City tourist office ( 020 7332 1456) has tickets to some
halls; other halls will allow you to join a pre-booked group tour for around
£5–10 per person. It’s not something you can do on the spur of the moment,
though some Livery halls are used during the City of London Festival and
others are open on Open House
weekend. Given here is a selection of
the most interesting Livery halls:
Apothecaries’ Hall Blackfriars Lane 020 7236 1189, apothecaries.org;
Blackfriars.
The seventeenth-century courtyard is open to the public, but entry to
the magnificent staircase and the Great Hall – with its musicians’
gallery, portrait by Reynolds and collection of leech pots – is by
appointment only.
Fishmongers’ Hall London Bridge 020 7626 3531, fishhall.org.uk;
Monument. A
prominent Greek Revival building on the riverfront, with a grand
staircase hall, and the very dagger with which Mayor Walworth stabbed
Wat Tyler.
Goldsmiths’ Hall Foster Lane 020 7606 7010, thegoldsmiths.co.uk; St
Paul’s. One of the easiest to visit as there
are regular exhibitions allowing you to see the sumptuous central
staircase built in the 1830s.
Skinners’ Hall 8 Dowgate Hill 020 7236 5629, skinnershall.co.uk;
Cannon Street.
The seventeenth-century staircase and courtroom survive, while the
wood-panelled hall contains a wonderful series of Frank Brangwyn murals
from 1902.
Tallow Chandlers’ Hall 4 Dowgate Hill 020 7248 4726, tallowchandlers.org; Cannon Street. Set back from the street
around an attractive courtyard, the Tallow Chandlers Hall retains its
seventeenth-century courtroom, complete with original seating.
Vintners’ Hall 68 Upper Thames St 020 7236 1863, vintnershall.co.uk;
Mansion House.
The oldest hall in the City, dating from 1671, with a period-piece
staircase with “fabulously elaborate balusters”.
St Mary Woolnoth
King William St • Mon–Fri 9.30am–4.30pm • Free • _test777 Bank
Hidden from the bustle of Bank itself, a short distance down King William Street, stands St Mary Woolnoth, one of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s six idiosyncratic London churches. The main facade is very imposing, with its twin turrets, Doric pillars and heavy rustication. Inside, in a cramped but lofty space, Hawksmoor manages to cram in a cluster of three big Corinthian columns at each corner, which support an ingenious lantern lit by semicircular clerestory windows. The most striking furnishing is the altar canopy, held up by barley-sugar columns and studded with seven golden cherubic faces. The church’s projecting clock gets a brief mention in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and the quote is commemorated in the southeast corner of the church.
FROM COFFEE HOUSE TO BOARDROOM
Several of the City’s most important institutions have their origins in the coffee houses which sprung up in the second half of the seventeenth century. The first coffee house in London was established in St Michael’s Alley, off Cornhill, in 1652 by Pasqua Rosée, the Armenian servant of a merchant who traded in Turkey. It was an instant success and in less than a century, there were literally hundreds of rival establishments, as the coffee house became the place the City’s wheelers and dealers preferred to conduct their business. Richard Lloyd’s coffee house – perhaps the best known – was where London’s sailors, merchants and ship owners went for the latest maritime news, eventually evolving into Lloyd’s Register of Shipping and Lloyd’s of London insurance market. Meanwhile, Jonathan’s, in Exchange Alley, posted up the price of stocks and commodities, attracting dealers who’d been ejected from the nearby Royal Exchange for rowdiness, and eventually became the London Stock Exchange.
St Stephen Walbrook
39 Walbrook • Mon–Fri 10am–4pm • Free • ststephenwalbrook.net • _test777 Bank
Named after the nearby shallow stream which provided Roman London with its fresh water, the church of St Stephen Walbrook is the Lord Mayor’s official church and Wren’s most spectacular after St Paul’s. Faced with a fairly cramped site, Wren created a church of great space and light, with sixteen Corinthian columns arranged in clusters around a central coffered dome, which many regard as a practice run for his cathedral. The furnishings are mostly original, but the modern beech-wood pews jar, as does Henry Moore’s altar, an amorphous blob of Travertine stone – nicknamed “The Camembert”. The Samaritans were founded here by the local rector in 1953, and their first helpline telephone serves as a memorial in the church’s southwest corner.
St Mary Abchurch
Abchurch Lane, off King William St • Mon–Fri 11am–3pm • _test777 Cannon Street
St Mary Abchurch is set in its own courtyard (the paved-over former graveyard), but nothing about the dour red-brick exterior prepares you for Wren’s spectacular interior, which is dominated by a vast dome fresco painted by a local parishioner and lit by oval lunettes, with the name of God in Hebrew centre stage. The lime-wood reredos, festooned with swags and garlands, and decorated with gilded urns and a pelican, is a Grinling Gibbons masterpiece.
Temple of Mithras
The remains of a Temple of Mithras were discovered beside the old stream of the Walbrook in 1954 during the construction of an office block on Queen Victoria Street. Mithraism was a male-only cult popular among the Roman legions before the advent of Christianity. Its Persian deity, Mithras, is always depicted slaying a cosmic bull, while a scorpion grasps its genitals and a dog licks its wounds – the bull’s blood was seen as life-giving, and initiates had to bathe in it. The site is currently being redeveloped once more – this time as Bloomberg’s Norman Foster-designed European headquarters – and the temple is due to be returned to its original site. In the meantime, the reconstruction in the Museum of London gives you a good idea of what the place was once like.
LONDON STONE
Bank may have a good claim to being the heart of the City, or perhaps Guildhall as the administrative core, but London’s real omphalos, its geomantic centre, is the London Stone, a small block of limestone lodged behind an iron grille set low into the exterior wall of 111 Cannon St, at the corner of St Swithin’s Lane. Whatever your reaction to this bizarre relic, it has been around for some considerable time, certainly since the 1450 Peasants’ Revolt, when the Kentish rebel Jack Cade struck it, declaring himself “Lord of the City”.
Bishopsgate to the Tower
Financial institutions predominate in the easterly section of the Square Mile, many of them housed in the brashest of the City’s new architecture. Bishopsgate, named after one of the seven gates in the old City walls, is dominated by bombastic skyscrapers such as the angular, glass-clad Broadgate Tower, at the northern end, Heron Tower, halfway along, and the Pinnacle – which aims to be the City’s tallest skyscraper, at the southern end. The area’s two most original architectural works are modest by comparison: the groundbreaking Lloyd’s Building and the unmissable Gherkin. These, plus the Victorian splendour of Leadenhall Market, the oldest synagogue in the country, several pre-Fire churches and Wren’s famous Monument to the Great Fire make for an especially interesting sector of the City to explore.
CITY SKYSCRAPERS
The economic recession notwithstanding, the City skyline is continuing to
sprout a whole new generation of glass-clad skyscrapers. From 1980, for thirty years, the City’s tallest
building was 600ft NatWest Tower (now
Tower 42; tower42.com) by Richard Seifert
(in the shape of the bank’s logo), which has a public bar on the 42nd floor
(prior booking required). In 2010, this was topped by the Heron Tower ( herontower.com), a fairly
undistinguished 660ft skyscraper with a 144ft mast at 110 Bishopsgate,
designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox – on the plus side, it has a 70,000-litre
aquarium in the atrium, a “sky bar” on the 40th floor, accessed via the
Sushisamba glass lifts, and the restaurant
Duck and Waffle. Rafael Viñoly’s 525ft Walkie
Talkie, 20 Fenchurch St ( 20fenchurchstreet.co.uk), so-called because it’s wider at the top
than the bottom, includes a free public “sky garden” café and restaurant on
the roof. The Cheesegrater, Richard Rogers’
737ft tapered office block at 122 Leadenhall St ( theleadenhallbuilding.com) is remarkable not simply for its
triangular shape but also for its giant steel frame and its 90ft-high
ground-floor Galleria, which will feature lawns and mature trees and will be
open to the public. Kohn Pedersen Fox are also responsible for The Scalpel, a twisted 620ft angular shard of
glass in Lime Street, due for completion in 2017. The only skyscraper that’s
failed so far to get off the ground is the Pinnacle, 22–24 Bishopsgate ( londonpinnacle.com), also
by Kohn Pedersen Fox, a swirling 945ft helter-skelter of a tower, which has
been re-nicknamed “The Stump” after work stopped in 2012 with only seven
floors of the concrete core built. If the Pinnacle fails to get built, the
City will remain just behind Canary Wharf, and a long way below the
country’s tallest building, the 1016ft Shard
over at London Bridge.
Liverpool Street Station
Built in 1874 Liverpool Street Station stands on the site of the old Bethlem Royal Hospital (or Bedlam), the infamous lunatic asylum, where the public could pay a penny and laugh at the inmates. Liverpool Street is now the City’s busiest terminus, renowned for its vibrantly painted wrought-iron Victorian arches. The station’s Liverpool Street entrance features the Kindertransport memorial, erected in 2003 and depicting some of the nearly ten thousand Jewish children who arrived at the station from central Europe, without their parents, shortly before war broke out.
Adjoining Liverpool Street Station, to the west, are the traffic-free piazzas of the very successful 1980s Broadgate complex. Fulcrum, Richard Serra’s 55ft-high rusting steel sheets, acts as a kind of gateway to the Broadgate Circle, whose arena is used as an open-air ice rink in winter and as a performance space in summer. Continuing north to Exchange Square, you’ll find a cascading waterfall, the hefty Broadgate Venus by Fernando Botero, and Xavier Corbero’s Broad Family of obelisks, one of whose “children” reveals a shoe.
Bishopsgate Institute
230 Bishopsgate • Mon–Fri 9am–8.30pm, Sat 10am–5.30pm • Free • 020 7392 9200, bishopsgate.org.uk • _test777 Liverpool Street
Across the road from Liverpool Street Station is the faïence facade of the diminutive Bishopsgate Institute, a graceful Art Nouveau building designed by Harrison Townsend. Townsend went on to design the excellent Whitechapel Art Gallery and the wonderful Horniman Museum. Opened in 1895, the institute houses a public library and puts on courses and talks throughout the year.
St Ethelburga’s
78 Bishopsgate • Fri 11am–3pm • Free • 020 7496 1610, stethelburgas.org • _test777 Liverpool Street
Hemmed in by office blocks on either side is the “humble rag-faced front” of the pre-Fire church of St Ethelburga. All but totally destroyed by an IRA bomb in 1993, the church was totally rebuilt and now houses a Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, hosting regular interfaith events and workshops, and hosting world music gigs. The bare interior retains the nineteenth-century font inscribed with the Greek palindrome “Cleanse my sins, not just my face” and half the tiny garden round the back, houses a polygonal, multi-faith Bedouin tent covered in woven goat’s hair.
St Helen’s
Bishopsgate • Mon–Fri 9.30am–12.30pm • Free • 020 7283 2231, st-helens.org.uk • _test777 Liverpool Street, Bank, Monument or
Aldgate
Another pre-Fire church that suffered extensive damage in the IRA blasts of the 1990s is the late Gothic church of St Helen, set back to the east of Bishopsgate. With its undulating crenellations and Baroque bell turret, it’s an intriguing building, incorporating the original pre-Reformation Benedictine nunnery church and containing five grand pre-Fire tombs. Since the bomb, the floor level has been raised, the church screens shifted, a new organ gallery added and the seating rearranged to focus on the pulpit, in keeping with the church’s current evangelical bent.
The Gherkin
30 St Mary Axe • _test777 Liverpool Street or Aldgate
Completed in 2003, Norman Foster’s glass-diamond-clad Gherkin remains one of the most popular of the new rash of brash tall buildings in the City. Most Londoners like it for its cheeky shape, though it’s beginning to be hemmed in and upstaged by the skyscrapers it helped encourage. Officially known as 30 St Mary Axe, the Gherkin sits on the site of the old Baltic Exchange, destroyed in an IRA bomb in 1992 that killed three people, commemorated on a nearby wall. At 590ft, it’s actually pretty tall, but at street level it appears a very modest building – you can’t go up it, but you can grab a bite to eat on the ground floor.
Lloyd’s Building
1 Lime St • Guided tours by appointment; £10 • 020 7327 6586, lloyds.com • _test777 Bank or Monument
Completed by Richard Rogers in 1986, the Lloyd’s Building, opposite St Andrew Undershaft, remains probably the City’s most innovative and remarkable office block. “A living, breathing machine”, it’s a vertical version of Rogers and Renzo Piano’s Parisian Pompidou Centre, in which the jumble of blue-steel pipes and cables form the outer casing, with glass lifts zipping up and down the exterior. The portico of the previous, much more sedate, Lloyd’s Building (c.1925) has been preserved on Leadenhall Street, so the current headquarters represented a bizarre leap into the modern by this most conservative of City institutions – the largest insurance and reinsurance market in the world. Some things never change, though, and the building is still guarded by porters in antiquated waiters’ livery, in recognition of Lloyd’s origins as Edward Lloyd’s coffee house in 1688.
Lloyd’s started out in shipping, but the famous Lutine Bell, salvaged from a captured French frigate in 1799 and traditionally struck once for bad news, twice for good, now only tolls once to commemorate more general disasters, twice for distinguished guests. The highlights of the interior are the Underwriting Room, centred on the aforementioned Lutine Bell, above which an incredible barrel-vaulted glass atrium rises almost 200ft, and the Adam Room, a dining room designed by Robert Adam in 1763 for Bowood House, Wiltshire, and now incongruously positioned on the eleventh floor. Dress code for visitors is jacket and tie for men and business-style for women.
Leadenhall Market
Gracechurch St • Market: Mon–Fri 10am–5pm • leadenhallmarket.co.uk • _test777 Bank or Monument
Occupying the very site where Roman London’s basilica and forum once stood, Leadenhall Market’s graceful Victorian cast-ironwork is richly painted in cream and maroon, with each of the four entrances to the covered arcade topped by an elaborate stone arch. Inside, the traders cater mostly for the lunchtime City crowd, their barrows laden with exotic seafood and game, fine wines, champagne and caviar, while the surrounding shops and bars remain busy until the early evening.
FROM TOP THE LLOYD’S BUILDING; LEADENHALL MARKET
Bevis Marks Synagogue
4 Heneage Lane • Mon, Wed & Thurs 10.30am–2pm, Tues &
Fri 10.30am–1pm, Sun 10.30am–12.30pm • £4 • Guided tours Wed & Fri 11.15am, Sun
10.45am; free • 020 7626 1274, bevismarks.org.uk • _test777 Aldgate
Hidden away behind a red-brick office block in a little courtyard off Bevis Marks is the Bevis Marks Synagogue. Built in 1701 by Sephardic Jews who had originally fled the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, this is the country’s oldest surviving synagogue, and its roomy, rich interior gives an idea of just how wealthy the community was at the time. Although it seats over six hundred, it’s only a third of the size of its prototype in Amsterdam, where many Sephardic Jews initially settled. The Sephardic community has since moved out to Maida Vale and Wembley, and the congregation has dwindled, though the synagogue’s magnificent array of chandeliers makes it very popular for candle-lit Jewish weddings. Close by Bevis Marks, just past Creechurch Lane, a plaque commemorates the even larger Great Synagogue of the Ashkenazi Jews, founded in 1690 but destroyed by bombs in 1941.
St Katharine Cree
86 Leadenhall St • Mon–Fri 10.30am–4pm • Free • _test777 Aldgate
The church of St Katharine Cree, completed in 1631, is a rare example of its period, having miraculously escaped the Great Fire of 1666. It’s a transitional building with Neoclassical elements, such as the Corinthian columns of the nave and, above, a Gothic clerestory and ribbing. At the east end is a very lovely, seventeenth-century stained-glass Catherine-wheel window. The church was consecrated in 1631 by Bishop Laud, and the “bowings and cringings” he indulged in during the service, were later used as evidence of his Catholicism at his trial and execution for heresy in 1645.
London Metal Exchange
56 Leadenhall St • Mon–Fri noon–1.30pm & 3.30–5pm • Free • 020 7264 5555, lme.com • _test777 Aldgate
The only place in the City where you can still witness the human scrum of share dealing – known as “open-outcry” – is at the London Metal Exchange, where metals – and even plastic – but not silver, gold or platinum are traded. The dealing takes place within the Ring, with each metal traded in five-minute bursts – to visit the public viewing gallery, you must phone ahead.
St Botolph-without-Aldgate
Aldgate High St • Tues 11am–3pm, Thurs 10am–3pm • Free • 020 7283 1670, stbotolphs.org.uk • _test777 Aldgate
St Botolph-without-Aldgate was designed in the 1740s by George Dance the Elder, and stood beside Aldgate, one of the old City gateways, now commemorated by a modern, wooden, latticed “palace on pillars” which stands close by. The church’s bizarre interior, remodelled last century, features blue-grey paintwork, gilding on top of white plasterwork, some dodgy modern art, a batik reredos and a stunning, modern stained-glass rendition of Rubens’ Descent from the Cross on a deep-purple background. Situated at the edge of the East End, this is a famously campaigning church, active on issues like gay priests and social exclusion.
Monument
Fish St Hill • Daily 9.30am–5.30pm • £3 • 020 7626 2717, themonument.info • _test777 Monument
In the 1670s, Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren’s Monument commemorating the Great Fire of 1666 used to rise above the rooftops. No longer so prominent on the skyline, this plain 202ft Doric column, crowned with spiky gilded flames, nevertheless remains the tallest isolated stone column in the world; if it were laid out flat it would touch the site of the bakery where the fire started, east of Monument. The bas-relief on the base depicts Charles II and the Duke of York in Roman garb conducting the emergency relief operation. The 311 steps to the gallery at the top – plagued by suicides until a cage was built around it in 1842 – once guaranteed an incredible view; nowadays it’s dwarfed by the surrounding buildings.
St Magnus-the-Martyr
Lower Thames St • Tues–Fri 10am–4pm • 020 7626 4481, stmagnusmartyr.org.uk • _test777 Monument
Not far from the Monument is another Wren edifice, the church of St Magnus-the-Martyr, whose octagonal spire used to greet all travellers arriving in the City across old London Bridge. Now it stands forlorn by busy Lower Thames Street, though the Anglo-Catholic interior holds, in T.S. Eliot’s words, “an inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold”. In addition, there’s a wooden pier from an old Roman wharf in the porch, and a great model of the old London Bridge in the vestry.
LONDON BRIDGE
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
At rush hour, you can still see Eliot’s “undead” trudging to work across London Bridge, which was, until 1750, the only bridge across the Thames. The Romans were the first to build a permanent crossing here, a structure succeeded by a Saxon version that was pulled down by King Olaf of Norway in 1014, and commemorated in the popular nursery rhyme London Bridge is Falling Down. It was the medieval bridge, however, that achieved world fame: built of stone and crowded with timber-framed houses, it became one of London’s greatest attractions. At the centre stood the richly ornate Nonsuch House, decorated with onion domes and Dutch gables, and a chapel dedicated to Thomas Becket; at the Southwark end was the Great Gatehouse, on which the heads of traitors were displayed, dipped in tar to preserve them. The houses were removed in the mid-eighteenth century, and a new stone bridge erected in 1831 – that one now stands near Lake Havasu in the Arizona desert, having been bought in the 1960s by a guy who, so the apocryphal story goes, thought he’d purchased Tower Bridge. The present concrete structure – without doubt the ugliest yet – dates from 1972.
Old Billingsgate Market
16 Lower Thames St • 020 7283 2800, oldbillingsgate.co.uk • _test777 Monument
Along the river from St Magnus is Old Billingsgate Market, a handsome Victorian market hall that once housed London’s chief wholesale fish market, but has since been turned into a corporate events venue. It’s difficult now to imagine the noise and smell of old Billingsgate, whose porters used to carry the fish in towers of baskets on their heads, and whose wives were renowned for their bad language even in Shakespeare’s day: “as bad a tongue…as any oyster-wife at Billingsgate” (King Lear). Next door stands the Neoclassical Custom House, from 1825, which has been collecting duties from incoming ships since around 1275, and still houses a department of HM Customs and Revenue.
St Olave
8 Hart St • Mon–Fri 10am–5pm • Free • 020 7488 4318, sanctuaryinthecity.net • _test777 Tower Hill
Saved from the Fire, but left as an empty shell by the Blitz, the Kentish ragstone church of St Olave was dubbed “St Ghastly Grim” by Dickens after the skulls and crossbones and vicious-looking spikes adorning the 1658 entrance to the graveyard on Seething Lane, a short stroll from St Dunstan’s. Samuel Pepys lived in Seething Lane for much of his life, and he and his wife, Elizabeth, are both buried here amid the pre-Fire brasses and monuments – Elizabeth’s monument was raised by Pepys himself; Pepys’ own is Victorian.
All Hallows-by-the-Tower
Byward St • Mon–Fri 8am–5pm, Sat 10am–4pm, Sun
10am–1pm • Guided tours daily 2–4pm • Free • Brassrubbing Mon–Fri 2–4pm; £5 per brass • 020 7481 2928, ahbtt.org.uk • _test777 Tower Hill
All Hallows-by-the-Tower, another pre-Fire church, only just survived the Blitz – most of the church is a postwar neo-Gothic pastiche wrought in concrete. The furnishings are fascinating, however, and include lots of maritime memorials, model ships, two wings of a Flemish triptych from around 1500, and, best of all, the exquisitely carved Gibbons limewood font cover, in the southwest chapel. Close by is an arch from the original seventh-century church; remains of a tessellated Roman pavement can also be found in the tiny Crypt Museum. All Hallows also has some superb pre-Reformation brasses, and offers brassrubbing.