Six ancient churches, one April morning, and why the City of London’s sacred lanes deserve to be top of every itinerary
There is a particular quality of light in London on an April morning — provisional, a little argumentative, as if the sun hasn’t quite committed to showing up. It was in exactly this light that I stepped out of Liverpool Street station and turned south towards the City, notebook in hand, with a self-imposed challenge: to visit every church in the Square Mile, in a series of unhurried days. What I had not anticipated was how quickly, in the most unexpected corners of EC3, I would find myself stopped in my tracks by sheer, overwhelming beauty.
The City of London contains one of the most remarkable concentrations of historic ecclesiastical architecture anywhere in the world — most of it the legacy of Christopher Wren’s extraordinary post-Fire rebuilding programme. But before Wren, and running straight through him, there is an older story, told not in stone or timber but in coloured light, Saxon arches and medieval lanes so narrow you could touch both walls at once. For anyone who loves architecture, history, or simply the sensation of stepping out of modern London’s noise into something ancient and astonishing, these streets are nothing less than a paradise.
One stop on the Circle line to Tower Hill puts you exactly where you need to be. From the station, it is a five-minute walk to the Tower of London, and once the Tower comes into view, you are standing at the threshold of the City’s most ancient sacred geography. The six churches of this first day sit within a roughly ten-minute walk of each other, which means the day is contemplative rather than a breathless dash. Turn off one of the main roads, and you find yourself in a lane barely wider than your outstretched arms, with a church around the next corner and a silence that the rest of London never quite manages.
The oldest and the most astonishing
Begin where any serious exploration of the City’s churches must begin: All Hallows by the Tower on Byward Street, the oldest church in the City, founded in 675 AD — three centuries before the Tower of London existed. It is a place of extraordinary, accumulated history. In the crypt, a Roman tessellated pavement from the second century lies beautifully preserved alongside a 1928 model of Roman London that genuinely stops you in your tracks — the whole city laid out in miniature, the lost river Walbrook running through its centre. Above ground, a Saxon arch from the very first stone church still stands. William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, was baptised here in 1644. John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States, was married here in 1797. The beheaded bodies of Thomas More, Bishop Fisher and Archbishop Laud were brought here after their executions on Tower Hill. Admiral Penn saved the church from the Great Fire by dynamiting the surrounding buildings to create a firebreak, watching London burn from the tower alongside his friend Samuel Pepys. The Blitz gutted the interior, and the church was rebuilt and rededicated in 1957. Fourteen centuries of continuous sacred use — and every inch of it visible, if you know where to look.
The church that moved a poet
St Olave Hart Street, a short walk along Seething Lane, is the church that the poet John Betjeman once described as “a country church in the world of Seething Lane” — and he was absolutely right. It is tiny, medieval, and entirely at odds with its surroundings, saved from the Great Fire when the wind mercifully changed direction and firebreaks were cut in the surrounding streets. Its churchyard entrance is watched over by a gateway decorated with three grinning skulls, installed in 1658 and so disturbing to Charles Dickens that he renamed the church “St Ghastly Grim” in his essays.
But the most affecting detail belongs to Samuel Pepys, who lived directly across the road and called St Olave’s “our own church” in his diary. He placed a memorial to his wife Elizabeth — who died of typhoid fever at just twenty-nine — on the wall directly opposite his pew, so that he could look at her face during every service for the rest of his life. Pepys was buried here alongside Elizabeth in 1703. The windows filter the light of Seething Lane into something almost tender. It is a church for sitting in.
The most beautiful ruin in London
If you visit only one place on this entire circuit, make it St Dunstan in the East — and make it on a bright morning if you possibly can. It is not a functioning church. It is a ruin, and the most breathtakingly beautiful ruin in London. Built around 1100, badly damaged in the Great Fire, it was given a magnificent Gothic tower and soaring needle spire by Christopher Wren in 1695, his flying buttresses carrying the steeple high above the surrounding lanes. The Blitz of 1941 gutted everything except that tower, the outer walls, and the steeple. The decision was taken not to rebuild the interior. Instead, in 1971, the City of London Corporation opened the shell as a public garden.
To walk through the gate is to step into another world. Trees grow where the nave once stood. Climbing plants have colonised the empty window arches, which now frame not glass but open sky, leaves, and light. A fountain plays in the middle of the old nave. Wren’s slender steeple rises perfectly intact above it all. It is one of those rare urban places where time does something genuinely odd — where the twenty-first century seems to recede completely, and what remains is simply the beautiful, improbable persistence of stone.
The musician’s church
St Mary at Hill, tucked into a cobbled lane between Lower Thames Street and Eastcheap, has a musical pedigree that stops you mid-step: Thomas Tallis was the organist here in 1538 and 1539. The church dates to at least the reign of King John; Wren rebuilt its interior after the Great Fire as a Greek cross inside a square, with four free-standing Corinthian columns supporting barrel vaults and a coffered central dome of great elegance. A severe fire in 1988 brought the dome and roof crashing down, and the celebrated box pews remain in storage, awaiting reinstatement. It is slightly bereft without them. But stand in the nave, let the proportions work on you, and think about Tallis at the organ — and the bare walls become rather magnificent.
The church with a punishment box
St Margaret Pattens on Eastcheap takes its name from the patten — the raised wooden or metal undershoe that medieval Londoners strapped to their feet to lift themselves above the filth of the streets. The pattens trade was based in the lanes around this church, and a notice inside still politely requests that women leave their pattens at the door before entering, which is either charming or quietly absurd depending on your mood. Wren rebuilt the church between 1684 and 1687; its spire, at 199 feet, is the third-tallest of all his City spires. Inside are the only surviving canopied churchwardens’ pews in London, with the initials “CW” carved into one — whether standing for Christopher Wren or Churchwarden, nobody can agree. There is also a carved wooden punishment box with the Devil’s head above it, where wrongdoers were required to sit in full view of the congregation throughout the service. The seventeenth century had admirably direct ideas about accountability.
The rose window that survived everything
The final church of the day — St Katharine Cree on Leadenhall Street — was the right place to finish, and it saved its greatest surprise for last. There has been a church on this site since at least 1280, originally connected to the Augustinian Holy Trinity Priory of Aldgate; “Cree” is a corruption of Christchurch, the Priory’s name. The present building, constructed between 1628 and 1630, is the only surviving Jacobean church in London. The architect is unknown, though the weight of opinion tilts towards Inigo Jones. Both Handel and Purcell played the organ here, and part of the seventeenth-century pipework survives.
The interior is glorious — Corinthian columns, a plaster-ribbed vaulted ceiling with medieval-style bosses — but it is the east end that stops you entirely. The rose window is extraordinary: its stained-glass original from 1630, thought to have been modelled on the great rose window of the old St Paul’s Cathedral, lost forever to the Fire. To stand before it is to look at glass that pre-dates the Great Fire, pre-dates Wren, pre-dates almost everything else you have seen that day. When I visited, I was the only person in the building. The light through that four-hundred-year-old glass fell across the Jacobean stonework in absolute silence, and it was — in the most straightforward sense of the word — humbling.
Six churches in a single day. Six buildings carrying centuries of craft, catastrophe and continuity, each one free to enter, each one waiting. The Square Mile asks only that you leave the main roads, turn into the lanes and look up. What you find — the spires, the silence, the light, the sheer accumulated weight of so much human history held within so small a space — is among the most magnificent things this city has to offer.
‘Reflections of the Glass Sellers Chronicler’
May 2026
