RESURGAM
Five churches, one golden afternoon and the corridor where Christopher Wren proved he could do Gothic when the money insisted on it. We follow Cheapside west from St Paul’s to St Mary Aldermary — with lunch, something to drink and ten questions to see what stuck.
Distance: 1.2 miles | Allow: 3 hours with stops | Start: St Paul’s (Central line) | Finish: Mansion House (District & Circle) or Bank (Central, Northern, Waterloo & City, DLR)
There are days arranged, seemingly on purpose, for walking the City and this one had the good manners to turn up bright, warm and entirely without menace. The route runs east to west along Cheapside, the oldest thoroughfare in the Square Mile, finishing just south of it at St Mary Aldermary. Five churches in all and between them they give you Wren at his most personal, Wren at his most ambitious, Wren dragged reluctantly into the Gothic revival and one of the most famous sets of bells in the world.
STOP ONE — St Paul’s Cathedral
There was never much question about where to begin. St Paul’s stands on Ludgate Hill at the highest point in the City, a site occupied by a cathedral in one form or another since 604 AD. Five buildings have stood here; the fourth, Old St Paul’s, was both magnificent and dilapidated by the time Christopher Wren was called in to propose repairs — work he was already engaged in when the Great Fire of 1666 made the whole question academic. He was formally commissioned to design the replacement in 1669.
Wren spent nine years refining his design, producing in 1673 a wooden model, thirteen feet high and more than twenty feet long, that still survives in the cathedral’s Trophy Room. It was not the design that was approved. The clergy found his preferred scheme too foreign, too domed, too un-English, and the plan eventually authorised by royal warrant in 1675 was a considerably plainer thing. Wren, given permission to make “ornamental” changes as building progressed, spent the next three and a half decades quietly building something much closer to the vision he had actually wanted.
Construction took thirty-five years; the building was declared complete on Christmas Day 1711, Wren by then seventy-nine, his son laying the final stone. The dome you see from the floor is not the dome you see from the street: an outer shell of timber and lead gives St Paul’s its skyline, an inner brick dome is what frescoes the interior, and between the two a hidden brick cone carries the actual structural load. There is a story, probably too good to check too closely, that when Wren needed a marker stone for the centre of the new dome, a labourer handed him a fragment of the old cathedral’s rubble bearing a single carved word: RESURGAM. I will rise again. Wren had a phoenix carved above the south transept door with the word beneath it, and it is there still.
“Reader, if you seek his monument, look about you.”
— The inscription above Wren’s tomb in the crypt, 1723
Nelson, Wellington, Turner, Fleming and Wren himself are all buried here. The Whispering Gallery runs round the inner dome ninety-nine feet up, where a murmur against the stone on one side carries clearly to the other, some 112 feet away. It rewards an unhurried hour — do not try to rush it.
STOP TWO — St Mary-le-Bow
A short walk north-east along Cheapside brings you to the church that decides who is, and is not, a true Cockney — the old rule being that you must be born within earshot of the Bow Bells. The tradition runs back to 1363, when the Common Council ordered the bell rung nightly as a curfew; in quieter centuries the sound reportedly reached Hackney Marshes, and Dick Whittington is said to have heard it from Highgate Hill and turned back for London. A 1926 recording of the bells was broadcast by the BBC during the Second World War as a signal of hope to occupied Europe and the same recording still opens BBC World Service broadcasts today.
There has been a church on this site since around 1080, built by Lanfranc, the Conqueror’s Archbishop of Canterbury. A tornado wrecked it in 1091, and the Norman stone arches, or “bows,” built into its reconstructed crypt gave the church its name. That crypt is the oldest surviving parochial building in London still in daily use. Wren rebuilt the church above it between 1671 and 1680, and his steeple — at 223 feet, the third tallest he ever built — was a deliberate successor to the medieval landmark it replaced. The Blitz brought the bells crashing down in May 1941; new ones, cast from the melted metal of the old, were rehung in 1961, which technically means two decades passed with no new Cockneys eligible for the title. The church has an unexpected colonial footnote too: Admiral Arthur Phillip, first Governor of New South Wales, and Captain John Smith, founder of Jamestown, were both parishioners here.
REFUEL —
Beneath the Bow Bells
Café Below (coffee, tea, light lunch) — Set in the eleventh-century Norman crypt itself, this is one of the most atmospheric places in the City for a sandwich and a pot of tea. Arrive early; it fills up at midday.
Humble Grape, Bow Lane (wine bar) — Also tucked into the church crypt, with several hundred organic and small-producer wines by the glass or bottle. A civilised place to pause before pressing on towards Foster Lane.
STOP THREE — St Vedast-alias-Foster
The short distance along Foster Lane brings you to the church with the most curious name in the City. Vedast was a French bishop who helped convert the Frankish king Clovis to Christianity around 500 AD; his cult arrived in London with Flemish merchants who settled here in the twelfth century. Over succeeding centuries the name anglicised through a remarkable chain — Vastes, Fastes, Faster, Fauster, Forster, Foster — and since the lane took its name independently from the saint, the church ended up carrying both. The “alias” is not a puzzle. It is an honest admission that the same man has answered to two different names.
Wren rebuilt the main body of the church between 1670 and 1673, reputedly his cheapest City commission at just £1,853, 15 shillings and sixpence. The tower followed in 1695–98, its elegant triple-stage spire, added a decade later at a further cost of £2,958, is thought to be the work of Nicholas Hawksmoor. The Blitz gutted the interior in December 1940; the rebuilding, from 1953, was overseen by architect Stephen Dykes Bower and a parish committee that included the poet John Betjeman as churchwarden and the organ builder Noel Mander, who tracked down a Grinling Gibbons font and a Wren pulpit rescued from other bombed churches and reassembled them here — a church rebuilt, in effect, from the City’s scattered salvage.
STOP FOUR — St Lawrence Jewry
North again to Guildhall Yard, where St Lawrence Jewry stands beside the seat of City government — a reminder that the Corporation has been governing itself here since the Middle Ages. The name recalls the Old Jewry, the medieval Jewish quarter that stood nearby until the expulsion of 1290. This has been the official church of the Lord Mayor and the City Corporation since a church first stood here around 1136, and Wren’s 1670–77 rebuild, at £11,870 one of his costliest, was reopened in the presence of Charles II. Thomas More lectured here in 1501 on the relationship between church and state; his tutor, William Grocyn, was vicar for over twenty years; both are remembered in a window.
“Very municipal, very splendid.”
— John Betjeman, on the interior
The Blitz destroyed the interior entirely in December 1940; restoration finished in 1957, reopened by the young Queen Elizabeth II. Near the pulpit sits one of the odder relics in the City: the parish baptism register, made of vellum, which survived the fire that consumed the building around it — but the heat shrank it to roughly a third of its original size, the entries still legible, compressed into something closer to a curiosity than a book.
STOP FIVE — St Mary Aldermary
The last stop, just off Watling Street near Mansion House, rewards one instruction above all others: go in, look up, and stop. The plaster fan vault overhead is the only one of its kind in any English parish church — Gothic in spirit, thoroughly Baroque in its detail, and genuinely startling the first time you see it. The name most likely marks this out as the elder of the City’s several churches dedicated to the Virgin Mary. When the Great Fire destroyed the previous building in 1666, a benefactor left £5,000 specifically to rebuild it in the old Gothic style — and Wren, a committed classicist with little natural sympathy for the Gothic, had no choice but to comply. The result is the only Gothic building he designed in London, by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner’s reckoning, one of the two most important late-seventeenth-century Gothic churches in England. John Milton married his third wife here in 1663. A blank monument on the chancel wall, reputedly commissioned by a widow who remarried before settling on the right words for her first husband, remains blank to this day.
REFUEL — Along the Way & Journey’s End
Ye Olde Watling (pub lunch, real ale) — 29 Watling Street, a two-minute detour from St Mary Aldermary. Said to be built by Wren himself from old ships’ timbers to house the St Paul’s masons, with the drawing office upstairs. Real ales, decent pies, unimpeachable pedigree.
Host Café, St Mary Aldermary (coffee, tea, light lunch) — Tables set among the pews beneath that extraordinary fan-vaulted ceiling. A genuinely lovely place to end the walk with a pot of tea and nowhere else to be.
Hawksmoor, Guildhall (sit-down lunch, wine list) — For those wanting a proper lunch rather than a stop-and-go, this is a short detour from St Lawrence Jewry — steak, a serious wine list, and a booking well worth making in advance.
Five churches, one afternoon; a walk that gives you Wren the frustrated visionary, Wren the pragmatist and — just once, under duress — Wren the Gothicist. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon in the Square Mile.
TEST YOUR WREN-CRAFT — Ten Questions
- What event in 1666 made the rebuilding of St Paul’s necessary?
- How many years did it take to build the present St Paul’s Cathedral?
- What single Latin word, found on a stone, inspired the phoenix carved above St Paul’s south transept?
- To be a true Cockney, tradition says you must be born within earshot of which bells?
- What feature of St Mary-le-Bow’s Norman crypt gives the church its name?
- Which two figures connected with early English settlement in America are commemorated at St Mary-le-Bow?
- Through a chain of anglicisation, what did the name “Vedast” eventually become?
- Who is thought to have designed St Vedast’s triple-stage spire?
- Which City institution stands beside St Lawrence Jewry, giving it its civic role?
- What makes the ceiling of St Mary Aldermary unique among English parish churches?
‘Reflections of the Glass Sellers Chronicler’
July 2026
