A walk through one of London’s most rewarding — and least visited — square miles
There is a particular kind of May morning in London that seems designed specifically to justify the other eleven months. Bright without being hot, the light low and clear, the old stone of the City catching it at exactly the right angle. It was on just such a morning that I turned off Liverpool Street and walked south down Bishopsgate, heading for a cluster of five churches in the Cornhill and Bishopsgate quarter of the Square Mile — five buildings that between them cover nine hundred years of the city’s spiritual, cultural, and human history. The whole route takes no more than two hours at a brisk pace. Almost no one walks it.
That, it seems to me, is one of the great mysteries of London life. Millions of people work within half a mile of these buildings every day. Most have never been inside any of them. The churches of the City of London are among the most concentrated collection of historic architecture in the world — over fifty buildings within a single square mile, many of them by Christopher Wren, others medieval survivals, others strange hybrids that carry three or four centuries of London’s story in their walls simultaneously. They are largely free to enter. They are rarely crowded. And on a good June morning, with the office workers streaming past on the pavements outside, they offer something genuinely rare in this city: silence, depth, and the unhurried company of the centuries.
ST HELEN BISHOPSGATE
St Helen Bishopsgate is reached by turning off Bishopsgate into the quiet courtyard of Great St Helen’s, and the building that confronts you is, by any measure, extraordinary. The largest surviving parish church in the City of London, it contains more monuments than any other church in Greater London outside Westminster Abbey, which is why it has long been called the Westminster Abbey of the City and why an hour spent inside it feels more like an afternoon at the V&A than a casual church visit.
The reason for its unusual width is that it was built with two parallel naves. Until the dissolution of the Benedictine priory in 1538, the church was divided by a partition running east to west, the northern nave belonging to the nuns of the adjacent convent and the southern nave to the parish. It is the only surviving building from a City nunnery. The nunnery was established around 1210 and flourished for three centuries before Henry VIII’s commissioners arrived, and the dividing screen was removed, merging the two naves into the single wide space that has defined the character of the church ever since.
William Shakespeare was a parishioner here in the 1590s when he lived nearby. The tomb of Sir Thomas Gresham — the great financier who founded the Royal Exchange and whose grasshopper crest appears on so much of the City’s fabric — stands in the south aisle, an altar tomb of white marble with fluted sides. Robert Hooke, who worked alongside Wren on the rebuilding of the City after the Great Fire of 1666, was buried in the churchyard, though his bones were removed in the Victorian era during one of those baffling episodes of grave clearance that the nineteenth century seemed to regard as tidiness and we now regard as vandalism.
The church survived both the Great Fire and the Blitz. It did not survive the IRA. In 1992 and 1993, two bombs exploded on Bishopsgate in quick succession, and the second — detonated on 24 April 1993, a device so large it raised a mushroom cloud visible across much of London and caused an estimated £350 million of damage — badly damaged the church. The subsequent restoration by the architect Quinlan Terry removed much of the Victorian accretion and returned the interior to a bright, flexible, welcoming space. The monuments stand undisturbed. The two naves breathe quietly in the light.
ST ETHELBURGA-THE-VIRGIN
A short walk further along Bishopsgate brings you to St Ethelburga-the-Virgin, squeezed between two far larger buildings and easily missed. It is one of the smallest churches in the City — little more than a room, really — and it has had an existence that makes its survival feel almost miraculous.
It survived the Great Fire of 1666. It survived the Blitz. And then on 24 April 1993 — the same morning that damaged St Helen’s — the Bishopsgate bomb destroyed seventy percent of it. St Ethelburga’s was not the target, was not insured, and had no particular claim on the public conscience beyond the fact of its small and ancient presence. Arguments were made for demolition.
The building was saved by the vision of Bishop Richard Chartres, who proposed not merely restoration but transformation. The church reopened in 2002 as the Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, a decision that turned an act of violence into a space dedicated specifically to its opposite. Behind the church, through a gate that most passers-by on Bishopsgate never notice, is a hidden garden with a Bedouin tent at its centre — installed after the September 11th attacks as a symbol of welcome across faiths and civilisations. On a weekday morning, it is one of the most unexpectedly peaceful spaces in the entire City.
The saint herself deserves a moment. Ethelburga was the first leader of a monastic order for women in England, the first Abbess of Barking — a foundation that once held considerable power across this corner of Essex and east London. She refused an arranged marriage to a pagan prince and cared heroically for the sick during the plague of 664, which eventually killed her and most of her community. Before Henry Hudson set out in 1607 to search for the Northwest Passage, he took communion with his crew at this church. The explorer and the ascetic saint share the same modest walls. Neither is easily forgotten.
ST ANDREW UNDERSHAFT
The name alone is worth the visit. St Andrew Undershaft — a church named for the shaft of a maypole — sits on St Mary Axe, a short walk east, and is one of the rare City churches to have survived both the Great Fire and the Blitz, which means that what you stand in is a building of 1532, substantially unchanged. The maypole itself was set up each year in the lane outside until student riots ended the custom in 1517. The pole, apparently taller than the church tower beside it, survived as a neighbourhood fixture for another thirty years before a mob seized it in 1547 and destroyed it as a pagan idol. The church has stood under its absent shaft ever since.
The monument that draws people here — those who know to come and not nearly enough do — is the effigy of John Stow, the Tudor tailor, antiquary, and chronicler who spent his life recording medieval London in his Survey of London of 1598 and gave us the most complete picture of the city before the Great Fire obliterated so much of what he described. Stow’s memorial shows him sitting at his desk, a quill pen in hand, and in a ceremony held every three years, the Lord Mayor of London places a new quill in the marble fingers — a gesture of civic gratitude that has been repeated since 1905.
Stow died in poverty in 1605. He had spent decades and most of his own money on his research, wearing out his eyes on medieval manuscripts by candlelight, walking the lanes and alleys of the City, taking notes. King James I granted him a licence to beg. His wife paid for the monument. Standing before it in the quiet of St Andrew Undershaft on a clear morning, with the glass towers of the modern City visible through the windows, it is difficult not to feel the full weight of that particular human story: the man who loved a city so completely that he gave everything to record it and whom the city forgot before he was cold.
ST PETER UPON CORNHILL
Down at the corner of Cornhill and Gracechurch Street stands St Peter upon Cornhill, and it opens proceedings with one of the most audacious claims in British ecclesiastical history. A brass plate inside the church states plainly that it was founded in AD 179 by King Lucius, the first Christian king of Britain, as the mother church of the kingdom. The original medieval tablet making this claim was lost in the Great Fire, but several writers had recorded its text before the flames arrived, and a replacement brass was set up in the rebuilt church and survives today.
Modern historians are sceptical of King Lucius. The archaeological evidence for a second-century church on this site does not exist. But the church itself has been documented here since around 1038, and its position — at the highest point of the City, directly above the foundations of the great Roman basilica of Londinium, built around AD 90 to 120 — gives it a layered antiquity that no brass plate needs to embellish. Wren rebuilt it between 1677 and 1684, producing a quietly fine interior of original door cases, a large pulpit, and a wooden chancel screen widely attributed to Wren himself. The weather vane on the tower takes the form of St Peter’s key. Tucked into the alley nearby is the Jamaica Wine House, occupying one of the oldest coffee house sites in London — an additional reason, if one were needed, to linger in this quarter of the City.
ST MICHAEL CORNHILL
The walk ends at St Michael Cornhill, just along from St Peter’s, and it is a building that rewards close attention precisely because it is so difficult to read at first glance. The bones of the structure are Wren’s, rebuilt between 1669 and 1672 in the years immediately after the Great Fire. The Gothic tower was largely the work of Nicholas Hawksmoor, whose upper stages were completed in 1722, and which imitates quite deliberately the tower of Magdalen College, Oxford. The interior was then comprehensively remodelled in the 1850s by Sir George Gilbert Scott in the High Victorian manner — an elaborate Italian Gothic reredos, rich Clayton and Bell stained glass, a new Gothic porch facing Cornhill, adorned with a sculpture of St Michael disputing with Satan. The result is a church that feels gloriously, almost defiantly Victorian on the inside, Oxford Gothic on the outside, and Wren underneath everything.
The folk tale attached to the building is irresistible. In the early sixteenth century, during a violent storm, a team of bellringers saw what a contemporary source described only as “an ugly shapen sight” appear as they were ringing. They fell unconscious. When they came round, they found scratch marks on the masonry which, the story insisted, were the Devil’s claw marks. John Stow recorded the tale. The scratch marks were pointed out to visitors for years afterwards.
Thomas Gray, author of the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, was born in a milliner’s shop immediately next door in 1716 and baptised inside the church. Harold Darke was organist here for fifty years, composing during those decades the carol In the Bleak Midwinter — sung every December in every corner of the English-speaking world, written by a man whose study window looked out across Cornhill.
WHERE TO STOP ALONG THE WAY
The walk provides several entirely fitting opportunities to pause and take refreshment, each one as historically layered as the churches themselves.
The Jamaica Wine House on St Michael’s Alley — already mentioned in the context of St Peter upon Cornhill and conveniently positioned between that church and St Michael’s — occupies one of the most significant addresses in the history of London’s social life. This was the site of London’s first coffee house, established by a Greek entrepreneur named Pasqua Rosée in 1652, where merchants, lawyers, and shipowners gathered to exchange news, conduct business, and argue about everything under the sun. The coffee house was the internet of its age, and this was where it began in London. The current building is a Victorian pub of warm wood and leather, exactly the right place to sit down with something restorative mid-walk. Samuel Pepys was a regular in his day. The standard is not quite what it was.
For something more substantial, Ball Court off Cornhill — a narrow alleyway easily missed unless you know to look for the old sign above the entrance — is home to what was, until 2022, Simpson’s Tavern, the oldest surviving chophouse in the City, established in 1757. After a prolonged dispute with its landlord, the tavern closed its doors that year but is now being reborn as Cloth Cornhill, due to reopen in 2026 under the team behind the well-regarded Smithfield restaurant Cloth, who are restoring the panelled walls, wooden booths, and fireplaces of the Grade II listed interior while promising that chops and steaks will remain central to the menu. The court itself, a Dickensian cobbled passage barely wide enough for two people abreast, is one of the most atmospheric corners of the entire City.
Those who prefer their refreshment in grander surroundings need only walk a short distance to The Counting House on Cornhill, a Fuller’s pub housed in what was formerly the banking hall of Lloyds Bank — all soaring ceilings, ornate plasterwork, original mahogany counters and a central dome of stained glass that makes it, by some considerable measure, the most beautiful pub interior in the Square Mile. A lunchtime glass and a moment on one of the deep leather banquettes in that room feels like precisely the right way to draw breath between churches.
And for those who prefer coffee and conversation over alcohol, the Grand Café in the courtyard of the Royal Exchange — a short walk from St Michael Cornhill — offers coffee, champagne, and light food beneath the colonnaded ceiling of what was for three centuries the beating commercial heart of London’s trading world. The building is now a luxury shopping destination rather than a market, but the architecture makes it one of the finest covered spaces in the City and the café is entirely worth the detour.
TEST YOURSELF: HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW BISHOPSGATE AND CORNHILL?
Ten questions drawn from the walk. Answers below — no peeking.
- St Helen Bishopsgate is sometimes called the Westminster Abbey of the City. What architectural feature gives it its unusual width and sets it apart from every other parish church in the Square Mile?
- Henry Hudson took communion at St Ethelburga’s before setting out on a famous voyage in 1607. What was he attempting to find?
- St Andrew Undershaft takes its name from a maypole that once stood outside the church. The pole survived the end of the maypole custom in 1517 by another thirty years before being destroyed. On what grounds was it finally seized and smashed by a mob in 1547?
- John Stow, commemorated in St Andrew Undershaft, wrote the most complete account of medieval London before the Great Fire. A ceremony has been held at his monument since 1905, in which the Lord Mayor performs a small but precise act. What is it?
- St Peter upon Cornhill claims to be the oldest church in London, founded in AD 179 by a king whose very existence historians dispute. What is the name of this legendary monarch?
- St Peter upon Cornhill stands at the highest point of the City, above the foundations of a major Roman structure. What was that structure?
- St Michael Cornhill is the work of at least three great architects across three different centuries. Can you name all three?
- The folk tale attached to St Michael Cornhill involves bellringers, a violent storm, and evidence supposedly left on the church walls. What was that evidence, and to whom was it attributed?
- Thomas Gray, baptised at St Michael Cornhill, is the author of one of the most quoted poems in the English language. What is it?
- The Jamaica Wine House on St Michael’s Alley stands on the site of London’s first coffee house. In what year was it established, and who founded it?
The churches of the City cost nothing to enter. They ask only that you slow down long enough to look. London, at its best, rewards that decision completely.
‘Reflections of the Glass Sellers Chronicler’
June 2026
