London Walk: City Churches with Nick Ross

Meet at 10:50am for an 11am start by The Monument outside Monument Tube station. We will finish around 1:30pm with a break for coffee. Lunch in a nearby restaurant.

Between the 2nd and the 6th September 1666 13, 200 houses, 436 acres of land, 400 streets and 89 churches were destroyed by fire - the worst conflagration London or any city, at the time, had ever suffered. This walk will look at a number of Wren’s churches that were built as part of the massive reconstruction programme. We will explore the various ingenuities with which he resolved a peculiarly awkward brief: to use cheap materials on the original foundations and yet design churches that conformed to contemporary liturgical demands. We will survey the scene of his architectural triumph from the Monument, a somewhat polemical commemorative column erected shortly after the Fire by one of Wren’s pupils. This tour will inevitably focus on Wren but by way of illustrating what came before and after him we will also visit the church of St. Bartholomew the Great, the oldest in the City today, and one of Hawksmoor’s quirky masterpieces from the early eighteenth century, St. Mary Woolnoth. Finally the tour will also include a brief visit to Postman’s Park - a wonderfully moving expression of Victorian sentimentalism with no discernible link to Wren whatsoever.

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