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| All Hallows is set in the
lattice of lanes south of Fenchurch Street
Station which are a reminder of what much of the
eastern part of the City was like before the Big
Bang of the 1980s and the consequent and
regretable loosening of planning regulations. The
medieval church here survived the Great Fire but
collapsed from neglect a few years later. It was
rebuilt, though not by the Wren workshop, and
appears to have been considered rather dull and
nondescript. All Hallows was one of the churches
demolished by the Diocese of London in the 1870s,
as the working population of the City parishes
fled for the new middle-class suburbia. The money
raised when the land was sold was used to build
churches in East London, and the parish was
united with that of St Olave Hart Street. The
tower was kept on the initiative of the
Clothworkers' Company, whose Hall is next door. The tower appears to be early 14th
Century, so before the Black Death ripped through
the City parishes. There was probably once an
upper stage and spirelet. Bizarrely, the
antiquarian enthusiasm of the Clothworkers for a
showpiece by their Hall extended to moving an
early 12th Century vaulted crypt from the
demolished Lambe's Chapel in Cripplegate. Lambe
had been a benefactor of the Clothworkers, and
established his chapel in the late 16th Century
in the buildings of the former early medieval
hermitage of St James in the Wall. The crypt was
moved in the 1870s and now lies underground here
to the east of the tower. In 1957 the
Clothworkers Company built a hall on church land
to the south of the tower for the use of the
parish of St Olave Hart Street.
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Simon Knott, December 2015
location: Mark Lane EC3R 7NQ - 4/003
status: tower only
access: set in public space
   
Commission
from Amazon.co.uk supports the running of this site
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