| This late Gothic church,
completed right on the eve of the Reformation,
must be one of the most photographed churches in
the City. People come to snap the Gherkin or the
Leadenhall building, and quickly notice they can
get St Andrew Undershaft in as well. This
juxtaposition of the old and the new is very
pleasing, and the internet is awash with
photographs of it. This does disguise the fact,
however, that St Andrew is actually quite a big
building, dwarfed as it is by the leading lights
of London's better-known skyscrapers crowding
around it. The church
famously gets its epithet from the maypole which
was on the green beside it before being destroyed
by rabid protestants in 1547. The mad gothick at
the top of the tower dates from the 1880s and was
the work of one Chatfeild Clarke. Whatever was he
thinking of? Rhineland castles, probably, which
just goes to show what you get when you have an
over-enthusiastic architect and a client with
more money than taste.
As with near neighbours St
Helen's Bishopsgate and St Ethelburga, this
church survived both the Great Fire and the
firestorm of the Blitz. Unlike its neighbours, it
only suffered minor damage from the massive
terrorist bombs of 1992 and 1993, and so this is
one of the City's few reasonably intact medieval
churches.
I'm still to get inside
this church. On the last two occasions I visited
it was under refurbishment for the use of the
busy evangelical congregation up the road at St
Helen's Bishopsgate. I suspect that we won't get
a repeat of Quinlan Terry's attempt to turn that
church into an operating theatre after the IRA
bombs, but I look forward to finding out - watch
this space.
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