| An impossible medieval
dedication, of course. The church was St Agnes,
becoming known as St Anne at some point in the
medieval period, perhaps when London was getting
itself back together after the Black Death and
had more important things to worry about than
getting church dedications right. To avoid
confusion and perhaps in an attempt to please
everybody (you never can) the two dedications
were concatenated, a usage that was general by
the time of the Reformation, at which point the
church was completely destroyed by fire, being
rebuilt in 1548, an unusual date. Given that the Gresham Street area
has the highest concentration of churches in the
City, and that St Anne and St Agnes was gutted by
its own fire, the Great Fire and the
Blitz, it has done well to survive. St John
Zachary, which adjoined the church to the east,
was not rebuilt. Wren reinvented St Anne and St
Agnes in the late 1670s as a small church on a
central plan with a small tower - perhaps too
small, and this appears to be because it is
actually a refurbishment and elaboration of the
original 14th Century tower. The church sits
awkwardly in its churchyard on the corner of
Aldersgate and Gresham Street, as if rather shy
and unsure where to show its face. As Simon
Bradley observes in the revised Pevsner, its
attraction is of a homely sort.
If this really is a shy
church then it will not have thanked the German
bombers, for before the Blitz this church was
almost hemmed in by other buildings, and apart
from the railed churchyard to the south had to be
approached along passageways. The firestorm on
the night of December 29th 1940 put paid to that.
It was not restored until the 1960s, by which
time nostalgia had set in and Braddock &
Martin Smith could do little else other than
restore it to its pre-war integrity.
The interior was
repopulated with older furnishings from other
London churches, some of which had been
demolished in the 19th Century and their
treasures placed in safe storage. These include
the reredos from St Michael Wood Street and the
font cover from St Mildred Bread Street, also
destroyed in the Blitz. The font, which appears
to be 18th Century, is actually a 1960s copy of
the one at St Vedast.
I've yet to see inside this
church. As far as I am aware it is still in use
by the City of London Lutherans, but it is also
used regularly for concerts, and is kept locked
when there are valuable instruments on the
premises. Internal photographs coming soon, then.
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