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For us East Anglians, the City is our entrance into
London. In a sense, the City is London for us.
Arriving at Liverpool Street Station we are thrown
immediately into the hubbub of the Square Mile. For us,
London is a serious, busy and rather exciting place.
Thinking about it, perhaps all visitors see London
refracted through their regular entrance into it. From
the West Country, London must seem vulgarly suburban in
its shabby gentility - no wonder Paddington station was
Graham Greene's favourite place to set suicides! For the
lucky people of Sheffield, Nottingham and Leicester,
their entrance is through the pleasing sophistication of
St Pancras, and they must think London rather a splendid
place. Brummies imagine their London through the shabby
shopping centre that is Euston station, an unfortunate
comparison with their proud new station in the centre of
Birmingham. And for those arriving from Kent and Sussex
at London Bridge station, I can only assume that for them
London is one of the circles of Hell.But I digress. My point was simply going to
be that it is interesting to find the City's only church
dedicated to the patron Saint of East Anglia just off of
Gracechurch Street, the main entrance into the City from
East Anglia in centuries gone by. Probably, it was a
place that travellers from the fens and marshes could
give thanks for their safe arrival, and ask for a
blessing on their return journey.
There was a church here by at least
the middle of the 12th Century. It was destroyed in the
Great Fire and its replacement built by the Wren
Workshop, probably to the design of Robert Hooke,
although the tower is credited to Hawksmoor. There was a
major restoration by Butterfield in the 19th Century
which left very little of the original woodwork except
for the magnificent pulpit and associated stalls, and
then a big restoration after the church was damaged by
Zeppelin bombs in 1917. The churchyard was pleasingly
turned into a courtyard in the 1930s. St Edmund survived
the Blitz.
The church is no longer in use for
services, and many of the 19th Century furnishings have
been removed. For a while, the church was used as a
spirituality centre, but Mammon has conquered and
although the centre is still based here, the bulk of the
building is now 'St Edmund in the City', a hospitality
suite and convention centre. We offer a range of
spaces and are an ideal choice for select private dining
for twenty, through to corporate receptions and weddings
for 250 guests says the website. So, there you go.
Simon Knott, December 2015
location: Lombard Street EC3V 9AN - 4/024
status: hospitality suite
access: probably only by prior arrangement.
     
St
Edmund as it was in 2011, photographed by Ian Hadingham:
Commission
from Amazon.co.uk supports the running of this site
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