This is a very unusual church for London, unusual for
England, for it was one of the very few churches to be
built during the Laudian years at the start of the 17th
Century. More than this, it can proudly claim that the
new church was consecrated by Archbishop Laud himself.
Even more, the vestments he wore and the ceremony he
oversaw on the occasion were both used in evidence
against him at his trial before he was summarily beheaded
by the Puritans. You don't get a much higher pedigree
than that.
Under the
circumstances then, it is perhaps a little disappointing
that the church is rather traditional, rebuilt on the
exact foundations of its medieval predecessor, and
perhaps doesn't really reflect what we know of Laudian
worship at all. As Elizabeth and Wayland Young observed, it
answers no questions about its time, informing one only
that it was a time of change and indecision. The
same may be said of the almost exactly contemporary
church of St John in the city of Leeds in Yorkshire.
The dedication is an abbreviation
of St Katherine Creechurch or Christchurch, for this was
the site of the Augustinian Priory of Holy Trinity
Aldgate, the parish of which was known as Christchurch.
The people of the parish used the Priory church, which
the monks seem to have found something of a nuisance, so
in the 14th Century they gave the parish its own church,
which Simon Bradley suggests may have been the former
cemetery chapel. As the parish of Christchurch had been
made up of four earlier medieval parishes, the new church
took its dedication from one of them, St Katherine.
At the dissolution the parish was
offered the Priory church, but they turned it down,
probably because it was in a poor state of repair, or
perhaps they were merely proud of the new tower built
against their own church some thirty years earlier.
Instead, St Katherine Cree was rebuilt against the tower,
and consecrated in 1628. The floor was raised up higher
than the old church, the ceilings vaulted, the east
window in its Catherine wheel style one of the most
memorable in London. The church survived the Great Fire,
and Samuel Pepys described how it was used by the
Corporation as a meeting place in the days after it. This
part of Leadenhall Street survived the Blitz, and so St
Katherine Cree remains in all its singularity. Simon Knott, December 2015
location: Leadenhall Street 3/033 status: working church in parish of St Olave
Hart Street access:
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