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Anyone who potters about the City
with their eyes open will occasionally come across little
patches of garden, often fenced in, sometimes belonging
to adjoining buildings and sometimes apparently belonging
to nobody. A closer look might reveal the occasional
headstone, even a tombchest. These are the burial grounds
of lost City churches, which remained in use after the
Great Fire into the 1850s. The
burial ground of St Lawrence Pountney is more atmospheric
than most. Claes Visscher's 1616 panorama of the City of
London churches before the Great Fire, drawn (and partly
imagined) from the Southwark bank, shows the spire of St
Laurence Poultney as one of the most prominent in the
City. Now, a narrow lane south of Cannon Street takes you
between two separate spaces, one with tombchests. The
other was the site of the church, which was lost to the
Great Fire and not rebuilt. The gardens are quite
overgrown, so you won't see much in summer. Elizabeth and
Wayland Young suggest that the dedication was because of
a bequest by Sir John Poultney, mayor of the City several
times in the 14th Century, who endowed a college of
priests dedicated to Corpus Christi.
Simon Knott, December 2015
location: Laurence Pountney Hill, Cannon
Street EC3M 4BS - 2/034
status: churchyard only, now private garden
access: locked but viewable seven days a week
  
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