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St Mary Abchurch is many people's favourite City church,
and it is not hard to see why. Sandwiched between the
busy thoroughfares of King William Street and Cannon
Street, with Bank underground station and the Mansion
House not far off, Abchurch Yard comes as a complete
surprise, an intimate space with its picturesque church
on the northern side. The tower is pretty well invisible
from ground level, but the facade is one of Wren's
loveliest. The medieval church here had been destroyed in
the Great Fire, and for its replacement Wren erected
perhaps his squarest, most rational and most protestant
church of all. There are no aisles, and on stepping
inside it is the roof that takes the breath away, a vast
painted dome. It depicts the name of God in Hebrew
surrounded by clouds and rays of light, and is a reminder
that the non-conformist congregations of the late 17th
Century thought of their buildings as synagogues. St Mary
Abchurch has never been a non-conformist church, I hasten
to add, but the City merchants were the driving force
behind early modern protestantism in England, and you can
see the influence here.The
dome was practice for the cathedral. The furnishings
beneath it are superb. The huge, dominating reredos is by
Grinling Gibbons. Almost all the furnishings date from
the last thirty years of the 17th Century, with only a
tinkering by the Victorians to come. Since the fire at St
Mary at Hill, this is the best surviving example of what
some quiet, forgotten back-street City churches were like
before the Blitz, exactly the kind of place that Betjeman
recalled in Summoned by Bells when he used
to stand by intersecting lanes among the silent offices
and wait, choosing which bell to follow. And, once
inside, while a hidden organist sent reedy notes to
flute around the plasterwork, from the sea of pews a
single head with cherries nodding on a black straw hat
rose in a neighbouring pew. The caretaker? Or the sole
resident parishioner?
If you visit when the Friends of City Churches attendants
are on duty, you may be allowed to do two things.
Firstly, the font cover is operated by a central wooden
screw - if they let you raise it, you will find it lifts
as lightly as air. Secondly, you may be allowed to go
down into the crypt which was discovered during the
restoration after the Blitz. This is vaulted, but it is
not under the church at all - rather, it is under the
yard next door, which can never have been a churchyard.
Pevsner thought it might have been the undercroft of a
14th Century chancel chapel.
The name Abchurch is often thought
to be a corruption of 'upchurch', although there seems no
obvious reason for this. Perhaps it more likely refers to
the name of a long-forgotten patron. The church suffered
considerable blast damage during the Second World War,
but was restored exquisitely in the years that followed,
and is a must-see for anyone in search of lost time.
Simon Knott, December 2015
location: 4/040
status: guild church
access:
                 
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