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The pleasantly named Love Lane runs between London Wall
and Gresham Street, and thus it was at the heart of the
great fire storm of the evening of Sunday 29th December
1940. Everything conspired against London that night.
Many of the churches were left locked after the services
of that morning, contrary to the request of the
authorities who wanted to ensure access for firefighters.
It was Christmas week, and firewatchers who'd been
keeping an eye from the roofs of City buildings for the
last few months were away. A high wind blew through the
City, fanning the flames caused by thousands of German
incendiaries, and the conflagration grew until it was
covering thirty-five acres, and destroying eighteen
churches.St Mary
Aldermanbury was one of them. The medieval church had
been destroyed in the Great Fire, and Wren's replacement
was one of the first to be built, complete by 1675. It
was noted for its plainness and simplicity. This did not
please the Victorians, and in 1863 Edmund Woodthorpe, who
Wayland Young calls the prince of philistine
restorers, gutted the inside, removing the Wren
woodwork and replacing it with, among other things, a
stone reredos and font in 'the Byzantine style'. The
windows were filled with Venetian-style tracery. This was
the church that German bombs wrecked.
Enough survived for the church to
be rebuilt, and this happened, but not here. Instead, it
was re-erected at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri
in the United States in 1965 as a memorial to Sir Winston
Churchill who had given his famous 'Iron Curtain' speech
on the campus in 1945. The churchyard that remained was
laid out as a public garden, and the foundations of the
medieval church, which Wren had reused, were exposed. A
19th Century memorial with the bust of another great
Englishman, William Shakespeare, commemorates John
Heminge and Henry Condell, who compiled the First Folio.
Simon Knott, December 2015
location: Aldermanbury, Love Lane EC2V 7HH
status: churchyard garden
access: open seven days a week
      
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