An 11th Century foundation, though rebuilt in the 15th Century on a slightly different site on the other side of the Walbrook. Destroyed in the Great Fire, the Wren workshop rebuilt it 1672-80. Unlike the jolly churchwardens at St Nicholas Cole Abbey, who entertained Wren with dinners and drinks to make their church a priority, the churchwardens here demanded Wren's best work, and rewarded him handsomely with the promise of a personal gift of twenty guineas in a silk purse. That's about five thousand pounds in today's money - not much to a rich man like Wren, perhaps, but it was on top of what he earned for the work, and in any case it seems to have done the trick.

Wayland Young notes that the church is admired by foreigners for a logic rare in English architecture, and by Londoners for the quaintness of a building so dull outside having such lightness and beauty within. The proportions are exquisitely correct, music in stone, with a long view down to the east for all the fact that this is a series of intersecting cubes. Wren's pews were removed in the 19th Century, which only added to the mathematical delight. Many of the craftsmen here would also work on Wren's St Paul's Cathedral.

These days the exterior is rather more exposed than it ever has been since Wren's day. Shops clustered around it, and the main entrance at the west faced into a narrow passage. Now, a vast building site stretches to the west of the church, soon to be filled by some glass and concrete lump, no doubt. The old setting must have accentuated the surprise on entering, to find it so full of rational light. In Wren's day, people must have come in here and thought they were seeing the future.

But the future has caught up with St Stephen Walbrook. Blast damage from the Blitz was repaired, and glass by the great Keith New was installed in the early 1960s. But the church was suffering subsidence, and by the 1970s it was in danger of collapse. So came the controversial reordering under the hands of Lord Palumbo. The church was cleared of all clutter, the 19th Century mosaic floor was removed (indeed, the floor of the church was completely rebuilt), Keith New's glass was sent into exile at Norwich Cathedral, and instead of the previous long vista from the west towards the reredos, a huge central altar, the work of Henry Moore, was plonked down under the dome. It looks pleasingly like a vast, ripe Camembert cheese. But of course this completely changes Wren's intended perspective, hence the controversy. There is no doubting the quality of Moore's altar - it is, after all, what many people come to see - or the quality of the restoration as a whole.But perhaps these disagreements are good things, because they show how much buildings like this still really matter to people in the early decades of the 21st Century.

St Stephen Walbrook has a good collection of memorials from the late 17th Century onwards, many of which you can see below. The best is probably that to John Lilburne, Citizen and Grocer, who died in 1678. His Latin inscription tells us that he was of the ancient family of Lilburne in Sunderland in the Diocese of Durham, and that by his wife Isabel his eldest son was George, hoc posuit monumentum, who 'placed this memorial'. John and Isabel stand either side of the inscription in the fashionable clothes of the time, while up above a skeleton dances with a buxom woman behind a garland held by two cherubs. A memorable memorial.

This church will be known by many people as the birthplace of the Samaritans, the charity set up to provide emotional support to anyone struggling to cope, or at risk of suicide. Chad Varah, the vicar of St Stephen Walbrook, had been profoundly moved when taking the funeral of a 14 year old girl who had killed herself in his previous parish, and after moving here in 1953 he dedicated a telephone line in his study that would be open to anyone who wanted to talk. The number, Mansion House 9000, soon became widely known, and within ten years there were branches of the Samaritans all over England. The name was not chosen by Varah, but rather became common usage after a newspaper headline about the service refered to it as such. The telephone that provided the original service is on display inside the church.

Simon Knott, March 2022

location: Walbrook EC4N 8BN - 4/059
status: working parish church
access: open Monday to Friday 10am - 4pm
website

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