Around 160 years ago, a gleaming white Christian edifice was erected at the southernmost end of the Isle of Dogs that is rumoured to include remains of the old London Bridge in its structure.
Squashed in between buildings on a site next to the posh shopping area of Marylebone sits a surprisingly large and very gothic inspired church.
Next to the exceptionally posh Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge sits an exceptionally posh church, and despite passing by for years, I have never passed by when it is open – until now.
A large church stands on the corner opposite the Old Bailey and I have passed its locked gates for rather more years than I care to remember, for church that is open for a few hours each day during the week – has never been open when I am passing.
Although just a couple of minutes walk from the activity of Victoria Street and around the corner from Channel4’s head office, it is a church you would not casually pass unless you had certain reason to use the street it fronts onto.
Sitting right next to the V&A museum looms a massive church that despite its location in tourist-central, is hardly known to non-parishioners, and is one of London’s most overlooked and yet most glorious of buildings.
As Private Eye is wont to say, it’s Grim up North London, but if the eponymous characters of that newspaper were to dart out of their shell, they might find a remarkable building peaking its tall spire above the council estates of Kilburn.
If you approach an old church, mainly in towns and villages rather than cities, you might enter the churchyard through a small wooden gate with a pitched roof. These small gatehouses though have a particularly macabre history, for this is…
Bethnal Green sports two Churches with very notable and yet also very different representations of the Stations of the Cross. Both built within 80 years of each other, yet the older is also the younger, thanks to the after effects…
If you are the sort of church that has a long association with a famous bridge, it is possibly not that surprising that you might have a large model of said bridge in your building. Such is the church of…
Some 800 years ago, a church was built in the grounds of the existing Barking Abbey and while the Abbey has long since vanished, the church still remains as a cornerstone of Christian worship in the town. The Abbey itself…
If you were wandering through a churchyard in Woolwich, you might spy a rather aloof, snobbish even, memorial stuck in a somewhat overlooked corner behind another building. This noble lion with its nose in the air is the memorial to…
If you were to visit a certain Church in the City of London and go down into its crypt museum, almost overlooked under the stairs you can find one of the most perfectly preserved tessellated Roman pavements in the City.…
There is a very distinctive church frontage almost next to the Royal Court of Justice on Fleet Street that I have wanted to peer inside for years, but every time I walked past, the doors have been firmly closed.
There has been a church tower on the banks of the Thames in Fulham for over 600 years ringing out the hours and calls to prayer, and I was given a chance to have a climb up the 15th century…
Sitting on the edge of the large open yard at Guildhall sits somewhat uncomfortably in the space, the church of St Lawrence Jewry Near Guildhall.
London has three four Cathedrals, and while two – St Paul’s and Westminster — are famous, (And it seems, a fourth one I have never even heard of) Southwark has always seemed to me to be a bit overlooked, which…
Sitting in a corner behind Mansion House at Bank sits a 340 year old church designed by Sir Christopher Wren, with a huge dome modelled on that within St Paul’s Cathedral.
If I told you that the world’s oldest wooden church is not in a dusty part of Palestine or Ethiopia, but in the green fields of the UK, you might be surprised. Even more so if I pointed out that it is just outside London.
St Martins Church Chipping Ongar Peeking out behind some wonky wooden buildings on Chipping Ongar’s main street is a glimpse of the ancient town church, which is nearly a thousand years old. Built around the time of the Norman Conquest…
Although I was rudely thwarted in my attempt to visit the Foulness Heritage Centre yesterday (and the church next to it), I was slightly compensated by a look around another its sister church which was on my route between Shoeburyness…
St. Stephen’s is a former church in Hampstead designed in the Neo Gothic style by Samuel Sanders Teulon who considered it the best of the 114 churches he designed.
A chapel that dates from 1875 and built in the High Victorian style that almost out-Pugins Pugin for sheer over the top decoration.
If you’ve never been inside Westminster Cathedral near Victoria train station, then you are likely to be in for a bit of a surprise, for despite being over 100 years old, they still haven’t finished decorating it. And I hope…
