Annual City Church Walk
20th July 2016Annual City Church Walk
This is the second year this walk has been organised and I think it may become a calendar favourite amongst the Livery bretheren. The Mistress and myself joined approximately forty Masters, Mistresses and a Clerk or two rendezvoused from 9.30 in St. Pauls Crypt for bacon butties and coffee. Casually dressed, in deference to the heatwave, many of us were in shorts with Panama hats (I don't think I saw a single baseball cap, praise God!). At 10.15 the Clerk of the Plumbers (the Plumbers were organising this year's walk) divided us into two parties and we were allocated a guide and, as in our case, it was Past Master Mercer (2003), Mike Dudgeon. Once we were assembled by the old Temple Bar in Paternoster Square, we morphed into tourists and gawped and snapped with the best of them. Mike was a fount of knowledge and anecdotes and I shamelessly clung to every word as it was just so interesting. Many of us have visited a church or two and perhaps think that box has been ticked - well, unless you go with a guide like Mike, it hasn't. Over the course of the day we visited but twelve of the City's remaining 40 churches (109 were lost in the Great Fire alone!) but each and every one of them yielded gem after gem for either beauty, originality, artefacts and in most cases all three. Where can you see an original Epstein bust in a quiet green location? - why, the yard of St Vedast alias Foster of course! Where can you see the most astonishing fan vaulting in original condition? - St. Mary Aldermary, naturally - Wren's only Gothic church, done on account of a benefactor rejecting all the new-fangled neoclassical re-building that was going on, but Wren just made Gothic even more beautiful. On we went until at lunch time we came to a great rarity - where in London can you spy a Revd. Canon smoking his pipe? Look no further than our own Livery church, St Lawrence Jewry. We rested there for lunch (Mark Grove on good form as ever) and, whilst we chomped and quaffed, we were entertained by a young pianist whose name I regret I can't recall - he was very good, but what I didn't know was that St. L's owns and uses Sir Thomas Beecham's grand piano! After lunch we set off at much the same pace (ie quite slow as the "tourist" element was still much in evidence!) and made a failed attempt to get into St. Stephen Walbrook - this was a shame as the dome (which can be seen from the street) was Wren's 'practice' dome for St. Paul's, he having never built one before. After that domes became a bit of a feature and I was quite unprepared for the fully painted huge example in St. Mary Abchurch. My next favourite was St Magnus the Martyr, and I love it because its yard is a tiny fragment of Old London Bridge, complete with a sample of Roman piling and medieval stone pont nearby, and a wonderful clock dated 1703 over the door and which originally would have been the first thing you saw as you came off the bridge and looked up. Inside it is rather too high church for my Anglican tastes, a strong whiff of incense abounded, but there's the most terrific model of Old London Bridge as at about 1415, modelled by Liveryman Plumber, Fan Maker and Master Mariner, David Aggett - a true tour de force, with over 800 characters in costume on it - one of which is PC215 Aggett in modern police uniform, but I couldn't find him. We concluded at All Hallows by the Tower - badly bombed, but nicely restored with a neo-gothic concrete roof c.1950 as there was a wood ration on. Despite the Luftwaffe's best efforts, some good things survived - a Norman archway; an amazing font cover by Grinling Gibbons and the crypt which has some Roman pavement, artefacts and some other very surprising material - Shackleton's crow's nest from his last expedition for instance! By this stage I was done in and the All Hallows cafe served us a good cup of builders and a generous slice of cake which, taken in the drafty shade outside was just the reviver one needed before tackling the District Line. Many, many thanks to the Plumbers for a terrific day, to Mike for being such a great guide, even if he is a Mercer, and, should any future Master be sitting on the fence, if the forgoing hasn't been enough to convince you to go next time, then nothing will!