St. Dunstan in the West

St. Dunstan in the West stands on Fleet Street, close to Temple Bar. The original church was built sometime between the death of St. Dunstan in 988 and the consecration of Archbishop of Canterbury Lefranc in 1070. (The Norman Lefranc prohibited the dedication of new churches to Saxon saints). The earliest written record is in the 1180s. Dunstan was an early Bishop of London, and later Archbishop of Canterbury, and there were three churches in and around London dedicated to him, of which this is one of two that still exists. (The other is St. Dunstan and All Saints church at Stepney). This St. Dunstan’s is in the west part of the City of London, its name differentiating it from another City church, St. Dunstan in the East.

St. Dunstan’s stands on Fleet Street, to the east of Temple Bar, as shown in Civitas Londinum (the ‘Agas map’) from about 1561.

The right to appoint the clergyman lay with the abbots of Westminster until it was surrendered to the Crown in 1237 to pay for the maintenance of a house for the reception of converted Jews. In 1386 the right was transferred to the ‘White Canons’ of the Abbey of Alnwick in Northumberland to compensate for property lost during Scottish raids. In 1411 the priest-in-charge at St. Dunstan’s was the Canon of Alnwick. The patronage passed back to the Crown after the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536. The advowson remained fluid until 1821.

In 1623 the vicar was John Donne, who later became Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. As well as his clerical duties, he was also a poet, and two lines from one of his poems passed into common use: “No man is an island” and “For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee”.

St. Dunstan’s as it was before demolition in 1829, as drawn by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd.

St. Dunstan’s narrowly escaped the Great Fire of 1666 as the conflagration progressed westwards. During the last night of the fire the Dean of Westminster organised scholars of Westminster School to bring buckets of water to extinguish the flames that had reached just three doors away. In the late 17^th century an Ionic porch was created above the door that housed the two figures, thought to be the mythical guardians of London, Gog and Magog, which struck the quarter hours. It was thereafter frequently repaired and shops or sheds removed that had been built in front of it.

The old dilapidated medieval building was demolished in 1829 when Fleet Street was widened. It was rebuilt, set back due to the wider road, and re-consecrated in January 1833. It is therefore one of the newest of the City church buildings. John Shaw was the architect, although he died during the work and it was completed by his son, also named John. Much of the internal fabric, including some medieval and Tudor-period monuments, were saved, however, and re-used in the present building.

St. Dunstan’s is one of three City churches on the unusual north-south axis (the others being St. Botolph without Aldgate and St. Edmund King and Martyr). The building is an unusual mixture of styles. Its exterior is neo-Gothic, based on St. Botolph’s Boston – the ‘Boston Stump’ – and All Saints Pavement, York, with a square tower with an octagonal openwork lantern. Tall and imposing, it is a feature of Fleet Street. The tower was badly damaged by bombing in 1944 and rebuilt in 1950 by a donation from a newspaper magnate. A Gothic exterior would normally dictate an interior of a rectangular nave, yet St. Dunstan’s is octagonal on the inside with the main altar on the north side.

As the City of London became increasingly given over to commerce and the population diminished, the parish of St. Dunstan’s was in 1866 merged with that of the nearby St. Thomas in the Liberty of the Rolls, which was demolished in 1887. With a decreasing number of parishioners, in 1952 it became a Guild church and its parish united with that of St. Bride’s Fleet Street.

The High Altar and reredos of St. Dunstan’s are Flemish from the 17^th century. The four stained glass windows behind the altar were donated by the Hoare banking family. The organ dates from the 1670s but has since been entirely rebuilt.

The window to the left of the altar dates from 1895 in memory of Isaak Walton, the 17^th century ‘Scavenger, Quistman and Sidesman’. Walton published his account about angling, The Compleat Angler, in 1653 in the churchyard of St. Dunstan’s. It is still in print today, making it one of the most frequently reprinted books in the English language after the Bible and the works of Shakespeare. Several years after the publication of The Complete Angler, John Milton’s Paradise Lost was published at St. Dunstan’s. The churchyard was then a centre of the publishing trade, with books published “Under St. Dunstan’s Church Fleet Street”. The street continued thereafter as the centre of British newspaper publishing until the late 20^th century.

The statue of Elizabeth I that previously stood on Ludgate.

St. Dunstan’s is notable for two features on its exterior that faces onto Fleet Street. In an alcove over the vestry door is a statue of Queen Elizabeth dating from 1586 during her lifetime. It was originally on the old Lud Gate and presented to the church in 1760 when the gate was demolished, together with a statue of the mythical King Lud that stands below it. In 1928 £700 was donated to Elizabeth’s statue, which provides a very small income to help pay for its upkeep.

The second exterior feature is the prominent clock by Thomas Harris, dating from 1671, which was added to the previous building in thanksgiving of its rescue from the Great Fire. It was the perhaps the first public clock in London to have a minute hand. Above the timepiece stand the statues of two giants who still strike a bell every 15 minutes. There are numerous references in literature to the clock and the giants, including in both Dickens’ Barnaby Ridge and David Copperfield, and Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The clock was removed to the private home of Lord Hertford in Regent’s Park in 1828 when the old church was demolished but returned to St. Dunstan’s in 1935 by the newspaper proprietor Lord Rothermere.

There has been a close association with Hoare’s Bank, which was founded in 1672 and still continues in business opposite the church. There is a Hoare family vault is in the crypt and the church’s silver is housed in the bank’s vaults. Hoare family members remain as churchwardens. Another close association is with the Worshipful Company of Cordwainers, the City of London livery company.

St. Dunstan’s is Anglican but has a role in promoting good relations with other Christian faiths. Side chapels are dedicated to various Churches, including Roman Catholic, Assyrian, Lutheran, and Oriental. The altar screen is Romanian Orthodox, which came in the 1960s from a monastery church in Bucharest.