St. Mary Woolnoth

St. Mary Woolnoth, earlier known as St. Mary Woolnoth of the Nativity, stands in a prominent position in the City at the v-shaped junction of Lombard Street and King William Street. It faces across to the Lord Mayor’s official residence of Mansion House and the Bank of England. It was probably founded in Saxon times, although first recorded in 1191, and may be named after a Saxon noble named Wulfnoth. Another explanation is the location of a nearby wool market. To support the latter argument, a nearby church was St. Mary Woolchurch, which was destroyed in the Great Fire.

St. Mary Woolnoth is shown (inverted P) on Lombard Street in Civitas Londinum (the ‘Agas map’) from about 1561.

In medieval times St. Mary Woolnoth belonged to the Convent of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate, but it was given to Sir Martin Bowes by Henry V in the early 15^th century, and later to the Goldsmiths’ Company. The original building was replaced in 1438. It was embellished with several chapels built by mayors in the 15th century.

Being in the centre of the City, numerous people of note were buried in the medieval church. John Stow wrote of the many monuments in St. Mary’s in his 1598 ‘Survey of London’:

…a proper parish church of St. Mary Woolnoth, of the Nativity, the reason of which name I have not yet learnt.  The church is newly built. Sir Hugh Brice, goldsmith, mayor in the first year of Henry VI., keeper of the king’s exchange at London, and one of the governors of the king’s mint in the Tower of London, under William Lord Hastings, the 5^th [year of the reign of] Edward IV., deceased 1496. He built in the church a chapel called Charnell, as also part of the body of the church and the steeple, and gave money toward the furnishing thereof, besides the stone which he had prepared. He was buried in the body of the church. Guy Brice, or Boys, was buried there. Dame Joan, wife to Sir Henry William Peach; Thomas Nocket, draper, 1396: he founded a chantry there. Simon Eyre, 1459: he gave the tavern called the Cardinal’s Hat, in Lombard Street, with a tenant annexed on the east part of the tavern, together with an alley from Lombard Street to Cornhill, with the appurtenances, all which were by him new built, toward the brotherhood of our Lady in St. Mary Woolnoth’s Church. John Moager, pewter, and Emma his wife, in St. John’s Chapel; Sir John Percival, merchant tailor, mayor about 1504; Thomas Roch and Andrew Michael, vintners, and Joan their wife; William Hilton, merchant tailor; and tailor to King Henry VIII., was buried there 1519, under the chapel of St. George, which chapel was built by George Lufken, sometime tailor to the prince; Robert Amades, goldsmith, master of the king’s jewels. Sir Martin Bowes, mayor, buried about 1569; he gave lands for the discharge of that Langborne Ward, of all fifteens to be granted to the king by parliament. George Hasken, Sir Thomas Ramsey, late mayor, &c.

St. Mary Woolnoth in the late 19th century.

Damaged, but not totally destroyed in the Great Fire, it was repaired by Wren in 1677, largely at the cost of Sir Robert Vine. That building proved to be structurally unsafe. It was therefore rebuilt again in the early decades of the 18^th century in an English Baroque style by Nicholas Hawksmoor as part of the ‘Fifty New Churches Act’ of 1711. It is the only complete Hawksmoor church in the City, and completed in 1727. It is said that Hawksmoor based his design on an Egyptian hall. During the work a large amount of Roman artefacts were discovered, as well as animal tusks.

Hawksmoor’s design has been described as “one of the most striking and original, although not the most beautiful church in the metropolis”. Its fortress-like west front, giving a sense of strength, faces towards the Bank/Mansion House road junction. It features Tuscan columns, topped by twin turrets.

The casing of a clock mechanism displayed in the church is engraved with the words of T.S. Elliott’s poem.

There is a projecting clock on the north wall. Of the clock, the poet T.S. Elliott, who worked in a bank opposite the church wrote in his 1922 poem ‘The Wasteland’:

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

Internally the lofty, square nave features twelve Corinthian columns in clusters of three. Natural lighting comes through large clerestory windows below ceiling level.

Changes were made to Hawksmoor’s original layout by William Butterfield in the 1870s. The galleries were taken down and their fronts fixed to the walls.

As mentioned by Stow, Simon Eyre, founder of the nearby Leadenhall Market who died in 1445 was buried in St. Mary’s. Another buried there was Sir William Phipps, who in 1687 had managed to extract £300,000-worth of silver from the wreck of a Spanish galleon in the Caribbean, earning himself a knighthood from King James II. So too was Edward Lloyd, founder of the nearby Lloyd’s coffee house that led to the Lloyd’s insurance underwriting organisation, who died in 1712.

The memorial tablet to John Newton.

The rector at St. Mary’s for 28 years from the latter part of the 18^th century was John Newton, who wrote many well-known hymns. Before turning to religion he had been a slave-ship captain. During his time at sea, Newton was once shipwrecked but he and the crew survived. The experience turned him to Christianity and became the inspiration for his famous hymn ‘Amazing Grace’. He became a vocal abolitionist and part of the long but ultimately successful campaign to abolish the slave trade. A memorial on the north wall of the church that he himself wrote reads:

John Newton, clerk, once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long laboured to destroy.

The leading advocate in Parliament to abolish the slave trade was William Wiberforce, for which he had originally been inspired by Newton’s preaching at St. Mary’s. There is a memorial to Newton in the church.

There was a possibility of St. Mary’s being demolished in the 1890s. The City & South London Railway were then building their new underground line (now the Bank branch of the Northern line). They proposed to buy and demolish St. Mary’s, offering enough to pay for six new churches to be built in the suburbs. The offered was declined. Instead, an agreement was reached whereby the railway company took only the crypt, which is where the ticket office of Bank station is located. It involved underpinning the church on steel girders on which the church is now supported. Bodies from the crypt, including that of Edward Lloyd, were removed to the City cemetery at Manor Park, Ilford.

St. Mary’s remained undamaged during the Second World War. It is now a Guild church and its parish amalgamated into that of St. Edmund the King located further along Lombard Street. It is now one of three in the City that are part of the IMPRINT group of independent churches, along with St. Clement Eastcheap and St. Edmund the King.