St. Olave Hart Street

The Great Fire of September 1666 raged for three days and destroyed most of the City of London. The wind was blowing from the east, so the fire spread westwards from Pudding Lane, where it had begun, destroying everything in its path. On the morning of the fourth day firefighters used explosives to clear a firebreak along Seething Lane and Mark Lane, thus saving those buildings on the very east of the City. One of those that survived was the small church of St. Olave on Hart Street. It therefore has a more ancient air about it than most others in the City. John Betjeman described St. Olave’s as “A country church in the world of Seething Lane”.

St. Olave, shown top left in this detail from Civitas Londinum (the ‘Agas map’) of about 1561, is located on the east side of the City near the Tower of London, and was thus saved from the Great Fire.

There were once six churches with the name St. Olave in the City and Southwark. Olaf Haraldson, after whom they were dedicated, was the King of Norway in the early 11^th century. In 1012 Danish Vikings murdered Archbishop of Canterbury Alfege, at Greenwich and occupied London. The Anglo-Saxon King Æthelred II (Æthelred the Unready) fled to Normandy but returned to London with his ally Olaf. During the resulting siege in 1014 Olaf captured London by destroying part of London Bridge, drowning its Viking defenders, and thus giving us the rhyme London Bridge is Falling Down.

The St. Olaf office building at Southwark, built on the site of St. Olave Southwark church

The Danes also had an earthwork castle at the southern end of the bridge – the ‘south weorc’ – that was successfully stormed, and that became the location of St. Olave Southwark church. Olaf converted to Christianity in England and took his faith back to his native country.

St. Olave Broad Street only survived until about 1300 when the Austin Friars demolished it to create their monastery. St. Olave Silver Street and St. Nicholas Olave were both destroyed in the Great Fire and never rebuilt. St. Olave Jewry in the City’s medieval Jewish quarter was rebuilt by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire but demolished in 1888, leaving only a façade of the former tower, with the proceeds of the sale of the land used to build a new church in Stoke Newington. St. Olave Southwark was demolished in 1928 to make way for the St. Olaf office building, which still survives and incorporates a black and gold figure of the saint in its facia. The proceeds from the sale of that site were used to build St. Olave Mitcham church.

The stone vaulted crypt of St. Olave Hart Street survives from the late 12^th century, although there was probably an earlier wooden building from the Saxon period on the site. The vestry door is thought to be from the 13^th century.

At the very end of that century the important religious order of Crutched Friars, or Friars of the Holy Cross, was established on the corner of Hart Street and remained as a neighbour of St. Olave’s until the dissolution of the monastery by Henry VIII in 1538. In around 1450 two wealthy parishioners, Robert and Richard Cely, commissioned a rebuilding of St. Olave’s in the Perpendicular style.

St. Olave’s on the corner of Hart Street and Seething Lane.

St. Olave’s stands on the corner of Hart Street and Seething Lane. Another of the buildings that survived the Great Fire was the Navy Board, which was located further along Seething Lane, where Seething Lane Garden can now be found. Samuel Pepys was then employed as Clerk of the Acts at the Navy Board, for which he and his wife Elizabeth were provided an apartment in the building. They lived through the Great Plague of 1665 that preceded the Great Fire. In that year Mary Ramsey was buried in the churchyard and the legend is that it was her who brought the plague to London.

Pepys often mentioned their parish church of St. Olave in his diary. In August 1660 he had difficulty finding a seat with his colleagues:

19^th August: “This morning Sir W. Batten [Sir William Batten, Surveyor of the Navy], Pen [Sir William Penn, MP and Navy Commissioner, father of the founder of Pennsylvania] and myself went to the church to the churchwardens to demand a pew, which at present could not be given us, but we are resolved to have one built.”
24^th August: “Office; and then with Sir W. Batten and Sir W. Penn to the parish church to find a place to build a seat or gallery to sit in, which is to be done speedily.”
26^th August: “With Sir W. Penn to the parish church, where we are placed in the highest pew of all, where a stranger preached a dry and tedious long sermon.”
29^th August: “To the office; and after the office, then to the church, where we took another view of the place where we had resolved to build a gallery; and have set men about doing it.”

Thereafter, Samuel and Elizabeth sat in the private Navy Board pew in the south gallery, which could be reached from a specially-built staircase from the churchyard.

Elizabeth died in 1669 at just 29 years of age. She was buried beneath the church’s communion table and Samuel commissioned the well-known sculptor John Bushell to create a fine white marble bust in her memory that can still be seen to the left of the altar. In 1703 Samuel was buried in a vault beside Elizabeth. A memorial to Pepys was created in the 19^th century that can be seen on the south wall. There is an annual Pepys Commemoration Service at the end of each May.

The entrance from Seething Lane with the skull and crossbones gate

There are entrances into the church from both Hart Street and through the churchyard in Seething Lane. The entrance to the churchyard is a stone gateway built in 1658. Charles Dickens wrote of it in 1860 in The Uncommercial Traveller:

“One of my best-loved churchyards, I call the churchyard of St. Ghastly Grim… It is a small churchyard with a ferocious strong spiked iron gate, like a jail. The gate is ornamented with skulls and crossbones, larger than life, wrought in stone; thrust through and through with iron spears.”

St.Olave Hart Street in the early 19th century.

The skulls and crossbones can still be seen above the Seething Lane gate.

The nearby 15^th century churches of All Hallows Staining at the northern end of Mark Lane, and St. Katherine Coleman on the south side of Fenchurch Street, were also spared by the Great Fire yet neither remain today. All Hallows collapsed in 1671, except for its tower. It was rebuilt but the body of the building was demolished in 1870. The ancient stone tower still stands as a reminder. St. Katherine’s was rebuilt in vernacular Palladian style in the 1730s but closed in 1921 and demolished. Part of its old churchyard, with railings and stone pillars, still survives in St. Katherine’s Row, off Fenchurch Street. When each of them closed, their parishes were both incorporated into that of St. Olave where there is a stained-glass window in the Lady Chapel representing all three historic parishes.

The walls of St. Olave’s are of ragstone and the 15th century tower has a 17^th century top stage and lantern. The pulpit came from St. Benet Gracechurch, which was demolished in 1867, and like many carvings in City churches is claimed to be the work of Grinling Gibbons. The reredos of the Parish Chapel were a gift from Lloyd’s Register of Shipping after the Second World War. To the left of the altar are the colourful memorials to the early 17^th century aldermen brothers Andrew and Paul Bayninge, both kneeling in prayer. A contemporary of Samuel Pepys was Sir Andrew Riccard, a governor of the East India Company, investor in a Barbados slave-plantation, and City of London MP. When he died in 1672 a prominent statue and memorial was erected in the church.

St. Olave’s suffered four direct hits by German bombs in 1941, which reduced the building to ruins but after the war it was carefully restored by Ernest Glanfield to its 15^th century pattern. A foundation stone was laid by King Haakon VII of Norway in 1951 and work was completed in 1954.

St. Olave’s continues as a parish church into which the parishes of All Hallows Staining and St. Katharine Coleman have been amalgamated. It the church of Trinity House, the organisation that is responsible for Britain’s lighthouses and coastal safety, with their headquarters located nearby on Tower Hill. To the right of the altar is the Trinity House chapel. It is also the church of the Clothworkers’ Company.