At St Bartholomew The Great

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Billy Reading introduces St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, one of my favourite City Churches, in this excerpt from his new book Faith Buildings in the City of London published by Historic England and Liverpool University Press.

The Norman arcade 

 

You do not soak up the atmosphere at St Bartholomew the Great. Rather, it threatens to soak you up. The gloom is so pervasive it seems it might just blot you out altogether. It is palpably exciting, a feeling you only get with a nine-hundred-year pedigree.

The building began in 1123 with Rahere, a jester-monk in the court of Henry I. He had a Damascene fever-dream while travelling from Rome, and in gratitude for surviving he obeyed the vision, came to Smithfield (‘foul and like a marsh’) and founded a priory. From this origin we can trace a parish, two churches and the venerable hospital next door.

The present built form started to find shape after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In 1539, King Henry VIII sold off the priory to Sir Richard Rich and refounded the hospital, a moment recorded by the only public statue to him in London, on the hospital gate.

Rich redeveloped the priory site, selling off slivers of land for building. He pulled down the redundant church’s enormous nave to build around its perimeter while opening up the central space as a churchyard. The retained chancel became the parish church. The line of today’s West Smithfield marks where once the west end of the nave reached. The archway under the little Elizabethan house that leads to the sequestered graveyard beyond is in fact thirteenth-century fabric of the former doorway into the south aisle.

Step through and you are standing in what once was the soaring nave, with the cloister to your right and the chancel away ahead – now screened off by a flint west wall and little brick tower from 1628. Sweet, but not indicative of what lies beyond.

You tumble into something incredible: the choir and ambulatory Rahere built, supplanted by the transepts, crossing and one bay of the nave added between 1230 and 1240. You would not immediately notice that the mighty nave, once ten bays long, is missing, since the surviving space is so atmospheric. Where the nave once began at the west end now a vast organ and organ screen loom away into the shadows of the central tower arches. Stretching east from the crossing are five bays of massive Norman columns with their scalloped and cushioned capitals and billet mouldings, an arcaded triforium above and a perpendicular clerestory over that, which admits crystalline light, alleviating the darkness of antiquity. The arcade sweeps towards the apsidal east, with a groin-vaulted ambulatory running behind and beyond. Although subsequent architectural styles are present, it is the solid, undeniable, dignified and venerable Norman work setting the mood. Once three medieval chapels radiated out beyond the apse, replaced in the fourteenth century with the current Lady Chapel. The apsidal arcade was demolished at this time and made straight, its restoration came much later.

The spaces around the retained parish church were haphazardly consumed by the life of the City: an inn stabling horses in the cloister, a hop store in the sacristy, a forge set up in the north transept, a school, cramped itself, limpet like, along the exterior to Cloth Fair. (The structures are still there, you can see them on the outside.) A lay physician from the hospital rented a chamber and latrine in the south triforium arcade, the Lady Chapel was sold off and became a lace fringe factory. By the eighteenth century, the area was increasingly impoverished, and it wasn’t until the later nineteenth century that antiquarian interest in the battered old bones of the place began to slowly turn around the fortunes of St Bartholomew’s.

Sir Aston Webb, famous architect, had long-standing family ties to the parish and seems to have had a love for it, too. He worked extensively here to celebrate and reunite the surviving parts, to stitch them back together. The transepts were recovered and remade, albeit foreshortened. The Lady Chapel of 1335 was reunited. The missing central section of the apse arcade was reinstated, following its original curve. While so many Victorian restorations were disastrous, this one can only be credited. Webb’s patience and persistence, his approach to preservation and repair stimulated by understanding and sympathy, has allowed the full drama of the interior to soar and sing. Because of this, today’s church, grand amputated suffering that it is, ranks among the most important Norman survivors in the south of England.

The scars of these histories and processes remain readily legible, not just in the stones, but also in the deliciously inky shadows.

The entrance (Photograph by London & Middlesex Archaeological Society)

The churchyard (Photograph by London & Middlesex Archaeological Society)

In Bartholomew Close (Photograph by Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London)

At the rear of St Bartholomew’s (Photograph by Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London)

In Bartholomew Close (Photograph by Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London)

Looking through from Smithfield (Photograph by London & Middlesex Archaeological Society)

The gatehouse in Smithfield (Photograph by London & Middlesex Archaeological Society)

Photographs from SPROL and LAMAS reproduced courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute

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