Huguenot Soho
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The two major destination for Huguenots in London were Spitalfields and Soho, so I took a walk around Soho to discover some of the significant sites that tell the story of the Huguenot presence.
Commemorated in Soho Sq, Charles II granted sanctuary to the Huguenots in 1681
At the corner of Greek St & Old Compton St from 1694 – 1770 was once the workshop of Paul Crespin, Silversmith, and Nicholas Sprimant, Silversmith, had his workshop in Old Compton St from 1716 – 1771
Samuel Romilly (1758-1818) was the son of a Frith St jeweller who became the Solicitor General, notable as an anti-slavery campaigner and for abolishing hanging, drawing and quartering, and his nephew Peter Mark Roget, the Physician, wrote the famous Thesaurus
In West St, this chapel was originally built as La Pyramid de la Tremblade in 1770, but in 1742 it became a Methodist Chapel when Samuel Wesley took over
Appointed Silversmith & Goldsmith to George III in 1716, Paul de Lamerie (1688- 1751) had his workshop at 40 Gerrard St and his trade card was designed by William Hogarth
The Huguenot L’Église de Leicester Fields was built in 1693 in Orange St
A Huguenot chapel of ease was built here in Spring Gardens in 1685 but burnt down in 1726 along with the gunpowder depot next door
This Statue of Charles I at the top of Whitehall was created by French sculptor Hubert Le Suer in 1633
In 1662, Charles II granted a patent for Huguenot Chapel in Savoy Hill provided they used the Book of Common Prayer in French
London’s first Huguenot chapel was on the site of Somerset House between 1653 and 1660
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So Long, Harry Landis
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Spitalfields resident Harry Landis died this Monday 12th September aged ninety
“I was born and brought up in the East End, then I went away for fifty years and came back again – but I returned to a very different East End from the one I left,” admitted Harry Landis, as we stood together outside the former Jewish Soup Kitchen in Brune St.
“When I was four years old, I came here with my mother holding me in one hand and a saucepan in the other, to get a dollop of soup and a loaf of bread.” Harry confided to me, “When I returned, the soup kitchen had been converted into flats, and I thought it would be great to buy a flat as a reminder – but the one for sale was on the top floor with too many stairs, so I didn’t buy it. Yet I’d have loved that, living in the soup kitchen where I went as a child.”
“I don’t feel any sense of loss about poverty and the bad old days and people suffering,” Harry declared with a caustic grin, as we ambled onward down Brune St. And when Harry revealed that growing up in Stepney in the nineteen thirties, he remembers taking refuge in his mother’s lap at the age of ten when a brick came smashing through their window – thrown by fascists chanting, “Get rid of the Yids! Get rid of the Yids!” – I could understand why he might be unsentimental about the past.
We walked round into Middlesex St to the building that was once the Jewish Board of Guardians where Harry’s mother came to plead her case to get a chit for soup at the kitchen. “I hate those jumped up Jews who blame poor Jews for letting down the race,” Harry exclaimed to me, in a sudden flash of emotion as we crossed the road, where he accompanied his mother at four years old to face the Board of Guardians sitting behind a long table dressed in bow ties and dinner jackets.
When she told the Board she had two children – even though she only had Harry – in hope of getting more of the meagre rations, the Guardians unexpectedly challenged Harry, requiring evidence of his mother’s claim. With remarkable presence of mind for a four year old, he nodded in confirmation when asked if he had a sister. But then the Guardians enquired his sister’s name, and – in an extraordinary moment of improvisation – Harry answered, “Rosie,” and the Board was persuaded. “She used to break her loaf of bread and give half to the poor Christians waiting outside the soup kitchen,” he told me later, in affectionate recognition of his mother’s magnanimous spirit, even in her own state of poverty.
Yet the significance of Harry’s action reverberated far beyond that moment, because it revealed he had a natural talent for acting. It was a gift that took him on a journey out of the East End, gave him a successful career as an actor and director, and delivered him to the Royal Court Theatre where he originated the leading role in one of the most important post-war British plays, Arnold Wesker’s masterpiece “The Kitchen.” Although, ironically, at Stepney Jewish School where Harry was educated, the enlightened headmistress, Miss Rose, made the girls do woodwork and the boys learn cooking – and when Harry left at fourteen he wanted to become a chef in a kitchen, but discovered apprenticeships were only available to those of sixteen.
“They sent me to work in a cafe pouring tea but I didn’t last very long there, I did several jobs, window cleaner and milkman. And I used to go to the Hackney Empire every week, first house on a Monday because that was the cheapest – the company had just arrived, rehearsed with the band once and they were on at six, but the band weren’t sure what they were doing, so I enjoyed watching it all go wrong.
Being a cheeky little sod, I used to perform the show I’d seen on the Monday night next day at the factory where I worked – Max Miller’s jokes, the impersonators and Syd Walker who did a Rag & Bone act. 95% of them nobody knows now. “The shop steward, who was my mentor said, “You ought to be on the stage.”I’d never seen a play. I said, “Where do I go to see a play?” He said, “If you go the West End, the play will be about the tribulations of the upper classes, the problems of posh people. But there is one theatre in Kings Cross called the Unity Theatre, the theatre of the Labour & Trade Union Movement that does plays about ordinary people. I’m going there next Sunday night with my wife, if you’d like to come.” And I went. And at the Unity Theatre, that’s where my life changed.
It knocked me out because the people on the stage could have been living in my street and the language they spoke was the language we all spoke down the East End. The shop steward said, “You should be here, I’ll get you an audition.” I did my audition and I showed them my acting of bits I’d seen at the Hackney Empire, and they put me in the variety group. We performed shows in air raid shelters and parks. But then they transferred me to the straight acting section because I was fifteen and there was a shortage of men since they were all away at war. I was playing above my years but learning to act.
After two or three years of this and doing my military service, I returned to the Unity Theatre and the headmaster of a South London school saw me and said, “You should be professional, why don’t you apply for a grant from the London County Council to go to drama school?” I was twenty. He got me the form and we filled it out, and I was given a grant and money to live on. How times have changed! I did three years at Central School of Speech & Drama. You learnt RP (Received Pronunciation) but you never lost your own speech. I was considered a working class actor.
“I got cast in a wonderful play at the Royal Court Theatre, run by George Devine where they did the plays of John Osborne. It was “The Kitchen” by Arnold Wesker, and I played the part of Paul, the pastry cook – which is the Arnold Wesker character – that’s what he did when he worked in a kitchen. It was about himself. Arnold wrote without any knowledge of theatre, which is to say a play with twenty-five actors in it which only lasts seventy-five minutes. People said they could see the food we were cooking but it was all mimed…”
So Harry fulfilled his childhood ambition to become a chef – on stage – through his work as an actor in the theatre. To this day, he gratefully acknowledges his debt to the Unity Theatre and those two individuals who saw his potential – “I was going to be an amateur but I was pushed to the next stage,” he accepts. Harry enjoyed success as one of a whole generation of talented working class actors that came to prominence in the post-war years bringing a new energy and authenticity to British drama.
When Harry Landis returned to his childhood streets, he laid the ghosts of his own past. He was happy to embrace the changes, although he did not choose to forget the East End he once knew.
“It was a different East End. The bombs got rid of a lot and it’s all been rebuilt. The Spitalfields Market is full of chains and it’s been gentrified, and you’ve got your Gilbert & Georges and your Tracey Emins, and the place is full of art studios and it’s become the centre of the world. It’s the new Chelsea. I sold my house in Hammersmith where I lived for forty years (that I bought for £2,000 with 100% mortgage from the LCC) and I came back and bought a flat here in Spitalfields with the proceeds. And the rest I put in the bank for when I am that constant thing – an out of work actor!”
Outside the soup kitchen in Brune St where Harry came with his mother at the age of four
At the former Jewish Board of Guardians in Middlesex St
Harry as Private Rabin in “A Hill in Korea,” 1956
Harry Landis
At Westminster Abbey
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STOP PRESS! BETTY HAS BEEN FOUND
Betty’s owner said, ‘Good morning lovely people. Betty is home. A kind lady, Vanessa, had Betty and handed her back this morning. Thank you all for the huge support … very appreciated. I know everyone has their own stuff to deal with so very grateful. Thank you’
The past is a cluttered and shadowy place, filled with wonders we do not know and things that we choose to forget. These were my thoughts on visiting Westminster Abbey for the first time in many years, taking a rare opportunity of the absence of tourists to explore an old haunt that is otherwise inaccessible without crowds.
Certainly on the day of my arrival, the living were outnumbered by the 3300 dead yet, more than this, the over 300 statuary easily outnumbered the animated souls in the Abbey too. It is hard not to get overwhelmed by the weight of history in a place of such dense and heavy significance as this. Greater than the sense of a vast contained space is the feeling of how narrow and gloomy it is, and how crowded with tombs and memorials, like a great skull crowded with too many memories and not all of them good ones.
It is the nature of the place and of our history that this is literally a shrine to imperialism. Confronted with bombastic statues of those who subjugated the world, it was my great relief to discover Thomas Fowell Buxton, brewer and abolitionist, sitting quietly on a chair for eternity as if he were waiting to greet me. And just a few feet away sat William Wilberforce, also approachable in an armchair, by contrast with those colonial ‘heroes’ asserting their bellicose virility upright on plinths.
The myth of the abbey’s origin is that fisherman had a vision of St Peter while fishing near Thorn Island on the Thames in the seventh century and founded a church on the site. But the recorded origins of the abbey lie with our own St Dunstan of Stepney who installed a community of Benedictine monks here around 970.
Of particular fascination for me is the Cosmati Pavement laid down by Islamic craftsmen in 1268 for Henry III at the centre of the abbey. This intricate mystical design of interwoven circles composed of coloured mineral stones is believed to be a symbolic map of the cosmos – the primum mobile – and it is at the centre of this pavement that every monarch has been crowned since 1066.
Perhaps the most magical part of the abbey are the ancient battered tombs of the early English kings, such as Henry V and Richard II, personalities whom we feel we know thanks to William Shakespeare. Once you reach the east end of the old abbey, steps ascend to Henry VII’s Lady Chapel. You enter the light of a renaissance chapel from the gloom of the medieval abbey and the astonishing geometric detail of the fan vaulting high overhead takes your breath away.
Even as they were rivals in life, it is surprising to discover that Elizabeth I and Mary are both memorialised here in shrines of apparent equal status, each in a separate side chapel set apart diplomatically at distance on either side of the main space.
It is impossible not to be moved by the worn stones under your feet, smoothed by the tread of our innumerable forebears through centuries and the poignant multiplicity of tombs and effigies, striving so hard to win eternal remembrance for those who are now entirely forgotten.
I must confess to unease about the selection of writers honoured in Poets’ Corner which to my eyes appears as remarkable for the omissions as much as for those who are included. I have not been here since I attended the inauguration of a plaque for John Clare in 1993. On this recent visit, it delighted me more to visit the tomb of a favourite writer, Aphra Behn, the first woman to earn her living by the pen, in the cloister. Even if the inscription ‘Here lies a proof that wit can never be / proof enough against immortality’ is less than generous and, thankfully, now proved incorrect.
William Wilberforce
Cosmological Pavement
The Coronation Chair
Tomb of Henry V
Henry VII’s Lady Chapel
Poets’ Corner
Tomb of Aphra Behn in the cloister
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Has Anybody Here Seen Betty?
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Betty
One of Spitalfields’ best loved dogs has gone missing and not returned home to Wilkes St. We have been searching the streets and the parks since last Saturday 10th September but Betty, a female Jack Russell Terrier, is not to be found anywhere. Now we need your help to widen the search across the East End. Betty must be out there somewhere and feeling very lonely now. Please keep your eyes open and if you have any information call 07798700317 or email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com
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Cruikshank At The Tower Of London
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The Execution of Lady Jane Grey at Tower Green
“It has been for years, the cherished wish of the writer of these pages to make the Tower of London the groundwork of a Romance,” wrote William Harrison Ainsworth in 1840, introducing his novel, “The Tower of London” – and it is an impulse that I recognise, because I know of no other place in London where the lingering sense of myth and the echoing drama of the past is more tangible that at the Tower.
Whenever I have entered those ancient walls, I am struck anew by the mystery of the place. I have to stop and reconcile my knowledge of history with the location where it happened, and each time I become more spellbound by the actuality of the place, which in spite of Victorian rebuilding still retains its integrity as an ancient fortress. I always make a point to pause and read the age-old graffiti, to stop in each doorway and take in the prospect at this most dramatic of monuments.
When I discovered “The Tower of London” by William Harrison Ainsworth in the Bishopsgate Institute I was captivated by George Cruikshank’s illustrations, realising that not only had this favourite of mine amongst nineteenth century illustrators once stood in exactly the same places I had stood, but he had the genius to draw the images inspired by these charged locations.
“Desirous of exhibiting the Tower in its triple light of a palace, a prison and a fortress, the author has shaped his story with reference to that end, and he has also endeavoured to combine such a series of incidents as should naturally introduce every relic of the old pile, its towers, halls, chambers, gateways and drawbridges – so that no part of it should remain uninvolved.” explained Ainsworth in his introduction to his sensationalist fictionalised account of the violent end of the short reign of Lady Jane Grey. Yet it is George Cruikshank’s engravings which bring the work alive, providing not just a tour of the architectural environment but also of the dramatic imaginative world that it contains – and done so vividly that I know already that when I return I shall be looking out for his characters in my mind’s eye while I am there.
There is a grim humour and surreal poetry in pictures which, to my eyes, presage the work of Edward Gorey, who like George Cruikshank also created a sinister diaphanous world out of dense hatching. Maurice Sendak is another master of the mystery that can be evoked by intricate webs of woven lines in which – as in these Tower of London engravings – three dimensional space dissolves into magical possibility. But to me the prime achievement of these pictures is that George Cruikshank has given concrete life to the Tower’s past, creating figures that convincingly take command of the stage offered by its charged spaces and, like the acting of Henry Irving, appear as if momentarily illuminated by flashes of lightning. Cruikshank’s pictures are like glimpses of a strange dream, drawing the viewer into a compelling emotional universe with its own logic, peopled by its own inhabitants and where it is too readily apparent what is going on.
The popularity of William Harrison Ainsworth’s novel was responsible for creating the bloodthirsty reputation of the Tower of London which still endures today – even though for centuries the Tower was used as a domestic royal residence and administrative centre, headquarters of the royal ordinances, records office, mint, observatory, and a menagerie amongst other diverse functions throughout its thousand year history. Yet although it may be just one of the infinite range of tales to be told about the Tower of London, William Harrison Ainsworth’s Romance does witness historical truth. There is a neglected plaque in the corner of Trinity Green, just outside Tower Hill station, which is a memorial to those executed there through the centuries – as testament to the reality of the violence enacted upon those with the misfortune to find themselves on the wrong side of authority in past days.
Jane Grey’s first night in the Tower – “Prompted by an undefinable feeling of curiosity, she hastened towards it and, holding forward the light, a shudder went through her frame, as she perceived at her feet – an axe!”
Cuthbert Cholmondeley surprised by a mysterious figure in the dungeon adjoining the Devilin Tower.
Jane Grey interposing between the Duke of Northumberland and Simon Renard.
Jane Grey and Lord Gilbert Dudley brought back to the Tower through Traitors’ Gate – “Never had Jane experienced such a feeling of horror as now assailed her – and if she had crossed the fabled Styx, she could not have greater dread. Her blood seemed congealed within her veins as she gazed around. The light of the torches fell upon the black arches – upon the slimy walls and upon the yet blacker tide.”
Jane imprisoned in the Brick Tower – “Alone! The thought struck her to the heart. She was now captured. She heard the doors of the prison bolted – she examined its stone walls, partly concealed by tapestry – she glance at its barred windows, and she gave up hope.”
Simon Renard and Winwinkle, the warder, on the roof of the White Tower – “There you behold the Tower of London,” said Winwinkle, pointing downwards. “And there I read the history of England,” replied Renard. “If it is written in these towers, it is a dark and bloody history, ” replied the warder.
Mauger sharpening his axe – ” A savage-looking individual seated on a bench at a grinding stone, he had an axe blade which he had just been sharpening, and he was trying its edge with his thumb. His fierce blood-shot eyes, recessed far beneath his bent and bushy brows were fixed upon the weapon.”
Execution of the Duke of Northumberland upon Tower Hill – “As soon as the Duke had disposed himself upon the block, the axe flashed like a gleam of lightning in the sunshine – descended – and the head was severed from the trunk. Mauger held it aloft, almost before the eyes were closed, crying out to the the assemblage in a loud voice, “Behold the head of a traitor!”
Cuthbert Cholmondeley discovering the body of Alexia in the Devilin Tower – “Pushing aside the door with his blade, he beheld a spectacle that filled him with horror. At one side of the cell upon a stone seat, rested the dead body of a woman, reduced almost to a skeleton. On the wall, close to where she lay, and evidently carved by her own hand, the name ALEXIA.”
Queen Mary surprises Courtenay and Princess Elizabeth
Lawrence Nightgall dragging Cicely down the secret stairs in the Salt Tower
Courtenay’s escape from the Tower
The burning of Edward Underhill at Tower Green – “As the flames rose, the sharpness of the torment overcame him. He lost control of himself, and his eyes started from their sockets – his contorted features and his writhing frame proclaimed the extremity of his agony. It was a horrible sight, and a shudder burst forth from the assemblage.”
The Death Warrant – “Mary tried to ascertain the cause of the animal’s disquietude as its barking changed to a dismal howl. Not without misgiving, she glanced towards the window and there between the bars she beheld a hideous black mask, through the holes of which glared a pair of flashing eyes.”
Elizabeth confronts Sir Thomas Wyatt in the torture chamber – “‘Sir Thomas Wyatt,’ Elizabeth declared in a loud and authoritative tone, and stepping towards him, ‘If you would not render your name forever infamous, you must declare my innocence!'”
The Fall of Nightgall – “Nightgall struggled desperately against the horrible fate that waited him, clutching convulsively against the wall. But it was unavailing. He uttered a fearful cry, and tried to grab at the roughened surface. From a height of nearly ninety feet, he fell with a terrific smash upon the pavement of the court below.”
The Night before the Execution – “In spite of himself, the executioner could not repress a feeling of dread and the contrary urge, which represented his curiousity. He pointed towards the church porch, from which a figure, robed in white, but insubstantial as the mist, suddenly appeared. It glided noiselessly along and without turning its face to the beholders.”
Jane Grey meeting the body of her husband at the scaffold – “She knew it was the body of her husband, and unprepared for so terrible an encounter, uttered a cry of horror.”
Plaque at Trinity Green on Tower Hill
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John Keohane, Chief Yeoman Warder at the Tower of London
At Abbey Wood
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Serving Hatch
Only recently did I learn that there is an abbey and a wood at Abbey Wood. Stunned by my own obtuseness, I set out to discover what I have been missing all these years. Visiting ruins was a memorable feature of childhood holidays, leaving a residual affection for architectural dereliction that has persisted throughout my life.
There is a familiar style of presentation in which the broken fragments of wall are neatly cemented in place while the former internal spaces are replaced by manicured lawns. This is the case at Lesnes Abbey in Abbey Wood, augmented with simple metal signs indicating ‘kitchen’ or ‘garderobe’ which set the imagination racing.
On leaving new Abbey Wood Elizabeth Line station, my enthusiasm was such that I headed straight up the hill into the woods where I was overjoyed to discover myself entirely alone in an ancient forest of chestnut trees, filled with squirrels busily harvesting the chestnuts and burying them in anticipation of winter. Descending by a woodland path was perhaps the best way to discover the old abbey, situated upon a sheltered plateau beneath the hills yet raised up from the Thames and commanding a splendid view towards London.
Lesnes Abbey of St Mary & St Thomas the Martyr was founded in 1178 by Richard de Lucy, Chief Justice of England, as penance for the murder of Thomas A Becket. Richard retired here once the abbey was complete but died within three months. For centuries, the abbey struggled with the cost of maintaining the river banks and maintaining the marshlands productively. As a measure of how far it declined, it was closed by Cardinal Wolsey in 1525 as part of programme of shutting monasteries of less than seven residents, before the abbey was eventually destroyed in 1542 as one of the first to be subjected to the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
After demolition, the building materials were salvaged and the abbey was forgotten until Woolwich & District Antiquarian Society rediscovered it, excavated the ruins in 1909 and the site became a park in 1930.
One of the last sunny afternoons at the end of a long summer was the ideal occasion for my lone pilgrimage. I stood to gaze upon the ancient ruins and lifted my eyes in contemplation of the distant towers of contemporary London, wondering where the events of our time will lead. Then I walked back up into the forest and it crossed my mind that I if I followed the woodland paths long enough and far enough, maybe I could come back down the hill and enter the time when the abbey flourished and witness it as it was once, full of life.
Stairs to dormitory
The burial place of the heart of Roesia of Dover, great great granddaughter of the founder of this abbey, Richard de Lucy
West door of the church
Four hundred year old Mulberry tree, dating from the reign of James I
Chestnuts at Abbey Wood
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In City Churchyards
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In the churchyard of St Dunstan’s in the East, Idol Lane
If ever I should require a peaceful walk when the crowds are thronging in Brick Lane and Columbia Rd, then I simply wander over to the City of London where the streets are empty at weekends and the many secret green enclaves of the churches are likely to be at my sole disposal. For centuries the City was densely populated, yet the numberless dead in the ancient churchyards are almost the only residents these days.
Christopher Wren rebuilt most of the City churches after the Great Fire upon the irregularly shaped medieval churchyards and it proved the ideal challenge to develop his eloquent vocabulary of classical architecture. Remarkably, there are a couple of churches still standing which predate the Fire while a lot of Wren’s churches were destroyed in the Blitz, but for all those that are intact, there are many of which only the tower or an elegant ruin survives to grace the churchyard. And there are also yards where nothing remains of the church, save a few lone tombstones attesting to the centuries of human activity in that place. Many of these sites offer charismatic spaces for horticulture, rendered all the more appealing in contrast to the sterile architectural landscape of the modern City that surrounds them.
I often visit St Olave’s in Mincing Lane, a rare survivor of the Fire, and when you step down from the street, it as if you have entered a country church. Samuel Pepys lived across the road in Seething Lane and was a member of the congregation here, referring to it as “our own church.” He is buried in a vault beneath the communion table and there is a spectacular gate from 1658, topped off with skulls, which he walked through to enter the secluded yard. Charles Dickens also loved this place, describing it as “my best beloved churchyard”
“It is a small small churchyard, with a ferocious, strong, spiked iron gate, like a jail. This gate is ornamented with skulls and cross-bones, larger than the life, wrought in stone … the skulls grin aloft horribly, thrust through and through with iron spears. Hence, there is attraction of repulsion for me … and, having often contemplated it in the daylight and the dark, I once felt drawn towards it in a thunderstorm at midnight.” he wrote in “The Uncommercial Traveller.”
A particular favourite of mine is the churchyard of St Dunstan’s in the East in Idol Lane. The ruins of a Wren church have been overgrown with wisteria and creepers to create a garden of magnificent romance, where almost no-one goes. You can sit here within the nave surrounded by high walls on all sides, punctuated with soaring Gothic lancet windows hung with leafy vines which filter the sunlight in place of the stained glass that once was there.
Undertaking a circuit of the City, I always include the churchyard of St Mary Aldermanbury in Love Lane with its intricate knot garden and bust of William Shakespeare, commemorating John Hemminge and Henry Condell who published the First Folio and are buried there. The yard of the bombed Christchurch Greyfriars in Newgate St is another essential port of call for me, to admire the dense border planting that occupies the space where once the congregation sat within the shell of Wren’s finely proportioned architecture. In each case, the introduction of plants to fill the space and countermand the absence in the ruins of these former churches – where the parishioners have gone long ago – has created lush gardens of rich poetry.
There are so many churchyards in the City of London that there are always new discoveries to be made by the casual visitor, however many times you return. And anyone can enjoy the privilege of solitude in these special places, you only have to have the curiosity and desire to seek them out for yourself.
In the yard of St Michael, Cornhill.
In the yard of St Dunstan’s in the East, Idol Lane.
At St Dunstan’s in the East, leafy vines filter the sunlight in place of stained glass.
In the yard of St Olave’s, Mincing Lane.
This is the gate that Samuel Pepys walked through to enter St Olave’s and of which Charles Dickens wrote in The Uncommercial Traveller – “having often contemplated it in the daylight and the dark, I once felt drawn towards it in a thunderstorm at midnight.”
Dickens described this as ““my best beloved churchyard.”
In the yard of St Michael Paternoster Royal, College St.
In the yard of St Lawrence Jewry-next-Guildhall, Gresham St.
In the yard of St Mary Aldermanbury, Love Lane, this bust of William Shakespeare commemorates John Hemminge and Henry Condell who published the First Folio and are buried here.
In the yard of London City Presbyterian Church, Aldersgate St.
In the yard of Christchurch Greyfriars, Newgate St, the dense border planting occupies the space where once the congregation sat within the shell of Wren’s finely proportioned architecture.
In the yard of the Guildhall Church of St Benet, White Lion Hill.
In St Paul’s Churchyard.
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