A Thousand Years of the Church of St. Stephen Walbrook

St. Stephen’s Defined window arches have become the Church’s principal light sources. since the east windows 220 In many of the City churches Wren was not are coloured and the oval side windows are 855 A Thousand Years particular about right angles in the plans, but shielded by later buildings. The worshipper the geometry of St. Stephen’s is perfectly and the agnostic alike may feel at first only (0)7949 rectangular. What makes this Church so that they are in a pleasant interior, but the of the Church of remarkable, however, is not the delicacy of the flooding light, and the arrangement of the +44 M: plasterwork or the accuracy of the geometry, interior space, so clear yet capable of several · St. Stephen Walbrook hut the subtlety of the space which that readings, have a cumulative effect. That effect geometry defines. Significantly, the space has does not depend on decorative richness – the London never been interrupted by galleries, for there enrichment exists only to give softness and is no place in which galleries could have been substance to the abstraction of lines; the roses, Design, acceptably placed. laurels and palms of the plasterwork are only & Wren’s churches were intended to be what the most conventional of symbols. Wren ection he called ‘auditories’, in which everyone considered geometry to be the basis of the Dir t present could see, hear and feel themselves whole world and the manifestation of its Ar part of the congregation. A well-lit interior Creator, while light not only made that was imperative, with the minimum of geometry visible but also represented the Meyer obstruction from internal supports. Wren gift of Reason, of which geometry was for him Hauke also provided, as a matter of course, a place the highest expression. Like the solution to a for the communion table at the east end, mathematical problem, everything fits into by and a principal entrance at the west; the place with apparent simplicity; yet this latter is unusually impressive because the simplicity itself is mysterious and magical. Designed slope of the site makes it necessary for a Whether one experiences St. Stephen’s alone, flight of steps up from the street. From the in stillness and quiet, or in a full congregation porch, we pass into a short nave of only two resounding with music, the effect is always the bays with double aisles, to face a chancel of same. Life outside is complicated and chaotic. one bay on the far side of the dome; the main To enter is not to escape into fantasy; rather is focus of the interior becomes immediately it to submit to the strongest positive assertion clear. But the space can be read in other of the true order of the universe. ways. We seem to be inside a set of pillars arranged on a regular grid plan, except that four have been left out of the centre, under The Moment of Truth the dome. Or again, we may see a perfectly regular domed church, with four triplets of Like all great works of art, St. Stephen’s is of columns, but extended westwards into a sort its time, and our sense of history requires that of ante-chapel from which we can look into we recognise its associations with a great age; the central symmetrical space. The dome but again like all great works of art, it has seems to rest on the points between the arches, something about it that is timeless, and its and on the eight columns under these points; message, indeed its very survival, must be the in fact there are walls and window arches concern of us all. behind these points, which share with the columns the function of support. These Professor Kerry Downes Suggested Donation for this Brochure: £1 Early History By 1428 this church and its graveyard were of ceremonial assembly. The domed churches St. Stephen’s provided a kind of dress too small for the parish, and licences were he had seen in France had excited him – for rehearsal in visual terms. The structural In the second century A.D. a temple of obtained to build a larger church on higher there were none in England at this time – and problems between the two buildings were Mithras stood on the bank of the Walbrook, a ground some twenty metres to the east, the must have engaged his emotions as well as quite different, for the dome and vaults of stream running across London from the City ground having risen about six metres; and appealing to his intellectual appreciation of the Cathedral are all of masonry, whereas Wall near Moorfie1ds to the Thames. In this Walbrook, no longer a stream, was now a the geometry of solids and voids. But at this those of St. Stephen’s are, as in all the temple Roman soldiers sought valour and street. The land, 208 1/2 feet by 66 feet, was stage he had not yet come to imagine the parish churches, lath and plaster facings on virility in shower-baths of hot blood from given by Robert Chicheley, a member of The Cathedral as a building which would differ elaborate carpentry frames. Wren could slaughtered bulls. After the recall of the Worshipful Company of Grocers. The from parish churches, not merely in size therefore design the Church with much legions to Rome in 410 A.D. the building building, of flint and rubble with stone and scale, but also essentially in kind. This smaller supports, giving an unparalleled became a quarry; the locals left only the dressings, had a tower at the west and a realisation came to him in 1672, when he feeling of lightness of weight and brightness foundations. These were discovered when cloister on the north. It was one of a began working on a sequence of designs of illumination. He was able to make the eight Bucklersbury House was built in 1953-1957, hundred churches in the square mile of the that culminated in the ‘Great Model’ still arches equal in span and to introduce light and they are preserved to this day. However City of London. preserved at St. Paul’s. These were designs through all of them, whereas in St. Paul’s the there were no foundations of the Christian The houses were not so solid: most of more radical, more European, and more requirements of supporting the enormously church which stood on the site and was a them were built on timber frames, infilled unified than the ultimate one, in which he tall and heavy landmark of the dome meant going concern in 1090 A.D. when it was given with lath and plaster work, and as the was made to compromise by incorporating that the diagonal arches had to be smaller to the monastery of St. John by Eudo, Dapifer population increased roofs were raised and the nave and transepts of a traditional Latin and windowless. Even so, at St. Paul’s a ring (cupbearer) to Henry I. It was Saxon, not back vards built over. In 1662 the diarist, cross plan. Even so, what we see today inside of eight equal semicircular arches, coming Norman, and must have been built on the Samuel Pepys, added a storey to his house St. Paul’s centres round a large dome carried down to acute points, is marked on the Mithraic foundations to hallow a heathen site. elsewhere in the City, taking light from on eight piers. Both the Great Model and the masonry by moulding; it is both a survival and This could have been as early as 700 A.D., or his neighbour. This crowding allowed the final solution show a quality of mind, of a reminder of the conception Wren had tried as late as 980. rapid spread both of infection and of fire. feeling as well as of intellect, for which out at Walbrook. At the east end of the church was Bearbidder Lane, the source of the Great Plague of 1665. The only doctor who remained with his patients was Nathaniel Hodges, to whom there is a plaque in the present Church. The Great Fire of London Then, early on Sunday, 2nd September, 1666, a fire in a bakery near London Bridge became out of control and a strong wind fanned the f1ames westward. Not only the wooden houses and their furnishings, but warehouses with their stocks, and public buildings, and churches of brick and stone, were consumed in the fierce heat – molten lead running in the gutters, while stone was burnt to lime. Within twenty-four hours, St. Stephen Walbrook The Interior of the Church was burnt to the ground. The Altar of Wren, whose body lies in the vault beneath significant. Architecture is especially an art The Great Fire destroyed over three quarters College Library at Cambridge, and to improve the floor. There are memorials to John in which positive virtues are gained from of the City. The disaster was felt by the and extend Hampton Court. He was to be Dunstable, ‘father of English Music’, and to compromise. whole nation, and King Charles II appointed a responsible, after the Rebuilding Act of 1670, rector George Croly, the famous preacher commission to plan rebuilding, which had to for the Monument to the Fire still to be seen whom the Brontë sisters were taken to hear be done quickly in order to avoid a fresh start on Fish Street Hill. He was also entrusted with by Emily’s publisher’s reader, himself a in a different place. The old street plan was the building of fifty or so new churches, in parishioner.

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