Literary London

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St Olave Hart Street

Pepys's own church, where he and his wife are buried and where he watched the plague fill the churchyard.

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Photo by Lonpicman, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Also in Sacred London.

Samuel Pepys lived in Seething Lane beside the Navy Office, and St Olave's was 'our own church', where he sat in the Navy gallery and eyed the congregation; Elizabeth Pepys, who died at twenty-nine in 1669, has a bust he commissioned looking towards where he sat, and he was buried beside her in 1703. The churchyard gate of 1658 with its skulls made Dickens call it St Ghastly Grim in The Uncommercial Traveller, and hundreds of plague victims of 1665 are buried here, which the diary records with dread. The church survived the Great Fire by yards, and Pepys has a bust in the garden on Seething Lane.

Where
8 Hart Street, EC3R 7NB
Nearest station
London Fenchurch Street · 2 min walk

Weekdays

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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