Sacred London

City of London churches

Forty-odd churches in one square mile, most of them Wren's, most of them with almost nobody left to live in the parish.

Across the City of LondonChurchesWren

The City had more than a hundred parish churches by 1183, one for roughly every three acres, because every parish had to have one and the parishes were tiny. The Great Fire destroyed eighty-six of them in 1666; a tax on coal paid to rebuild fifty-one, and Christopher Wren's office designed them. Then the people left. As the square mile turned commercial in the nineteenth century the congregations went with them, and about two dozen churches were pulled down by law; the Blitz took most of the rest of the losses.

What is left is around forty-five churches for about nine thousand residents and more than half a million people who arrive in the morning and go home at night. That shapes when they are open and what happens in them: weekday services at lunchtime, free recitals, a great deal of choral music, and Sundays that are often silent.

The Friends of the City Churches send volunteers to sit in them so they can be unlocked, which is why the doors you find open change from day to day. Their church finder has a downloadable map and lets you search by the day you are coming, which is the thing to look at before setting off rather than after.

Where

Across the City of London, EC2 to EC4

Most open on weekdays only, on a rota; check the church finder for which are open today

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