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Some of the finest churches, synagogues, mosques and temples. Architectural + decorative beauty plus historical significance.
Hawksmoor's only City church, squat and strange on Lombard Street, with Bank station dug out beneath it and a slave captain's pulpit inside.
ChurchesHawksmoor
Nicholas Hawksmoor built six churches under the Act of 1711 that paid for fifty, and this, finished in 1727 on a site where a church had stood since before 1191, is the only one in the City: a square block with a front of banded rusticated stone, two squat turrets instead of a spire, and inside a single room lit from above, with twelve Corinthian columns in threes at the corners holding up a clerestory of semicircular windows. John Newton was rector here from 1780, the former slave-ship captain who had written Amazing Grace and who spent his last years preaching against the trade and steering William Wilberforce, and his memorial gives his own summary of his life. In 1900 the City and South London Railway bought the crypt for Bank station, dug out the dead and put the lifts under the church, which is why the building stands on the Underground rather than on the ground. T.S. Eliot, who worked in a bank round the corner, put its clock in The Waste Land, keeping the hours with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
Open on weekdays; the church publishes no times online.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.