St Brides has a long history, probably due to the proximity of a Holy Well once dedicated to St Bridget, from which the church received its dedication. Indeed, the name Bridewell has been synonymous with the area for centuries, and is now the name of a nearby theatre.
On the site of the future church, the Romans dug a mysterious extra-mural ditch which was bigger than the one they eventually dug around the city walls, only a stone’s throw away at Lud Gate. Soon after they put up an equally mysterious building, which has puzzled arcaeologists since its discovery. Why build just outside the walls of Londinium? Could this building, under the site of the present St Brides, have been connected to the Well? Or could it have been one of the earliest Christian sites, erected away from the settlement due to fear of persecution? The answers remain elusive, but the relics do not: the line of the ditch is marked on the floor of the crypt, and a section of tessellated pavement can still be seen.
In the sixth century the first definite church was built here, a nave and chancel with a typical Saxon rounded apse. This was rebuilt many times over the following centuries, with the result that the marvellous crypt contains remains from seven previous St Brides! It was, as the first church encountered between London and Westminster, of considerable importance: in 1205, the Curia Regis, first court of the realm, was held in St Brides and in 1210 King John held his Parliament there.
By 1500 the area had become a magnet for the clergy. The Bishops of Salisbury, Peterborough and Ely all had buildings in the neighbourhood, and this in turn led to the area’s enduring association with printing and journalism. At the time, the printing press was still a relatively new development but Wynkyn de Worde, the apprentice and successor of Caxton, knew that the principal purveyors of literature were churchmen – so he erected his printing press in the heart of the clergy’s quarter, the churchyard of St Brides, where he has been buried since 1535. Other printers soon followed his example and flocked to the area.The connection between St Brides and the world of journalism is today still as strong, despite the mass defection to the Docklands in the 1980’s.
The growing number of printing presses attracted Dryden, Milton and Evelyn to the neighbourhood. Samuel Pepys was born in a road adjacent to the church, and was baptised there along with his eight siblings. Later, he recorded in his Diary the necessity of having to bribe the gravedigger with sixpence to ‘jostle together’ coffins in the crypt to make way for his brother Tom. Other notable interments at this time were Mary Frith (1659), otherwise known as ‘Moll Cutpurse’, a rather notorious local criminal, and the Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace (1658), who wrote ‘Stone walls do not a prison make’. One speculates if these really were his thoughts, as he sat in the Gatehouse Prison doing time for his Royalist beliefs.
The Great Fire destroyed St Bride’s, other than the remains in the crypt, now very extensive due to the number of preceding churches on the site. Rebuilt to Wren’s design at a cost of £11,430:5:11d, it was one of the first post-fire churches ready for worship. The steeple, one of the most remarkable in London, was completed in 1703.
The steeple is of Portland stone. It consists of rising and diminishing octagons, ending in a spirelet, and until a lightning strike was eight feet higher. Its shape gave rise to one of St Brides most romantic stories, that of Thomas Rich.
Rich was, as a young man, apprenticed to a baker near Ludgate. He fell in love with his master’s daughter and, at the end of his apprenticeship when he set up his own business, asked for her hand in marriage. The proposal was given her father’s approval. As a baker, Rich wished to create a spectacular cake for the wedding feast, but was unsure of how to create something completely new for his betrothed… until, one day, he looked up at the steeple of the church in which they were to be married, and the inspiration hit him. A cake in layers, tiered, diminishing as it rose. And thus began, according to the story, the tradition of the tiered wedding cake, based on Wren’s steeple for St Brides.
This story may be fanciful, there is no concrete historical proof to its veracity. However, walking through St Brides Churchyard, now paved over and with benches for lunching workers, one can still find – among about a dozen now prone gravestones – the names of Thomas Rich and his wife, still together after centuries, and one hopes the story is true.
The area – and its printing presses – continued to attract the great and the good. Johnson, Boswell, Reynolds, Garrick, Goldsmith, Pope, Hogarth, Sarah Siddons, Richardson, writers, actors, artists all. A later generation saw Wordsworth, Hood, Keats, Hazlitt and Lamb holding deep discussions in local coffee houses. Naturally, the rise of the newspaper was here – the crypt holds a copy of the first edition of the ‘Daily Courant’, the first newspaper.
On December 29th 1940, the area suffered massive bombardment. By morning, all that remained of St Brides was the wedding-cake steeple and outer walls. With financial help from newspapers, Godfrey Allen studied Wren’s original plans and created a faithful rebuilding, keeping the clear glass which Wren loved, but not rebuilding the galleries, instead laying out the stalls in collegiate style. The church today has a light, open feel of symmetry, the floor is paved with marbled parquets of black from Belgium and white from Italy. The church is very much a living church in a modern world – an altar in the NE corner carries sympathy messages to reporters who have lost their lives in current conflicts. A bust of Virginia Dare, the first child to be born of settlers in the New World, is a reminder that her parents were married here.
The crypt has the feel of a medieval charnel, which is exactly what it is – in a bricked up chamber to the south are the bones of several thousand Londoners. On display are the remains of former churches, the Roman pavement, an iron coffin (to deter grave robbers) and the brass plate once attached to the coffin of Samuel Richardson, author of ‘Pamela’ and ‘Clarissa’, often proclaimed – alongside DeFoe and Fielding – to be the ‘Father of the English Novel’.
Richardson was buried at St Brides in 1761. Something of a hypochondriac, he left behind several letters bemoaning his mediacal complaints. His coffin seems to have been disturbed during W F Grimes’ post-War excavations, but was rediscovered in 1993 by the osteologist Dr Louise Scheuer, who scientifically compared the state of the bones with the complaints Richardson listed. Along with Christ Church Spitalfields, on the opposite side of the City, the many hundreds of named remains at St Brides are an invaluable resource for those studying illness in antiquity.
Set back from Fleet Street, only yards from the tremendous bustle of Ludgate Circus yet seemingly existing in its own peaceful space, St Brides is one of the most historic, vibrant and beautiful churches to be found in London. The list of people connected with it reads like a Who’s Who of historical personages, and even now, in this high-rise age, the famous spire draws the eye from surrounding vistas. A historic, architectural and thought-provoking gem.
Author Mark McManus
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