One of the worst buildings in the city of London in my opinion is Minster Court. I remember it being built when I first started in the city in the 1980s. It’s interesting to observe the changing building styles as you walk around the Square Mile. If you are in the eastern part of the City near Great Tower Street and Mark Lane you can see three different different types of modern architecture. The brutalist telephone exchange of the 70s on the south side of Great Tower Street (currently unoccupied and begging for redevelopment) is right opposite the postmodern 1980s excrescence of Minster Court.Then if you go up Mark Lane a little way you will get to the point where I took the photograph above. Here you can see Minster Court and right behind it the Walkie-Talkie building. You can also see the edge of the lost church of All Hallows Staining with its original medieval tower and all the modern construction work currently happening around it. Which lead us to the question – which do you prefer? – the postmodern ornamentation of 1980s Minster Court or the post postmodern, bulbous, top-heavy, steel and glass Walkie-Talkie. Or are you actually a fan of brutalism, like the telephone exchange or the Barbican which, after years of being ridiculed and decried, is now gathering a new generation of fans as it retreats into the rear view mirror of history. Maybe, if you don’t like any modern architecture, your answer would be none of the above.
A better answer – if you forgive the pun – would be “nun of the above” because this part of London in medieval times was the location of many religious houses (see map), and in particular two important nunneries. Many of the parts of the city around here are still named after these vanished religious institutions like Austin Friars, Crutched Friars, St Katherine’s Dock and Spitalfields. But I want to focus on two in particular – Mincing Lane where Minster Court stands and the Minories which stood just outside the old City wall. Both these derive from old words for nuns. Mincing Lane is a corruption of the word “mynechene” the Anglo-Saxon term for nuns and also the reason why Minster Court is called what it is. The building’s bewildering variety of fins, angles and steep gables with upswept ends – all in rose granite – are reminiscent of a Gothic cathedral reinterpreted by an origami expert. Just looking at it makes you think of religion and nun’s wimples. The Priory of St Helen (No.15 on the map) – of which the extant church of St Helen’s Bishopsgate is the only remaining part – owned tenements in this lane so it was named after these Benedictine “mynechenes” – the nuns. Over time, this became “Mincing” Lane.
The Minories, although it sounds similar, has a different derivation. It is named after the nuns of the Order of Saint Clare who set up an Abbey just outside the city walls in 1292 (No.11 on the map). These nuns were known as Minoresses – from the Latin “minor” meaning “little” and the addition of the “ess” making it feminine. So Minoresses are “little sisters” – or nuns. The lost church of Holy Trinity Minories was the chapel of the Abbey of the Order Sinclair, which became a parish church when the Abbey was surrendered to the crown as part of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539.
The parish was one of London’s Liberties – separate from the Portsoken Ward in which it lies – and with the rights of a royal peculiar and so free from the authority of the Bishop of London. Some historians have gone further in stressing the independence of this little parcel of a few acres. Tomlinson’s “History of the Minories” says –
“The parish was practically a miniature kingdom of its own, acknowledging no allegiance to any authority whatever except the Crown. The parishioners appointed their own minister, and, when appointed, he claimed freedom from any jurisdiction of bishop or archbishop; marriages were solemnised without banns or licence; they had their own magistrate, and licensed their own publican; persons dwelling in the precinct were free from arrest by outside authorities, and they paid no public taxes, except such as were especially levied upon Royal liberties”
Unlike St Helen’s Bishopsgate, Holy Trinity Minories has not survived. The church managed to escape the Great Fire of London unscathed, but was in such a bad state by 1706 it was rebuilt in brick while still keeping parts of the old medieval building. However, in 1899 the church was closed and the parish united with St Botolph’s Aldgate under the Union of Benefices Act. After that, the deconsecrated building was used as a parish room until it was destroyed in the Blitz of World War II.
Other than the name of the street, there is precious little that you can find today of the lost church of Holy Trinity Minories. If you are walking down the Minories Street, you will come across St Clare Street on the left followed by Haydon Street – the church was situated between these two. The first recalls the Order of St Claire and the second – if you venture halfway down Haydon Street – is the location of the bollard in the photograph shown. You are still just able to make out the inscription “H.T.M. Commission 1864” which is a parish boundary marker for Holy Trinity Minories. Otherwise, you will have to go all the way out to the City of London Cemetery near Ilford, where you will find a gravestone marking where the remains of some corpses from the vaults of the lost church were reburied when the area around Minories was cleared for redevelopment in 1956.
