Anyone who has spent time investing in markets will have discovered that it can be a humbling experience. Though the streets of London are said to be paved with gold, investing in the stock market can prove the negative. Sometimes the clarity of your insight and the brilliance of your analysis can be right, but the timing is wrong. And sometimes it’s just plain wrong. This will not be news to those who work at Schroders, one of the oldest and finest fund managers in the City. They only have to look out the window of their office on London Wall to see the ruins of the lost church of St Alphage. These mute stones bear witness to the failure of many cherished dreams.
When you first see the ruins of the church tower as you pass down London Wall towards Moorgate it’s obvious what you’re looking at – the remains of a lost church. But the history of this building is much more complicated than that. The first perplexing thing is that, if you examine old maps, the church was south of London Wall – in other words – inside not outside the wall. We all know that the street “London Wall” is so named because it follows the path of the old Roman wall. So why is the church north of the road – seemingly outside the wall?
The answer is, of course, that the road does not actually follow the path of the old London wall fully. The stretch from Bishopsgate to Moorgate does, but the second half of the route was diverted during the reconstruction after World War 2. If you stand at Moorgate crossroads, you can see the diversion quite clearly as a pronounced kink in the direction of the dual carriageway. So the ruins you are looking at were actually south of the old wall.
Then comes the second surprise. These are not the ruins of the medieval church of St Alphage, but actually the remains of a medieval priory called Elsing Spital. This is “spital” as in “hospital” or “Spitalfields” meaning a lodging for travellers and the poor run by a religious order. The third surprise is just how many attempts and rebuildings have been made on this site, striving to create an enduring place of worship.
St Alphage was a Saxon saint (954 – 1012) who served as a monk at Deerhurst in Gloucester, before becoming the Bishop of Winchester in 994 and then the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1006. He was brutally murdered by Danes at Greenwich in 1012, where a church dedicated to his name was first erected. Spelt “Alfage”, it still stands today having been rebuilt by Hawksmoor in 1714. He was a popular enough saint for the City church of St Alphage to be founded in his name a little before 1068. It was built on the south side of London Wall, with the old Roman wall forming part of its northern side. This church was closed by an Act of Parliament in 1536. You can still see the outline of this mediaeval church marked out with black paving slabs in what is now called Saint Alphage Gardens. There is also a plaque on the old Roman wall that commemorates this first church.
Just to the south of the church of St Alphage lay a Benedictine nunnery called St Mary-within-Cripplegate, founded sometime before the Norman Conquest. By 1300, it had fallen into a state of decay. In 1331 William Elsing, a rich London mercer, took over the property and founded a hospital there that could accommodate 100 poor or needy people, but with blind or paralysed priests getting preferential treatment. After a few years, Elsing became unhappy with the secular priests at the hospital and replaced them with Augustinian Canons in 1340. His pious charity did him little good. Elsing died during the Black Death eight years later, and the hospital struggled with debt throughout the rest of its existence. It was finally closed under the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536.
The parishioners of the first church of St Alphage, which was in a poor state, then petitioned to have the redundant priory church of Elsing Spital as their new parish church. This then became the second church of St Alphage. You can see it clearly on the Agas map of 1560 When John Stow wrote his “Survey of London” in 1598, site of the first church was already a carpenters yard and that misfortune had struck the remaining buildings of Elsing Spital – in 1541 they burnt down in a great fire :
“on Christmas eve at night, about seven of the clock, a great fire began in the gallery thereof, which burned so sore, that the flame fiering the whole house, and consuming it, was seen all the Cittie over, and was hardly quenched”
The ruined property was then sold on and became the first location for Sion College in 1630. Thirty years later it burnt down again – this time in the Great Fire of London and later the college moved to new buildings in Victoria Embankment. Meanwhile, the second church of St Alphage, also damaged in the Great Fire, required repeated repairs in 1667, 1684 and 1701. Still short of money, the parishoners applied for new funds to the Commission for New Churches in 1711 and they to Parliament in 1718. They received nothing from either. By 1774 was in such a bad state that it was pulled down and rebuilt, the new church opening in 1777. This rebuilt church had two fronts – one facing north to London Wall and the other east to Albermanbury. It was not a pretty building. Both these entrances were “equally remarkable for want of taste in the arrangement, and of beauty in the effect” according to George Godwin. He went on to also criticise the interior too in his book on the Churches of London in 1839, saying it was “merely a plain room with a flat ceiling, crossed from north to south by one large band at the east end”. This book includes a sketch of the eastern front (facing Aldermanbury) shown below.
The north (London Wall) entrance was rebuilt again in Neo Gothic style in 1913. Again, this was not to last long as it was one of the few churches in the City to be damaged by bombs both in WW1 and also in WW2. When the Barbican area began to be redeveloped in 1958, this north entrance and the upper parts of the old tower were demolished, leaving only the stumpy arched remains you see today.
So you can see the theme here of the run of bad luck, like that often suffered by playing the stock market. The first church failed, the Nunnery failed, Elsings Spital failed, the priory was demolished, the church needed constant repairs and was pulled down and rebuilt twice and later was bombed twice in both world wars. So you can either see these ruins as a positive symbol that “hope springs eternal” or as a monument to crushed dreams.
Of course, the other way of exploring these ruins is by the raised walkway which wends it’s serpentine way above the historic site. The walkway itself is also as symbol of unfulfilled dreams. It was part of a ‘pedway’ network planned in the 1960’s which was to consist of 30 miles of elevated walkways intertwined throughout the the City keeping pedestrians separated from the motor traffic beneath. The plans are described in this excellent article from the Londonist Time Machine. All new buildings in the City had to incorporate abutments to support future bridges, which in most cases never came. You can still see these on the sides of older office buildings. Another utopian dream thwarted.