The lost church of St Michael le Querne stood at the north east corner of St Pauls churchyard, near Paternoster Row and Panyer Alley, roughly where St Pauls tube station is now. The word “querne” means a handmill for grinding wheat and the church was close to the corn market – part of the great market at Cheapside. Interestingly, this locale is still the biggest retail area in the City in the form of the large New Change shopping Centre.
The first mention is in the 12th Century as “St Michael que fundata est ante portam Sancti Pauli” or St Michael founded before the gate of St Paul. It was also sometimes recorded as “St Michael ad Bladum”. Bladum being the early medieval latin name for wheat.
In medieval London, clean water was a scarce resource. The River Fleet near Blackfriars was heavily polluted and the Thames, being tidal, was often salty and filled with waste flowing down from the city. The solution was to build a conduit in 1236 to bring water from the River Tyburn (near Bond Street Tube) to Cheapside. Just off New Bond Street in Mayfair, you will find Conduit Street which marks where the conduit ran before going down Fleet Street, up to Newgate and on to Cheapside. You can find a plaque in the pavement near Bank (outside the No1 Poultry building) marking the site of the “Great Conduit”, the remains of which are still there underneath this slab. At the other (western) end of Cheapside was the “Little Conduit” right outside the church of St Michael le Querne.
It is very rare to find drawings of churches that were lost in the Great Fire. But we are very lucky in the case of St Michael le Querne because Ralph Treswell conducted a survey there in 1585 – probably to do with pipes of the conduit – and produced a beautiful drawing of the church in the process. You can see it below, with the Little Conduit building on the end at the right surrounded by tankards for collecting water.
You can see St Michael’s quite clearly on the Newcourt map of 1658 – just before the fire. The degree of detail in the drawing of the church on the map is unusual. Normally on the Newport map churches are represented by just a generic oblong containing a number. But here you can see a building that matches Ralph Treswell’s earlier illustration, right down to the Little Conduit building at the east end.
The position of the church is even more clear on John Leake’s survey of 1666, commissioned in the weeks following the Great Fire of London to record the damage. You can see the huge swathe of City left denuded of buildings and the sites of the churches lost in the conflagration marked as squares. Sadly after the fire it was decided not to rebuild St Michael le Querne and the parish was united with nearby St Vedast. If you go into St Vedast today you will find a pew marked out as for St Michael le Querne, shown below.
The only other physical memorial of the church can be found on the wall of the St Pauls Cathedral School in New Change. Here you will find a series of parish boundary markers, one of which is for St Michael le Querne. The others are for the lost church of St Faith under St Paul’s and for St Vedast.
The wikipedia page for St Michael le Querne is here