If you walk down Nicholas Lane in the City you will find a blue plaque on the wall stating “Site of the parsonage of St Nicholas Acons where scientific life assurance began in 1762” . It commemorates the first office of Equitable Life, the world oldest mutual insurer, which pioneered scientific life assurance by basing premiums on age and mortality rates for the first time. But it is also a memorial to the lost church of St Nicholas Acons which was destroyed in the Great Fire of London a hundred years before that. In fact above the blue plaque you can see some parish boundary markers which show the division between the parishes of St Nicholas Acons and St Mary Abchurch.
On the opposite side of the street, you will see a remarkably well preserved fire hydrant whose inscription reads “E & S Poynder – St N A – 1836 – London” in letters almost as clear as the day it was cast. The letters ’N A’ stating for Nicholas Acons. So almost two hundred years after the church building disappeared, St Nicholas Acons is still casting a shadow. Of course, this is not unusual in the City – the buildings disappeared but the parishes remained. A good reminder that flesh, bricks and mortar may perish but administrative structures are eternal. The only certainties are death and taxes, as the saying goes.
Wherever you walk in the City of London, your feet are following a path laid down in medieval times. If you happened to be walking down Nicholas Lane almost a thousand years ago, you would have come across the church of St Nicholas Acons. The first recorded mention is from 1084 when Godwynus and his wife Turnud gave the church of “St Nicolas apud Londinias”to Malmsbury Abbey. It has had many different names – “St. Nicholas Achim” in 1190, “St. Nicholas de Candelwryhtestrate” in 1272, “St. Nicholas Hakoun” in 1275 and “St. Nicholas near Lombardstret” in 1369. The St Nicholas in question was the Archbishop of Myra in Asia Minor in the fourth century. The “Acons” in the name is a corruption of “Hacon”, a common surname in the ancient deeds from this time and place. So it probably commemorates an early benefactor to the church. The church does on appear on the early Agas map of London, but can be seen in the Newcourt map of 1658 as number 83.
In 1361 the church reportedly had a chapel dedicated to John the Baptist, and in 1520 the church was repaired and given battlements by the Lord Mayor, John Bridges. The Elizabethan historian John Stow in his survey of London in 1598 had this to say :
“Then is the parish church of St. Nicholas Acon, or Hacon (for so have I read it in records), in Lombard street. Sir John Bridges, draper, mayor, 1520, newly repaired this church, and embattled it, and was there buried. Francis Boyer, grocer, one of the sheriffs, was buried there 1580, with other of the Boyers: so was Julian, wife to John Lambart, alderman.”
After the fire in 1666, the church was not rebuilt and the parish was united with the nearby church of St Edmund King and Martyr in Lombard street. But that is not quite the end of the story. During commercial redevelopments in 1963, excavations on the site of the church revealed late Saxon pits, post-holes and a ragstone wall dating to the 11th century. The outlines of the church walls were found which comprised a nave and square chancel on foundations of chalk and gravel about 4ft thick. The south aisle was clearly a later addition along with a well-founded structure at the north-east corner.
If you decry the new soaring skyscrapers in the City, remember that they point not just towards the future but also to the past. Every new building here involves archaeological excavations which teach us more about the rich history of the City of London
The wikipedia site for St Nicholas Acons is here