The lost church of St Nicholas Olave is clearly visible on the Copperplate Map of 1555 and you can see it surrounded by many other churches in the later Agas map of 1560. This is a good illustration of just how many churches were stuffed into such a small area in the medieval city. This portion of the Agas map only measures around 350 metres by 150 metres. The map beneath it shows the parish boundaries.
In 1014, King Olaf of Norway fought along side the Anglo-Saxon King Aethelred the Unready against the Danes in the battle of London Bridge. While the Danes are occupying the bridge, King Olaf tied his longboats to the bridge supports and pulled it down, drowning the enemy in the river. Soon after his death in 1030, King Olaf was canonised and “St Olave” became a popular dedication for churches in the City of London because of his heroic defence of the City.
If you emerge from London Bridge Station you will find yourself in Tooley street – which is a corruption of “St Olaf’s” (sounds like “t’oolus” which becomes “tooley”) and facing you will be an Art Deco building called St Olaf House. This stands on the site of the lost church of St Olave Southwark, demolished in 1926 having stood there for almost a thousand years. On the other side of the river (near Fenchurch St) is St Olave Hart Street, one of the few medieval churches to survive the Great Fire. Near the Guildhall is St Olave Jewry, which has been converted into an office building. Up towards the Barbican you will find the churchyard of the lost church St Olave Silver Street with a skull and crossbones stone plaque at the entrance. But the most elusive of the lost churches is St Nicholas Olave
Unlike many other lost churches, there are no parish boundary markers for St Nicholas Olave but there is at least a little green space, although unmarked, now called Senator House Garden where the church (and churchyard) stood. This lost church is unusual in having a double dedication – to St Nicholas and St Olave. It is said that this derived from the merger of two earlier churches – St Nicholas on this site and St Olave in Austin Friars on Broad Street which was demolished in 1271 when the Augustinians built their friary there. However, this story might just be a confusion of the names – “St Olave Bradestrat” could be read as either Bread Street or Broad Street. Other authorities think that the parish of St Olave erased by the Austin Friars was absorbed into St Peter le Poer on that site.
Whatever the derivation, we know that the church of St Nicholas Olave existed in 1285 and is recorded as “St Nichi Olaul” and later as “St Nicholas Bernard Olof” and St Nicholas Olaph”. John Stow called it a convenient church in his Survey of London in 1598 :
“On the west side whereof is the parish church of St. Nicholas Olive, a convenient church, having the monuments of W. Newport, fishmonger, one of the sheriffs 1375; Richard Willowes, parson, 1391; Richard Sturges, fishmonger, 1470; Thomas Lewen, ironmonger, one of the sheriffs 1537, who gave his messuage, with the appurtenances, wherein he dwelt, with fourteen tenements in the said parish of St. Nicholas, to be had after the decease of Agnes his wife, to the ironmongers, and they to give stipends appointed to almsmen, in five houses by them built in the churchyard of that parish, more to poor scholars in Oxford and Cambridge, etc. Blitheman, an excellent organist of the Queen’s chapel, lieth buried there with an epitaph”
The church of St Nicholas Olave was repaired and beautified in 1623 but the parishioners only got to enjoy this for 40 years because the church was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and not rebuilt. Instead the parish was combined with the nearby church of St Nicholas Cole Abbey. From then on, it is frustratingly hard to find traces of this lost church as it slides into the fog of history. There are no parish boundary markers remaining today, but we can try to identify its footprint on the following succession of maps.
The site of the lost church is clear on the Ogilby and Morgan map of 1676 which shows the city immediately after the Great Fire. The churchyard is still marked as a open space on the Roque map of 1746. There is a beautiful watercolour of Bread Street Hill showing the entrance to the old churchyard of St Nicholas Olave on the right, opposite the barrels. However, all of the streets in this area were significantly disrupted with the building of Queen Victoria Street – the path of which is shown in red on the Roque map.
Queen Victoria Street was built in 1871 to provide a new, wide direct route between two important junctions in the city – Blackfriars and Mansion House. It cut through a maze of small alleys and narrow streets leaving them truncated and adrift. At the same time – underneath the new street – sewers, water and gas mains were built as well as the Circle and District tube line. The Goad Fire Insurance maps of 1886 show the area after Queen Victoria Street was built revealing a maze of small offices and businesses in great detail.
The building of the new street was not the end of the disruption to this area of the City. In the Blitz of 1940, this was one of the most heavily bombed areas. The bomb damage map below shows in blue the areas damaged beyond repair. You can see the areas around St Pauls bore the brunt of the destruction and a photo of the area after the war shows the devastation. That’s why today this part of the city seems so soulless – a collection of nondescript modern buildings and little streets amputated by the busy dual carriageway of Queen Victoria St. Wandering around here one feels strangely deracinated, with a mournful sense of history erased. So if you do see the little tree outside Senator House which is roughly where the lost church of St Nicholas Olave stood, then spare a moment to think of the saint who saved the City by pulling down London Bridge, and the fishmongers and merchants once buried beneath your feet.
The wikipedia page for St Nicholas Olave is here and the Parish Clerks page is here