One of the joys of walking around London is the trip across the Millennium Bridge from the Tate Modern to St Paul’s Cathedral. As you cross the river here, there’s the most magnificent vista of St Paul’s in front of you. Strangely, neither the Corporation of the City of London, nor the Tate Gallery, wanted this bridge to be built in the first place, which is why the bridge doubles back on itself when it reaches the Tate. The gallery did not want it intruding on its premises. It was only after almost a decade of struggle with local council planning departments that the bridge was finally built in time to mark the millennium. It helped to open up the whole of the South Bank as a tourist destination, including Shakespeare’s Globe which also struggled for ages to get planning permission – a salutary reminder of the evils of Nimbyism.
As you walk over the bridge and up the slope to Saint Paul’s, just as you reach the Salvation Army headquarters, look to the right. You will discover that you are standing on a bridge over Upper Thames Street with the tower of St Mary Somerset in the distance. You are now standing where the lost church of St Peter Paul’s Wharf once stood. The only thing that might remind you that the church was once here is the name of the street itself, which is St Peter’s Hill. Tourists find this confusing since it’s leading straight to St. Pauls.
The church of St Peter Paul’s Wharf was first recorded in 1170 as “Saint Peter the Little”. In the following centuries, it had a variety of different names: St. Peter de Ia Wodewarve, St. Peter the Less upon the Thames, St. Peter near Oldefishstret and St. Peter the Less near Pouleswharf , before settling on the shorter standard – St Peter Paul’s Wharf. In 1430, Robert Franklin granted the parishioners parcel of land to the north to use as a church yard, and in 1625 the church was repaired and beautified. Sadly, it was completely destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666 and never rebuilt, with the parish being united with that of St. Benet Paul’s Wharf next door.
We know what the church looked like as it appears in the Wyngarde panorama of 1543 and is clearly visible on the Copperplate Map of 1555 with St Benet on one side and St Mary Somerset on the other. You can see on the parish map below how close these churches were to each other.
Even though the church building disappeared, the site and churchyard remained open until the middle of the 20th century. You can see on the Goad Fire Insurance map of 1886 that the site of the lost church is clearly marked as an empty space, and it is still there in the Bartholomew Atlas map of 1940. However, this area was completely obliterated in the Blitz in World War II and then extensively redeveloped in the following decades.
The map below illustrates these changes superimposed on an OS map from 1899 . Upper Thames Street was widened into a dual carriageway and redirected underneath Blackfriars with the sinuous street of White Lion Hill curving up past St Benet onto Queen Victoria St. This period in the 70s also gave birth to probably the gloomiest street in the whole of the City – Castle Bayard Street – which is a long underpass with no natural light for much of its length. Planners in that decade were keen to separate traffic from pedestrians, as you can see in the Barbican walkways, but this tangle of streets, shown in red on the map, is probably one of the worst examples of planning in the City. The new roads cut through the maze of wharfs leading down to the Thames, which had become redundant as shipping became containerised, and the whole area was taken over by ugly office blocks. As the area was redeveloped, the remains of the church of St Peter Paul’s wharf were observed on three occasions. In 1961 the walls were discovered, in 1981 the foundations of the west end of the church were recorded, and with the building of the City of London’s Boys School in 1984 the south and west walls and some early graves were uncovered.
There are no parish boundary markers for the lost church of St Peter Paul’s Wharf, only an echo in the name of the street, as mentioned before. However, I noticed something when I was standing on the site. If you tilt your head and walk around to get the alignment right, you will find that the last ’t’ in the word “that” on the walls of the Salvation Army headquarters will appear against the white background of the steel girder. And magically, or maybe fancifully, a blue cross appears marking the site of this lost church.
The wikipedia page for St Peter Paul’s Wharf is here