St Giles Cripplegate: medieval island in a Brutalist sea
- London On The Ground
- 2 days ago
- 11 min read
The church escaped the Great Fire of London, but has been badly damaged in three other fires. Today the medieval survivor contrasts sharply with the concrete of the surrounding Barbican Estate.
St Giles Cripplegate is a great example of post war regeneration in the City of London. Its fabric, monuments, objects and windows reflect the long history and heritage of the City from Roman times to the 21st century. And it’s not as isolated from its surroundings as it looks.
Walks available for booking
For a schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks and tours, please click here.
Origins
The first chapel on this site outside the ancient City walls was built in Saxon times, but nothing is known of the detail of that building. The first substantial church, a Norman building, was built around 1090 by Alfune, Bishop of London. The lower part of the tower still includes some Norman stonework.
The church was built so close to the City walls that the southern border of the churchyard was formed by the wall and part of a Roman bastion.
Part of the old City wall and the bastion have been preserved within the Barbican Estate and can still be seen today.
The first fire: 1545
The church was rebuilt in the perpendicular gothic style in 1394, but required reconstruction after being badly damaged by fire in 1545. It was one of 22 or 23 churches that survived or escaped the Great Fire of London of 1666, out of a total of 109 or 112 (depending on which source you read).
Today it is one of seven remaining medieval churches in the City.
The church tower was extended by 15 feet of brickwork in 1682, when the number of bells was increased from eight to 12 and the structure was capped by a cupola and weather vane.
In the mid 1880s, in an example of the Victorian habit of trying to make an old Gothic building look older and more Gothic, ragstone cladding and crenellations were added to the southern exterior of the church.
The second fire: 1897
The church suffered more damage in 1897, when a fire in a neighbouring ostrich feather warehouse broke out and spread. After that, the northern exterior was clad with ragstone and embellished with crenellations to match the south side.
The church was the first in the City to be damaged in World War II, on the night of 24/25 August 1940, when the first bombs to land in the City struck Fore Street. The damage on that occasion was relatively slight.
The third fire: incendiary bombs 1940
However, the church was gutted by an air raid on the night of 29 December 1940, when fire bombs devastated an area three quarters of a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide. Much of the area was totally destroyed, but the solid stone walls and tower of St Giles remained standing.
Around the windows on the north wall of the church, the interior stonework has been left blackened to show the effect of the incendiary bombs.
Interior views of St Giles Cripplegate today (click on any image to enlarge)
Post-war restoration
After languishing in a semi-ruined state for many years (during which time the 12 replacement bells were cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1954), extensive restoration work to the church began in 1960 under the direction of architect Godfrey Allen.
The drawing below, by artist, historian and architectural author Hubert Pragnell, shows St Giles Cripplegate in 1961, in the early phase of its restoration (and well before the surrounding Barbican Estate was built between 1969 and 1982). Below the drawing is my photo from the same angle, taken 65 years later.
For more of Hubert Pragnell’s unique drawings of City bomb sites in the 1950s and 1960s please click here.
Fortuitously, plans that had been drawn up for the 1545 reconstruction were discovered in Lambeth Palace, the London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury. They proved enormously helpful in carrying out the post-war restoration work, which was completed in 1968.
Who was St Giles and what is Cripplegate?
St Giles was a Greek, from a wealthy Athenian family in the seventh century, who gave away his wealth and became a hermit living in the forests of southern France. He is said to have stuck to a strict vegetarian diet of herbs and the milk of a hind (a female red deer), which was also his only companion.
One day, a royal hunt, led by Wamba, King of the Franks, in pursuit of the hind, discovered his retreat. Giles was wounded by an arrow shot at the deer as he held up his hand to protect his four legged friend.
Moved by this act of selflessness, the King granted Giles land for the founding of an abbey.
His cult spread across Europe and it is thought that a small chantry chapel was built outside Cripplegate, the oldest gate in London’s ancient City walls, in Saxon times before Alfune built the first church on the site.
The gate had Roman origins, but its name is thought to derive from the Saxon word crepel, meaning a covered walkway (which probably led from the gate to the barbican, or fortified watch tower outside the walls), rather than to cripples who may have begged there.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that St Giles became the patron saint of cripples and beggars. It is thought that he was lame and he is often portrayed with a crutch or walking stick.
He is also patron saint of blacksmiths, which seems appropriate for a church that has emerged from fire three times in its history.
Organ, altar and font from St Luke's, Old Street
The original organ of 1704 was destroyed in the Blitz and was replaced in 1968 by one built by the renowned organ builder Noel Mander (who later rebuilt the organ at St Paul’s Cathedral). There is also a smaller choir organ at the east end of the north aisle.
At the core of Mander’s creation at the west end of the nave is the organ and organ case built in 1733 for St Luke’s, Old Street, a parish that was carved out of the parish of St Giles on the completion of that church in 1733.
After St Luke’s was deconsecrated in 1959, because it was declared unsafe due to subsidence, the parish was reunited with St Giles. The altar and font in St Giles were also taken from St Luke’s.
The altar and the font (click on any image to enlarge)
Medieval arches and Roman tiles
The oldest materials in the structure of St Giles Cripplegate are some Roman tiles recycled into one of the two medieval arches that are visible to the right of the east window. This contained the sedilia, where priests sat, and the piscine, where communion vessels were washed.
Historical figures associated with the church
St Giles Cripplegate has a large number of monuments and associations with historical figures.
Under the organ gallery four busts sculpted in the early 1900s by sculptor George Frampton and donated by philanthropist John Passmore Edwards, commemorate men connected with the church in previous centuries:
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), author of Robinson Crusoe and pioneer of the modern novel, was born in nearby Fore Street and spent time in prison for his views on religion.
The poet John Milton (1608-1674), who was buried here, was blind when he wrote his most famous work Paradise Lost. There is also another bust and a statue of him in the south aisle and his grave is near the pulpit.
Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), Lord Protector of England, Scotland & Ireland during the Republic in the 1650s after leading the Parliamentarian army in the English Civil War, was married here in 1620. His wife, Elizabeth Bourchier, was the daughter of a local leather merchant.
John Bunyan (1628-1688), a tinker turned preacher and best known as the author of The Pilgrim's Progress, occasionally attended and preached here. He was also imprisoned for his religious views.
Also commemorated in the church are:
Sir Martin Frobisher (c1535/39-1594), explorer, sea captain, privateer, knighted for helping to fight off the Spanish Armada, was buried in the church in 1594.
Sir Martin Frobisher memorial and additional information (click on any image to enlarge)
John Speed (1552-1629), Merchant Taylor, historian and map maker, was buried in the church in 1629. His monumet was damaged in the Blitz and restored by the Merchant Taylors' Company in 1971.
Lancelot Andrewes was vicar of St Giles from 1588 to 1605 and is considered the church's most famous vicar, because of his role in producing the Authorised Version of the Bible, which was completed in 1611. He was a translator and general editor on what is more commonly known as the King James Bible, as it was commissioned by James I.
Andrewes later moved on to become, successively, Bishop of Chichester, Ely and Winchester and was also Dean of the Chapel Royal. He died in 1626 and was buried in St Mary Overie (now Southwark Cathedral, but then part of the Diocese of Winchester).
Lancelot Andrewes is commemorated by a Victorian brass eagle lectern and in the stained glass window at the east end of the church (see below).
Although there is no memorial to him, pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt was baptised here in 1827.
Other famous parishioners from the past include Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII who was executed for treason after refusing to back Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn and his self-appointment as head of the Church in England.
John Foxe (1516/7?-1587), author of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, was buried in St Giles.
Less famous, but important to the history of the church, are two parishioners of the late 18th/early 19th century, who likely played a part in restoration work at the time.
One is vestry clerk Thomas Stagg (1731-1772), whose briefly worded monument ends with the phrase ‘That is all’, possibly indicating that he was also a bell ringer, since the expression often concludes a session of ringing.
The other, more wordy, memorial recalls Sir William Staines (1731-1807). A stone mason born in Southwark, he ran away while an apprentice to join the Navy, only to be captured by the French. After his release and completion of his apprenticeship, he ran a successful building business in the Cripplegate area and went on to become a popular Lord Mayor of London in 1801, when Admiral Nelson - a national hero - rode in his procession.
Memorial and bust of Sir William Staines (click on any image to enlarge)
Sword rest
One of my favourite objects in the church is its sword rest, one of many to be found in City of London churches. A post war replacement for the one destroyed in the Blitz, it preserves an ancient tradition of providing a stand for the ceremonial mayoral sword when the Lord Mayor attends a service.
Stained glass windows
St Giles has a number of interesting stained glass windows, all installed after World War II, covering both religious and secular themes.
The stained glass east window of the church, designed by Gerald Smith of Nicholson Studios in 1960, re-creates the original arched 14th century window that had been replaced by an oval window in the 18th century.
At top left, the window includes an image of St Giles with his friend the hind and with an arrow in his right hand.
The second figure from the right on the bottom row of the window depicts Lancelot Andrewes, who has already been mentioned.
The west window, above the door to the tower, was completed in 1968 by John Lawson of Faithcraft Studios. St Giles appears once more, at the top, above a large City of London coat of arms, flanked on the left with the arms of the Archbishop of Canterbury and on the right with the arms of the Bishop of London.
Lower down, the five shields depicted are those of former parishioners: Robert Glover (Somerset Herald of Arms in the reign of Elizabeth I), poet John Milton, John Egerton (17th century Earl of Bridgewater), Oliver Cromwell and explorer/privateer Sir Martin Frobisher.
The west-facing window in the northwest corner of the church depicts modern skyscrapers in the City of London in a fanciful scene as they rise above the medieval church and the City gate. They include the former NatWest Tower, now Tower 42, which was once London’s tallest building. The window, which marks the 1991 centenary of local charity the Cripplegate Foundation, also shows a woman in green holding a walking stick and a bunch of flowers.
The north-facing window in the northwest corner has three stained glass panels referring to a wedding, a baptism and a funeral. They were made in 2019-2021 by Caroline Swash, a stained glass artist who lives in the Barbican Estate and is a parishioner of St Giles.
The left-hand panel records Elizabeth Bourchier’s marriage to Oliver Cromwell in 1620. It deliberately mentions Elizabeth’s name first and includes mini portraits of the pair.
The central one recalls William Ward, founder of the City of London School for Girls, who was baptised in St Giles Cripplegate in 1797. The modern location of the school he founded is just outside the window and to the left.
The panel on the right commemorates the 1749 burial at St Luke’s, Old Street of naturalist Mark Catesby, one of the first to record the flora and fauna of North America.
A large stained glass window in the north wall, by John Lawson, commemorates Edward Alleyn (1566-1626), actor, theatre proprietor and founder of Dulwich College. He established almshouses for the elderly poor and the Fortune Theatre in the parish of St Giles.
His only rival as the greatest actor of his generation was Richard Burbage, a member of Shakespeare’s troupe of players.
If you are interested in stained glass windows, please see also Secular stained glass: ten of London’s best and Christ Church, Blackfriars Road: the story of Southwark in stained glass.
The Shakespeare connection
The church also has a Shakespeare connection. In the early 1600s the Bard lodged not far away, on Silver Street just inside the City walls, writing Othello, Measure for Measure, All’s Well that Ends Well and King Lear while living there. Click here for my post on Shakespeare's known residential locations in London.
His younger brother Edmund, also an actor, lived nearby and buried his illegitimate infant son here in 1607. Shakespeare is thought to have attended the funeral of his nephew (less than five months before Edmund died at the age of 27).
Moreover, there is a memorial in the church to Margaret Lucy, who was buried here. She was the great granddaughter of Sir Thomas Lucy, a landowner and magistrate in Stratford on Avon. According to a somewhat unlikely story, Shakespeare is said to have fled to London after being caught poaching deer on Sir Thomas’s estate.
The post-war reconstruction of St Giles Cripplegate was completed before the building of the residential developments of the Barbican Estate in 1969-1976 and the completion of the Barbican Arts Centre in 1982.
With the building of the Barbican the area had been transformed from a dense street network of mainly Georgian and Victorian warehouses, offices and residential accommodation to a vast bomb site and then to something totally new with almost no link to its past, apart from the church and parts of the ancient London Wall.
The unusual juxtaposition of contrasting architectural styles give the church a rather lost look today. Its medieval Gothic appears aloof from the concrete Brutalism of its surroundings.
However, the Barbican contains the largest residential population in the City of London and St Giles Cripplegate is one of the few City churches connected to an active local congregation.
Click on any image to enlarge
St Giles Cripplegate image gallery (click on any image to enlarge)
Walks available for booking
For a schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks and tours, please click here.
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