After weeks of rain, the sun beckoned me back to the city. No bike today, but St. Margaret Lothbury is nice and handy for the Central Line. From Bank I walked around the enormous pile of Portland stone that is the Bank of England, and found St Margaret round the back. There are only two views - down Lothbury looking east and down Lothbury looking west. The east view favoured the tower and gave me a nice corner under the Old Lady of Threadneedle's skirts, so I didn't waste any time, sat down and got on with it.
Margaret was a popular saint in medieval Europe and she had a following in London as early as 1200. The first church was completely rebuilt in 1440 but destroyed in the 1666 Great Fire. Wren rebuilt St Margaret from the ground up, completing his work in 1692 and Robert Hooke's tower was finished by 1700.
The great conflagration of 1940 burned out the church and now Wren's hand can only be seen in the shell of the building, the interior fittings coming from a variety of post-war sources.
I love this view of the church: it is not dwarfed by it's immediate neighbours and has the blank back wall of the Bank of England sitting over the road. It also has a clutch of steel and glass skyscrapers as a backdrop, including the Nat West tower. So, St Margaret Lothbury's setting perfectly illustrates the story of our medieval devotion to God replaced by our modern devotion to lucre.
Two hours exactly. Lots of interest including a man with a camera who asked if I wanted to be interviewed for his film about artists. I said I'd rather draw than talk about drawing, but that he should contact me later. We'll see if he does. Update: he didn't.
Map
More about St Margaret's rather dodgy history here
John Stow’s A Survey of London from 1598: description of the church before the fire here
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