I'm fated not to draw St Michael. Got down there on a beautiful day, only to discover I'd forgotten my ink. Couldn't find a shop selling bottles of ink. So I went and looked inside the church instead. Came back a couple of days later with a brand new folding stool and started well, but a call from work meant I had to put my pen down and get back to the office. And the stool broke. I'd hoped to get back and finish the drawing, but it's now September and I've lost the thread of the work.
St Michael has the Paternoster appendage because, as there were seven St Michaels in the city, it was named after Paternoster Lane, now College Lane, where traders sold Paternosters or Roseries. Sir Richard Whittington made some generous donations to the church and was buried in the yard. He has a great stained glass window of him, with cat, turning back to London on hearing the church bells and having his premonition that he would one day be Lord Mayor. Over the centuries, he's been dug up a few times, the last team to look for him in the 1950s didn't find his lead coffin, but did find a mummified cat! St Michael is very proud of this connection, and looking around, I think Boris has some way to go before he achieves Dick Whittington's kind of immortality.
The medieval church was one of the last to be rebuilt after the great fire, being finished in 1694, nearly 30 years after the conflagration. Like many of these projects, the steeple was added later, completed in 1717. In the war, the church survived the Luftwaffe's bombs, only to be hit by a V1 in 1944. The walls and steeple remained mostly complete, services carried on in the shell and the church was finally restored in 1968.
Maybe one day I'll finish/redo this one.
Map here
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