No.16 St Clement Eastcheap

Warm autumn sun, not so much on at the office, so the perfect chance to do a full 2 hours on St Clement Eastcheap. It's not actually on Eastcheap any more, after 19th Century road planners built King William Street, it has a narrow frontage onto the narrow Clements Lane, with a tiny passage down one side leading to a sad scrap of a sunless yard and that's it. So, by soulless office block packed with city boys staring at screens, I sat down and started to draw.

In the medieval city, the market on this side became known as Eastcheap, Westcheap eventually becoming Cheapside. Cheap evolved from the Old English 'ceapan' meaning to buy.

These narrow streets do seem to work well for this series - the last two or three have been similar in composition and I like the way I can make the foreground buildings focus attention onto the church. Also, I don't have to draw masses of detailed architecture which, whilst being a great challenge, it's very time consuming. This location had a city bollard in the foreground again!

St Clement's fame stems from the 'Oranges and Lemons' rhyme which is assumed to refer to the exotic fruit arriving at wharves nearby. After the great fire, Sir Chris rebuilt it after negotiating with the city authorities who took the chance to widen the lane, and as a result the church is 15 feet east of it's medieval footings. He started in 1683 and finished in 1687. Two parishes were combined after the fire, meaning the building's full name is The Church of St Clement Eastcheap with St Martin Orgar. I don't think Wren took too much time over St Clement: the church is a simple room with a short bell tower, shorn of any dramatic Wrenian flourishes.

Maybe its position, tightly packed into a group of buildings protected St Clement during the war, only the south aisle suffering bomb damage in the blitz.

The church has some medieval bread shelves on the south wall. These were used by parishioners to leave bread for the poor of the parish and date back to well before the great fire.

I sat and drew for the most part undisturbed, but a city boy on his ciggy break came over, professed admiration and asked if he could commission me. I declined.

Map here
Old version of the rhyme here

No15: St Michael Paternoster

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