London History

It stands marooned at the meeting of Houndsditch and Aldgate High Street - a very superior traffic island hardly noticed by the thousands of cars and buses that zip round it each day. Like so many City and East End churches, it has remained in place while all around has been bulldozed and developed.

St Botolph without Aldgate has a number of claims to fame. It possesses the oldest surviving organ in any English church. Here it was, too, that Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe got married. Geoffrey Chaucer was a parishioner and Isaac Newton lived opposite. And Thomas Bray, the founder of SPCK, was Rector here between 1706 and 1730.

Most famously in recent times, the church crypt was the birthplace of the St Botolph’s Project. Beginning as a soup kitchen for local homeless people, it grew to a charity with a yearly turnover of £2.5m, helping 3000 people a year with training, education and a bed for the night. Sadly, in 2004, the charity went into insolvency, squeezed out of an increasingly crowded sector of charities for the London homeless.

There has been a church for more than a thousand years at the ‘ald’ or ‘old’ gate at the eastern edge of the City of London. Look around England and you’ll find more than 70 churches to St Botolph and they’re very often found at city gates. Botolph, a Saxon who probably lived in Suffolk in the seventh century became the patron saint of travellers and so it made sense for arrivals at the city to give thanks to Botolph. The City of London had no fewer than four of them, with the surviving St Botolph without Bishopsgate and St Botolph Aldersgate, and St Botolph Billingsgate lost in the Great Fire of 1666. There’s a certain logic that the church became a shelter for homeless and rootless travellers within the city too.

The first certain record of the Aldgate church was when it was received by Queen Matilda’s Holy Trinity Aldgate Priory in the early 12th century. In 1418, the old Saxon building was enlarged and then almost entirely rebuilt during the 1500s. By 1740, surveyor George Dance was being called in to advise on the church’s state of dilapidation. His advice was simple - knock it down and start again, and so in 1741 St Botolph’s was pulled down.

Dance’s new design, raised between 1741 and 1744 is the building we see today. A handsome brick building with stone quoins and window casings, it has a distinctive combination of square tower and obelisk spire. It came in at a cost of £5,536 two shillings and eight pence. Remarkably, the new church was built around the existing organ, which had been endowed by Thomas Whiting in 1676 and built by the great organ maker in 1702-04. The organ was extended and improved for the new building, and was to be enlarged several more times during the 19th century. At the close of the 1800s the interior of the church was remodelled by JF Bentley (who had built the sumptuous Westminster Cathedral). He added a carved ceiling, decorative plasterwork, put in new pews and created a chancel by adding side screens.

German bombs seriously damaged the church during World Wars I and 2, but Bentley’s work escaped unscathed. In 1941 a bomb went through the roof above the organ but failed to go off - otherwise England’s oldest church organ might be no more. And in 1965 a mysterious fire necessitated a further renovation. The church’s official reopening was attended by the Queen Mother and the Lord Mayor of London. The organ, meanwhile, underwent its most recent refit during 2005-2006. 300 years on, the St Botolph’s keyboards are still going strong.

A wander away from our usual beaten track of the East End to leafy Dulwich. Why? Because I live here - East Dulwich to be exact. This is a part of London that’s changed enormously in the last few years, from a rather shabby suburb in the early nineties (traditionally an Irish area, a presence that has visibly diminished in the meanwhile), very popular with teachers, who could afford the distressed Victorian dwellings in this ‘perfect example of the Victorian suburb’ as it has been described. They certainly couldn’t afford it anymore, and would probably be relegated to ‘key worker’ dwellings somewhere on the outskirts of Croydon. The Claphamisation of the area - with Range Rover buggies, organic sweet shops for the pre-schooler, and revamps of pub into gastropub - is almost complete. A useful starting guide to the area comes via the Dulwich Society, which explains the unusual geography of the area - Dulwich proper is now known as Dulwich Village, with East, West and North Dulwich much later additions. As ever, more to follow when I have time.