File:Wonderful London (1927) 50 – St Margaret Lothbury.jpg

St Margaret, Lothbury, London

Photogravure by Donald Macleish from Wonderful London by St John Adcock, 1927.

There was a church here in the 12th Century, but there was a grand rebuilding along Perpendicular lines in the early 15th Century. The church was destroyed by the Great Fire, and rebuilt by the Wren workshop, the tower being completed right at the start of the 18th Century. The church sits flush with the other stone-faced buildings on the north side of Lothbury, rather anonymously but entirely at ease with its secular neighbours.

A number of the City of London's churches were lost in the 19th Century as they were demolished and the land sold off for large prestige building projects, the largest and most prestigious of which was the gradual expansion of the Bank of England. St Margaret is now the closest church to the Bank, being in its back yard so to speak, but the wealth that has accrued to it has been of a different kind, for no other City church has benefited to the same extent from the acquisition of furnishings from lost churches.

You enter from the south-west corner, and from the long Galilee area there are entrances into the body of the church and a pleasingly prayerful south aisle chapel. Both are crowded. This is a result of the early 20th Century restoration by Walter Tapper, who seems to have had pretty much a free-run of the stored furnishings from demolished Wren churches. The two stars here are the extraordinarily elaborate late 17th Century font in the south aisle, which came from St Olave Jewry, and the massive wooden screen from All Hallows the Great. This is a great Berlin Wall of a thing, slicing across the church majestically from wall to wall, its upper storey like a great door case, the rather alarming eagle waiting to dart down on anyone daring to enter the sanctuary.

Moses and Aaron came from St Christopher le Stocks, the beautiful Anglo-catholic reredos in the south aisle from St Olave Jewry (what a jewel of a church that must have been!) and the vast tester to the pulpit came from All Hallows the Great - it sits rather awkwardly with the heavy screen, but both originally came from the same church of course. They are as solid as the Bank across the road. All in all this is a splendid church as befits its location, full of treasures which did not originally belong to it, which seems curiously appropriate. The church appears to be open every day during the week.