St Bride's Church

Turn off Fleet Street into the narrow lane and the traffic noise drops away almost at once. The paving is worn smooth underfoot. Above you, a white stone spire rises in layer after layer, each one a little smaller than the one below. On a clear day the Portland stone looks almost silver against the sky. This is St Bride's Church, and people have worshipped on this small patch of London ground for well over a thousand years.

The church takes its name from Saint Bride, also known as Saint Brigid of Kildare. She is one of Ireland's patron saints, an abbess of the early Christian period. Her name is a clue to how old this site is. Historians believe the dedication points to Celtic Christian influence in London long before the Norman Conquest. So the name of the church is part of its history too. It links a busy City lane to an Irish saint.

The building you see today comes from disaster. In 1666 the Great Fire of London swept through this district and destroyed the medieval church. Sir Christopher Wren, the architect who later built Saint Paul's Cathedral, was given the task of rebuilding dozens of City churches. St Bride's was one of them. The new church rose in the decades after the fire, and its spire was added later. It became the tallest of all Wren's church spires.

Now look up at that spire again. It is built as a stack of open octagonal stages, one on top of another, and a slender point crowns the top. Many visitors have one thought: it looks like a wedding cake. They are not wrong. Legend has it that a baker on nearby Ludgate Hill, named Thomas Rich, looked at this spire and copied its shape for a wedding cake. According to the popular tale, the tiered wedding cake was born here. It is folklore, not documented fact, but it is a lovely one.

The spire has had its own troubles. In the eighteenth century, lightning struck it and the damage left it a little shorter than Wren designed it. The strike also joined a scientific argument of the time. Benjamin Franklin was then living in London, and he was involved in the debate over the best shape for lightning conductors. Some people wanted pointed rods, and others wanted blunt ones. A church spire in Fleet Street became part of a quarrel about electricity.

Fleet Street gave this church its best-known role. Around 1500, Wynkyn de Worde, an assistant to William Caxton, England's first printer, set up his press near here. He is buried at St Bride's. Printing stayed in the neighbourhood, and later the newspapers came. For centuries Fleet Street was the home of British journalism. So St Bride's became known as the journalists' church, and it is still called that today, even though most newspapers have left the street.

Inside, the church has a quiet surprise. The pews do not all face the altar in long rows. Instead, they face each other across the central aisle, like the seating in a college chapel. This layout was part of the rebuilding after the Second World War. The black and white marble floor, the dark wood and the gilded details all draw your eye forward to the altar. Behind the altar, a large painted scene creates the illusion of more depth than the wall really has.

That rebuilding was needed because of one terrible night. On the 29th of December 1940, during the Blitz, German bombs and fire struck the City of London. St Bride's was gutted. Only the outer walls and the spire survived. For years the church stood as a shell. Restoration came in the 1950s, and the church was rededicated in 1957. Look closely at the stone, and in places you may see the marks of fire and repair.

The bombing had one unexpected result. With the floor gone, archaeologists could dig beneath the church for the first time. They found layer upon layer of history. They found traces of Roman London, foundations of earlier churches from the Saxon and medieval periods, and burials from many centuries. One building site turned out to hold the story of a whole city. Those finds are now part of the crypt, which visitors can explore below the nave.

Go down into the crypt if you can. It is cool and calm, and the stone walls show the different building phases very clearly. Among the displays is a sad reminder of old London. An iron coffin is on display there. Grieving families used coffins like this to protect their dead from body snatchers, who sold corpses to medical schools. There is also a charnel house, where bones were stored when the burial ground grew too crowded.

The church records also link this place to well-known lives. Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist of seventeenth-century London, was born nearby and baptised at St Bride's. The parish also has a link to the early English settlements in America. Inside, a memorial remembers Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas. Her parents are said to have married in this church. Her later fate is still unknown, and it remains one of the oldest mysteries of colonial history.

Back upstairs, find the journalists' altar. Here the church remembers reporters, photographers and media workers who lost their lives doing their job. Some names are recent. Photographs, notes and candles change over time, so the altar is a living memorial. It shows that the church still serves the profession it has served for centuries. Many services for journalists are still held here, and newspaper people still come to remember their colleagues.

Before you leave, stand for a moment in the nave and listen. You can hear the low murmur of the City outside, office workers passing and buses on Fleet Street. Inside, the air is still. Then step back into the lane and look up once more at that tiered white spire. Perhaps you will see a wedding cake, or perhaps a tower that survived fire and war. Either way, it has watched over this street for more than three hundred years.