All Hallows-by-the-Tower

Listen for a moment. Behind you, traffic grinds along Byward Street, and tour groups drift toward the Tower of London. Then you step through the door, and the noise drops away. The air is cool. It smells faintly of stone, old wood and candle wax. You are standing in a church that has watched this corner of London for well over a thousand years.

All Hallows-by-the-Tower is usually described as the oldest church in the City of London. Its story begins in the late seventh century, when the abbey at Barking, a town to the east, founded a church on this spot. For centuries it carried the name All Hallows Barking. "All Hallows" simply means "all saints". So the old name tells you two things at once: who the church honours, and who first built it.

Now walk toward the south-west corner of the nave and look for a low, rounded archway. This is the surprise most visitors walk straight past. The arch is Anglo-Saxon, built in the time of the abbey's founding. Look closely at its edges. The builders reused flat red tiles taken from Roman buildings that once stood nearby. So here, in one doorway, you can touch two lost worlds — Roman London and the Saxon town that grew in its ruins.

That Roman layer runs deeper than the arch. Go down the steps into the crypt, and the temperature falls again. Beneath the church lies a section of Roman floor, a tessellated pavement made from small cut pieces of stone and tile. It belonged to a house or building from Roman Londinium, long before any Christian church stood here. Standing above it, you are at the level of a street that has not seen daylight for many centuries.

The crypt also holds carved stone fragments from Saxon crosses, found on this site. Their patterns are worn, but you can still trace the interlaced lines that Saxon carvers loved — bands that loop over and under each other with no clear end. These stones remind you that this was a working parish church long before the Normans arrived and began building the Tower next door.

And the Tower is the key to this church's darker history. Just outside lies Tower Hill, where many prisoners of the Crown were executed in public. The bodies of some of the condemned were brought into this church for burial. The most famous is William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was beheaded in 1645. He was buried here, and years later his remains were moved to Oxford, to the college he had loved.

Now for a happier record in the parish registers. In 1644, a baby named William Penn was baptised here. He grew up to found the American colony of Pennsylvania. Over a century and a half later, in 1797, John Quincy Adams married Louisa Catherine Johnson in this church. Adams later became the sixth President of the United States. So this small London church has quiet ties to both sides of the Atlantic.

The Penn family appears again in the church's most dramatic moment. In September 1666, the Great Fire of London swept through the City. According to the accounts of the time, men led by Admiral Sir William Penn, the baby's father, blew up nearby houses to create a firebreak. The flames stopped short. All Hallows survived, while dozens of City churches burned to the ground.

One man climbed the church tower to watch the fire. He was Samuel Pepys, the naval official whose diary is now one of the great records of seventeenth-century life. Pepys lived and worked nearby. In his diary he describes going up the steeple here and looking out over the destruction. He wrote that it was the saddest sight he had ever seen. The brick tower he climbed is the one you see today.

The church survived the fire, but it did not escape the twentieth century. During the bombing of London in the Second World War, German bombs gutted the building. Much of the interior was lost. After the war, the church was rebuilt, keeping the old tower and surviving walls. It was rededicated in the 1950s. As you look around, notice how clean modern lines sit beside medieval stone. That mix is the honest mark of its recovery.

A remarkable survivor of the bombing is the carved wooden cover above the font, near the west end. It is often attributed to Grinling Gibbons, the most celebrated woodcarver of seventeenth-century England. Look at the cherubs, flowers and fruit. The limewood is cut so finely that the petals look almost soft. Stand close, and you can see the individual tool marks of the carver's hand.

The church also has a strong tradition of service. In the years after the First World War, the vicar here was Philip "Tubby" Clayton. He led Toc H, a Christian movement that grew out of a rest house for soldiers on the Western Front. Its symbol is a simple oil lamp. Look around the church for memorials to sailors and to people lost at sea. This was always a parish of the river and the docks.

Before you leave, walk back up the aisle and pause near the Saxon arch once more. Above you is a post-war roof. Below you, a Roman floor. Around you, walls that heard Pepys climb the stairs and Penn's men fight the fire. Then step outside, and look up at the brick tower against the sky. Over the road, the Tower of London rises above the trees. These two old neighbours have faced each other for close to a thousand years.