Saint Christopher

Walks in Secret London, East of Saint Paul’s Walk

START/FINISH: St Paul’s Underground (Central Line)
LENGTH: 5 km (3 miles)
TIME: 21⁄2 hours
REFRESHMENTS: No shortage of places of all kinds throughout the walk, but two to look out for in particular are Talbot Court about a third of the way round (restaurant, pub and sandwich bar/café) and Priest’s Court towards the end (sandwich bar and cheap restaurant)
SIGHTS: City institutions like the Mansion House, the Bank of England and Lloyds; the 61-metre (202-foot) high Monument to the Great Fire of 1666 and the rather taller Tower 42; the livery halls of the Carpenters’, Drapers’, Grocers’, Mercers’ and Saddlers’ companies; numerous City churches including the least altered of Sir Christopher Wren’s; and Britain’s oldest synagogue (the Spanish and Portuguese)
NOTE: (a) This walk should be done between Monday and Friday during office hours. Not only is it during the working day that the City is at its liveliest and most exciting, it is also when the greatest number of places – including some of the passages that are an integral part of the walk – are open. (b) This is quite a long walk for such a dense place as the City, so you might prefer to do it in two goes. A natural halfway break at Fenchurch Street is indicated in the text.

One stop along the route is the Colony of Virginia
In the middle of the garden stands a statue of Captain John Smith, a City man and one of the founders of the colony of Virginia in 1606. Turn right between the statue and the church (a City Corporation board explains in more detail why the statue is here) and then left into the alley behind the church. Turn right into Bow Lane – a narrow pedestrian-only street thronged with office workers at lunchtime – and then almost immediately left through the archway into Well Court, no doubt taking its name from a well that was once here. Follow this round to the right into the court proper and turn left. Cross Queen Street – Guildhall to the left, Southwark Bridge to the right – into Pancras Lane. St Pancras Church was here until the Great Fire of 1666. Its churchyard is now a small, rather scruffy, garden, often used as a bicycle park. A little further on is the site of another church destroyed in the Great Fire – St Benet Sherehog. From its name (a ’shere hog’ is a ram castrated after its first shearing) you can tell that this church stood in the heart of the medieval City’s wool district.

At the end of Pancras Lane, cross Queen Victoria Street – Royal Exchange to the left, exposed remains of the Roman Temple of Mithras to the right – into Bucklersbury. Walk on down here (crossing the course of the Walbrook river in the process) towards the Mansion House and the church of St Stephen Walbrook. Chad Varah, founder of the Samaritans, was once rector of the church. The Lord Mayor is one of the churchwardens.

Go into the alley between the two buildings and follow it round to the left past St Stephen’s churchyard. When you meet the road, turn right and then at the T-junction (St Mary Woolnoth on the left) go right again into St Swithin’s Lane. On the right is New Court, the home of Rothschild’s merchant bank since 1804. Then comes a modern office block. The Founders’ Company had their hall here until they moved to Smithfield in 1987.

Near the bottom, turn right through the parking area into Salters Hall Court, home of the Salters’ Company until it was bombed out in 1941. The Salters had come here 300 years previously when they bought Oxford House, hence the words ‘Oxford Court’ on the garden wall. The garden is the old churchyard of St Swithin’s London Stone, destroyed during the same bombing as the hall.

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