File:Wonderful London (1927) 48 – lost church St Mary Aldermanbury.jpg

St Mary Aldermanbury, Aldermanbury, London

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

The pleasantly named Love Lane runs between London Wall and Gresham Street, and thus it was at the heart of the great fire storm of the evening of Sunday 29th December 1940. Everything conspired against London that night. Many of the churches were left locked after the services of that morning, contrary to the request of the authorities who wanted to ensure access for firefighters. It was Christmas week, and firewatchers who'd been keeping an eye from the roofs of City buildings for the last few months were away. A high wind blew through the City, fanning the flames caused by thousands of German incendiaries, and the conflagration grew until it was covering thirty-five acres, and destroying eighteen churches.

St Mary Aldermanbury was one of them. The medieval church had been destroyed in the Great Fire, and Wren's replacement was one of the first to be built, complete by 1675. It was noted for its plainness and simplicity. This did not please the Victorians, and in 1863 Edmund Woodthorpe, who Wayland Young calls the prince of philistine restorers, gutted the inside, removing the Wren woodwork and replacing it with, among other things, a stone reredos and font in 'the Byzantine style'. The windows were filled with Venetian-style tracery. This was the church that German bombs wrecked.

Enough survived for the church to be rebuilt, and this happened, but not here. Instead, it was re-erected at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri in the United States in 1965 as a memorial to Sir Winston Churchill who had given his famous 'Iron Curtain' speech on the campus in 1945. The churchyard that remained was laid out as a public garden, and the foundations of the medieval church, which Wren had reused, were exposed. A 19th Century memorial with the bust of another great Englishman, William Shakespeare, commemorates John Heminge and Henry Condell, who compiled the First Folio.