St Dunstan-in-the-East: The Garden in a Ruin
Why is it significant?
Step through the old Gothic doorway and you are inside a church with no roof. Stone walls rise around you, the empty tracery of the windows is laced with ivy and climbing plants, and where the congregation once sat there is a lawn and a small fountain.
Key Facts
| Place | St Dunstan-in-the-East: The Garden in a Ruin |
|---|---|
| Address | St Dunstan-in-the-East, St Dunstan's Hill, London EC3R 5DD, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.50970, -0.08250 |
| Part of Walk | London Burning: The Great Fire of 1666 and Wren's Phoenix City, from the Tower to St Paul's |
| Generated | Generated |
Step through the old Gothic doorway and you are inside a church with no roof. Stone walls rise around you, the empty tracery of the windows is laced with ivy and climbing plants, and where the congregation once sat there is a lawn and a small fountain. Office workers eat lunch on the benches as if nothing were strange about it.
St Dunstan-in-the-East was a medieval church, and the Great Fire of 1666 badly damaged it but did not destroy it completely. The parish patched up the walls, and then, at the very end of the century, Christopher Wren gave it a new tower and spire. Look up at it. It is Gothic, with a slender spire balanced on four thin flying buttresses, and it is one of the very few Gothic towers Wren ever built. He had little love for the style, but here he matched the old church.
The story goes that one night a great storm swept across London and damaged steeple after steeple. Someone rushed to tell Wren that all the spires had suffered. Wren is said to have replied, without even looking up: not St Dunstan's, I am quite sure. And the spire was, of course, untouched.
Then came the Second World War. In 1941 German bombs destroyed the body of the church, and once again it was Wren's tower that stood. There was no money, and no congregation left in the emptied City, to rebuild. So in 1971 the City of London did something gentle and clever: it turned the ruin into a garden.
And that is the point of this stop. Most of what you will see on this walk is London's answer to the Fire, a city of stone and white spires. This is the one place where you can stand inside the wound itself, with trees and birdsong growing out of the damage. Now walk back up the hill and turn left along Eastcheap, then left again down Pudding Lane, towards the tall column topped with golden flames.