St Olave Hart Street: Pepys and the Buried Parmesan
Why is it significant?
Stop by the gateway into the little churchyard and look at the stone arch above it. It is decorated with grinning skulls and crossed bones, carved in 1658. Charles Dickens loved this gate and nicknamed the church Saint Ghastly Grim.
Key Facts
| Place | St Olave Hart Street: Pepys and the Buried Parmesan |
|---|---|
| Address | St Olave's Church, 8 Hart Street, London EC3R 7NB, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.51090, -0.07940 |
| Part of Walk | London Burning: The Great Fire of 1666 and Wren's Phoenix City, from the Tower to St Paul's |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop by the gateway into the little churchyard and look at the stone arch above it. It is decorated with grinning skulls and crossed bones, carved in 1658. Charles Dickens loved this gate and nicknamed the church Saint Ghastly Grim.
St Olave's is one of the very few medieval churches in the City of London that the Great Fire did not touch. The flames came within a short walk of it, and then the wind dropped and the firebreaks held. It was also the parish church of Samuel Pepys. He lived and worked a few steps away, in the Navy Office on Seething Lane, where he was a senior official responsible for supplying the fleet.
On the evening of the 4th of September 1666, with the fire racing towards the Navy Office, Pepys and his neighbour Sir William Penn dug a pit in the garden. Into it went their wine... and, as Pepys recorded in his diary, his Parmesan cheese. Priorities. He had already sent his money and valuables out of London on a cart, and he slept, when he slept at all, on a borrowed quilt on the floor of his office.
If the church is open, look high up on the wall of the sanctuary for a marble bust of a young woman with a slightly open mouth, as if she were about to speak. That is Elizabeth Pepys, his wife, who died in 1669 at only twenty-nine. Pepys put her there so that he could see her from the Navy Office pew in the gallery. When he died in 1703, he was buried here beside her.
The church did not survive everything. German bombs in 1941 gutted it, and what you see inside is a careful post-war restoration. But the stones of the walls are the same ones Pepys walked past every day. Walk back down Seething Lane, past the small garden on the site of the Navy Office, and cross Byward Street to the church with the green copper spire.