St Stephen Walbrook: Wren's Rehearsal for St Paul's
Why is it significant?
From the outside, St Stephen Walbrook hardly looks like anything: a plain stone wall and a tower squeezed in behind Mansion House. But if the door is open, climb the steps and walk in. Light pours down from a great coffered dome that seems to float above a forest of slender columns.
Key Facts
| Place | St Stephen Walbrook: Wren's Rehearsal for St Paul's |
|---|---|
| Address | St Stephen Walbrook, 39 Walbrook, London EC4N 8BN, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.51230, -0.08980 |
| Part of Walk | London Burning: The Great Fire of 1666 and Wren's Phoenix City, from the Tower to St Paul's |
| Generated | Generated |
From the outside, St Stephen Walbrook hardly looks like anything: a plain stone wall and a tower squeezed in behind Mansion House. But if the door is open, climb the steps and walk in. Light pours down from a great coffered dome that seems to float above a forest of slender columns.
The medieval church here burned in 1666, and Christopher Wren rebuilt it in the 1670s. He was a local: Wren himself lived on this street, and this was his parish church. Here, on a small scale and with nobody watching too closely, he tried out the idea that obsessed him... a dome resting on a ring of eight arches, set over a square room. A few years later he would build the same idea, enormously bigger, at St Paul's.
Stand in the middle and turn around. The church manages to be a long nave and a centred, domed space at the same time, and the columns are arranged so that you never quite know which you are in. Architects have argued about it for three hundred years, and many call it the finest of Wren's City churches.
In 1953 the rector here, Chad Varah, was haunted by the funeral of a fourteen-year-old girl who had taken her own life. He put an advertisement in the paper offering a telephone line to anyone thinking of suicide, answered right here in the church. That was the beginning of the Samaritans, which today answers millions of calls a year. The original black telephone is kept in a glass case inside.
In the centre stands a huge round altar of pale stone by Henry Moore, installed in 1987 after a long legal battle over whether a round altar was allowed at all. City workers nicknamed it the Camembert. When you come out, walk west along Queen Victoria Street to a tall stone tower with pinnacles on Watling Street.