St Helen, Bishopsgate

St Helen's is a Grade I parish church in Great St Helen's, off Bishopsgate in the City of London, in the Diocese of London: the largest surviving parish church in the City, and one of the few to survive both the Great Fire of 1666 and the Blitz.

Overview

Historic England lists the Church of St Helen (list entry 1286458, designated 4 January 1950). The listing describes a thirteenth-century church with a fourteenth-century addition and fifteenth-century remodelling: two aisles (the northern formerly used by the priory) separated by a fifteenth-century arcade, with two earlier arches between the chancel and the former nuns' choir, a south transept and a fourteenth-century chapel to the east of it. Walls are rubble, partly rendered and much repaired, with some ashlar facing and brick; roofs are largely lead-covered. A modest timber west tower stands inside the church. A Benedictine nunnery was founded beside the parish church in 1210; after the Dissolution in 1538 the nuns' church was incorporated, giving the building its unusual double-nave plan.

The interior is remarkable for fittings and monuments, some brought from the demolished church of St Martin Outwich. The listing notes mid-seventeenth-century internal porches, an early seventeenth-century pulpit, fifteenth-century choir stalls, a mid-seventeenth-century font, and monuments including those of Sir John Crosby (1476), Sir Thomas Gresham (d. 1579) and Sir John Spencer (d. 1609). The church was badly damaged by IRA bombs in 1992 and 1993 and restored by Quinlan Terry. It is sometimes called the Westminster Abbey of the City for the number of its monuments.

St Helen, Bishopsgate

Overview

Further Information