Christopher Wren's churches in the City of London

Map of 15 locations in City of London, United Kingdom

Fifty-two parish churches went up in the City after the Fire of 1666 under Wren's office, and what is left of them is not one thing: some are working parishes with their original woodwork, one came through entirely unaltered, and two are ruins with gardens planted inside the walls. This list follows the ones that can still be found on the ground, with the dates of building, the surviving fittings, and what the Blitz took. Where a church is now a public garden rather than a church, it says so.

Places in this collection

  • Christ Church Greyfriars — The site began as the conventual church of a Franciscan friary in the thirteenth century and became a parish church after the Dissolution;…
  • St Dunstan-in-the-East — Wren's contribution here was the steeple, added between 1695 and 1701 and carried on flying buttresses; the body of the church below it was…
  • St Clement Eastcheap — Wren's rebuilding of the Candlewick ward church began in 1683 and was finished in 1687, and it survived the Blitz in its original form. The…
  • St Mary Abchurch — Rebuilt by Wren between 1681 and 1686 in red brick with stone dressings, unusual among the City churches, under a tower 51 feet high with a…
  • St Magnus the Martyr — Wren's church beside the old London Bridge landing, built between 1671 and 1687 and altered when the bridge approach was widened in 1762. T…
  • St Mary-at-Hill — The parish church of Billingsgate for close to a thousand years, and one of the first rebuilt after the Fire, completed in 1677 with Wren's…
  • St Margaret Lothbury — Rebuilt by Wren's office between 1686 and 1690, and now the place where the woodwork of demolished City churches ended up. The high altar r…
  • St Martin within Ludgate — One of Wren's later rebuildings, carried out between 1677 and 1684, with a slender lead spire whose height and profile were worked out in r…
  • St Benet Paul's Wharf — Built between 1677 and 1683 and the one Wren church that came through unaltered: the others were either damaged in the Second World War, hi…
  • St James Garlickhythe — Rebuilt by Wren's office between 1676 and 1683 on Garlick Hill, this was among the least damaged of the City churches in the Second World W…
  • St Paul's Cathedral — Old St Paul's was gutted in the Fire of 1666, and after a design process that ran from the royal warrant of 1669 through several rejected s…
  • St Mary-le-Bow — The Norman church here was called St Marie de Arcubus for the bow arches of stone in its crypt, and Wren carried the arch motif into his re…
  • St Bride's, Fleet Street — Churches had stood on this ground for roughly a thousand years before the Fire of 1666 left it in ruins, and Wren's replacement went up bet…
  • St Michael Cornhill — Rebuilt to Wren's design between 1669 and 1672 on a site easily missed from the street, the church is reached through St Michael's Alley of…
  • St Stephen Walbrook — Wren lived at number 15 Walbrook and gave this parish particular attention, building the church between 1672 and 1679 at a cost of £7,692 o…

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