St Mary Woolnoth

St Mary Woolnoth stands on the corner of Lombard Street and King William Street near Bank junction in the City of London. It is an Anglican parish church, one of the Queen Anne Churches, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. The site has held places of worship for at least two thousand years, with Roman remains found beneath it. Its name first appears in records from 1191, and it may be named after Wulnoth de Walebrok or Wulfnoth Cild. The present building is at least the third church on this spot, replacing earlier Norman and Wren-repaired structures. The church is worth visiting for its distinctive architecture and long history. Hawksmoor’s design from the 1710s features an imposing façade with two flat-topped Corinthian turrets and a baroque interior arranged as a ‘cube within a cube’. It survived threats of demolition in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including plans to build Bank Underground station beneath it. The railway company reinforced the church’s structure with steel girders while constructing the station, leaving no damage to the building. It is now a Grade I listed building and a guild church, still used for services. Inside, visitors find a spacious interior dominated by a baroque baldachin modelled on St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The church contains memorials to notable figures such as Edward Lloyd, founder of Lloyd’s of London, and John Newton, the hymnist and anti-slavery campaigner. It is also linked to literary history through T. S. Eliot’s *The Waste Land* and Peter Ackroyd’s novel *Hawksmoor*. The church remains an active place of worship and serves London’s German-speaking Swiss community.