St Leonard's Church, Shoreditch

St Leonard’s Church stands at the corner of Shoreditch High Street and Hackney Road in the London Borough of Hackney. The present building, completed in the 1740s, replaces an earlier medieval church and is listed Grade I. Its tall steeple copies Christopher Wren’s design at St Mary-le-Bow, while the porch holds the old parish stocks and whipping post. A pump in the churchyard recalls the parish’s water supply before piped systems. The crypt below contains graves of Tudor actors and other notables from the district’s past. The nursery rhyme ‘Oranges and Lemons’ still echoes its peal of bells. The church’s interior keeps many 18th-century fittings: the font, pulpit, communion table and commandment boards survive unchanged. Gaslight was installed in 1817, making it the first church in London to be lit this way. Richard Bridge’s tracker organ of 1756 still has all its original wooden pipes, one of the few pedal-less examples left. A modern electric organ is used for services, recordings and concerts. The BBC comedy Rev. filmed here between 2010 and 2014, and the church appeared in the 2011 series of Luther. Visitors step into a quiet space where history is visible at every turn. Giant Doric columns support the entablature overhead, and the classical memorial to Elizabethan actors reminds passers-by of Shoreditch’s theatrical golden age. Gravestones in the churchyard mark the resting places of James Parkinson, after whom Parkinson’s disease is named, and Thomas Fairchild, whose ‘Vegetable Sermon’ continued into the 1990s. The twelve bells, cast in 1994, are rung regularly, keeping alive the sound that once rang out in the rhyme.