St Mildred, Bread Street

St Mildred, Bread Street was a Wren church on the east side of Bread Street in the City of London. It dated from the 13th century and was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666 by Sir Christopher Wren. The rebuilt church measured 62 feet by 36 feet and had a plaster dome inside a lead-covered roof. Its Portland-stone front on Bread Street curved up to a pediment, while the tower and other walls were of brick. A wooden spire topped the tower until it was removed in the 19th century. The church held fittings from Wren’s time until the Second World War. Sir Nicholas Crisp gave two silver flagons and a five-light east window showing the Armada, Elizabeth I, the Gunpowder Plot and portraits of his family. In 1816 Percy Bysshe Shelley married Mary Godwin here, and in 1932 a bust of Arthur Phillip was placed on the west wall. The poet’s marriage register and Crisp’s heart at Hammersmith recall these links. Below the church archaeologists found a 1st-century Roman house. The site now lies beneath the 30 Cannon Street office building. The church’s records survive partly in the Harleian Society’s 1912 volumes, though most parish papers were lost in 1941.