City of London churches and more

Over the years I have got very used to being the one who plans the regular walks that I do with a friend, either I plan absolutely everything or he comes up with a rough idea and I have to turn it in to a route with suitable start and end points and a reasonable walking distance. This was one of the later cases.

While I mostly worked in Central London he was in places like Libya and Angola so he likes walking in London to discover places he does not really know and where I seem to have been to every pub. His idea this time was to visit churches in City of London.

That meant joining the queue of old gits at Richmond Station waiting for the barriers to open at 8:57 to catch the tube. We went all the way to Tower Hill to start our exploration on the east side of the City.

This time I had not done a detailed route and it was just a question of looking for the nearest cluster of churches and heading that way, there being no obvious route between them.

Where possible, we went inside which is something I had never done before so I was discovering something new too.

I forgot to checking on to the first few churches on Swarm but I did do the final nine so I knew that we went to some places with great names, including St. Botolph without Aldersgate, St. Vedast-alias-Foster and St Sepulchre-without-Newgate.

We had a coffee break in the one below, St Mary Aldermary.

This is also one of the several places where either we got lost or the church did. The maps show that Saint Nicholas Moldavian Church is next door but we walked all away around the block and could not find it. The two churches may be sharing one building, as we found elsewhere but there was nothing obvious to show this.

I am nothing like an expert on churches but I was pleasantly surprised at how varied and interesting the interiors were. The stained glasses were my favourites and I also appreciate grand architecture. There were several surprises to, such as the statue by Damian Hirst of St Bartholomew being skinned alive in St Bartholomew the Great (we failed to find St Bartholomew the Less).

The mural below is in St Alban the Martyr, a somewhat hard to find church in Holborn.

Somewhere along the way, St Lawrence Jewry I think, a helpful guide gave us a paper copy of the map at the top, which would have been very helpful a couple of hours earlier!

We saw enough in our haphazard wanderings to tempt us back to look at more churches, we only saw around 15 of over 50.

Our walk took a more usual course after that and we headed more or less due west to Hyde Park and the ever so familiar Serpentine Cafe for lunch.

My friend had to leave at that point and I took the opportunity to tick off some more roads in Kensington and Chelsea.and I surprised myself by completing 40 new roads in under two hours. A great way to end a fun series of walks.