Walk Two · Three hours

City Spires
& Cloisters.

From Paternoster Square to the Temple, a three-hour walk through the parish map London redrew in stone after the Great Fire of 1666. St Paul's, St Bride's, Temple Church — and the small Wren churches between them.

Duration

3 hours

Group size

4 to 12

Language

English

Meeting point

Paternoster Square

The walk in brief

The Wren city, walked in the order it was rebuilt.

In four days of September 1666 the City of London lost eighty-seven parish churches and a cathedral. In the fifty years that followed, Christopher Wren and his office rebuilt fifty-one of them. Twenty-three Wren churches still stand in some form. We walk a chosen seven of them, beginning under St Paul's dome and ending in the cool of Temple Church.

You'll meet your guide on Paternoster Square at 09:30 (morning) or 14:30 (afternoon). The walk finishes near Temple station, on the Embankment.

A guide and walkers gathered before the west portico of St Paul's Cathedral.

The route

Seven churches, two seated rests.

The pacing is unhurried. We finish each section before we move on, and the walk closes with a quiet quarter-hour in the lawn beside Temple Church.

0:00 · Paternoster Square
Where the booksellers stood.

We meet at the Temple Bar gate of Paternoster Square, the medieval street of stationers that gave the Lord's Prayer its English name — paternoster — and burned to the ground in 1666. A short orientation on what the City was before the Fire, and what it became after.
0:25 · St Paul's Cathedral (exterior)
Reading Wren's facade.

Forty-five minutes outside the cathedral, working through the west portico, the dome's load-bearing trick, the inscription above the door — Si monumentum requiris, circumspice — and the Blitz photograph that made the dome a national symbol overnight.
1:15 · St Mary-le-Bow
The Cockney's parish.

The bell within whose sound a true Cockney must be born. Wren's spire, the crypt that pre-dates the rebuild by six centuries, and a first sit-down on the church's small lawn.
1:40 · St Bride's, Fleet Street
The journalists' church.

A Wren spire that taught a young pastry cook to design the wedding cake. The connection between Fleet Street's print trade and a parish church that lists every British war reporter killed in the line of work, by name, on the wall outside.
2:10 · Temple Bar & the Inns of Court
Crossing into the Liberties.

We step from the City into the Temple, technically a separate jurisdiction, and walk through the cobbled lanes of Middle and Inner Temple to a second sit-down in Fountain Court.
2:35 · Temple Church (exterior)
The Knights Templar in stone.

England's only surviving round church, built in 1185 by the order of warrior-monks who answered to no bishop and no king. We walk the perimeter, read the effigies through the railings, and take a quarter-hour in the cloister lawn.
2:50 · St Clement Danes & Embankment
Closing on the river.

A last glance, from the gate, at the RAF's church — one of two churches that sit alone on the Strand — before we say goodbye on the Embankment, three minutes from Temple station.