London Churches Big and Little

St. Paul’s Cathedral is Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece. It is huge. It is impressive. Standing on the marble floor and looking up at that great dome is like standing in the rotunda of the U.S. capitol. Light pouring in on all that white marble, I could see why Diana chose to be married to Prince Charles in St. Paul’s, rather than in dark and frankly gloomy Westminster Abby.

Watching on television as Diana walked down the aisle trailing fifteen feet of white satin, I thought the whole production was overdone. In St. Paul’s on a quiet day with few other tourists around, I still felt overwhelmed. I preferred the 50 other churches Wren designed in the center of London.

I had a booklet titled “Churches of London” with a map and descriptions of each. Somehow, in my moves from Illinois to New Mexico to Texas, I misplaced the booklet. Maybe I gave it away. Or it may be in one of those boxes, still unpacked, on the shelf in my closet. I’m too tired to look for it now. Just as I am too lazy to look up the exact date of the Great Fire of London.

During the Middle Ages, when London grew to be one of the largest cities in Europe, people lived in wooden houses, packed close together and as crowded and unsanitary as New York tenements in the early 1900's. The city was divided into many small parishes, each with its church.

Then came the Great Fire of London. In 1666? Around that time. The city burned down, except for a small area near the Tower of London. It was rebuilt with rows of brick buildings replacing the wooden ones in the same narrow little streets. Christopher Wren was the century’s leading architect. St. Paul’s neo-classic church with its great dome replaced an ancient Gothic cathedral. And then he designed 50 other churches, no two alike, to surround St. Paul’s like chicks around an old hen.

By the 18th Century London was spreading out. St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, which had been in open countryside, now faces Trafalgar Square, considered the center of the city. As people moved to the suburbs, the Wren churches lost parishioners. I visited one church, kept open as a museum, which in 1800 had over 1,000 members. Fifty years later only 20 remained, and the church was closed.

Benjamin Franklin spent ten years in London before the American Revolution, trying to negotiate ways to keep the colonies from revolting. Since the Continental Congress was not generous in supporting him, he worked for a while in a church which had been converted into a print shop.

During World War II, German bombs destroyed all of the Wren churches except St. Paul’s. The cathedral was saved by plucky civilian volunteers who scrambled across the tiles to put out fires from bombs which landed on the roof. I heard one man say that after the war he stood on the steps of St. Paul’s and all around, as far as he could see, not a building stood over two feet high.

The English refused to lose their heritage. One or two churches were left in ruins as reminders of the war. The rest were restored to all the beauty of their 17th Century architectural glory. All are open to the public and are used for special events and concerts. Remember the church service at St. Clement’s at the end of the movie, “Chariots of Fire”?

I attended several concerts, including one where a young Japanese woman attacked the piano furiously. More in keeping with the retrained interiors was the classical music of Mozart and Bach, which I listened to while sitting in the elegant surroundings of Wren churches. I recalled those happy memories as I was getting dressed one morning this week in my apartment in Garland, Texas, making up my bed as the Dallas radio station WRR played a recording by the Academy of St. Martin’s-in-the-Field’s.

With my booklet as a guide, I spent days in London going from church to church, seldom seeing other tourists and sitting quietly and alone in each of them. My favorite was St. Bride’s. Just as few blocks from St. Paul’s, from the steps of the cathedral its pure white spire can be seen pointing to Heaven.

When German bombs pulverized St. Bride’s during World War II, the gaping hole uncovered Roman ruins below the church. After sitting for a while in the restored church, I went down into the crypt and walked on a Roman street with shops on either side. It was an odd feeling, standing on those old stones and realizing how this place had been built and re-built through the centuries, a church on top of houses, changing the foundations and, recently, changing the way the “restored” building is used.

Someone said to me last week, “The only thing that remains the same is that things are always changing.”