Be that as it may, St Botolph is still there, a grand frontage onto Bishopsgate as if it might actually be a banking house, and then the surprisingly large churchyard on the south side with the parish hall and the splendid former Turkish bathouse, now a restaurant. It is one of the quirkiest spaces in the City, and must be worth a fortune if the floor rents over the road are anything to go by. The parish hall was formerly a school, and the statues of children that flank its entrance are made out of Coade Stone. The churchyard is now a public garden. John Betjeman, whose grandfather George Betjemann was a churchwarden here, mentions the garden, and incidentally recalls the High Church nature of St Botolph in the mid-20th Century, in his poem City:

When the great bell
BOOMS over the Portland stone urn, and
From the carved cedar wood
Rises the odour of incense,
I SIT DOWN
In St. Botolph Bishopsgate Churchyard
And wait for the spirit of my grandfather
Toddling along from the Barbican.

Nothing survives of the medieval church, which was demolished in the 1720s, probably for street widening. The new church went up between 1725 and 1728, built by the Dance family to the design of James Gould, near enough in time for the influence to be all Wren's.

The church is open every day during the week. The first surprise when you step inside is that the porch leads you into the east end of the south aisle - that is to say, the altar and sanctuary are hard against the street wall. The barrel-vaulted interior, with its dark wood, plaster reliefs and galleries, is apparently all of the 18th Century. Although it is a large church, the attempt at a baptistery in the north-west corner and a side altar in the north aisle don't really come off, for they attempt to shoehorn sacramental spaces into what is already a unified whole. There is still a feel of an earlier age, perhaps because, as the verger remarked to me on one occasion, "we haven't got the money of that lot up the road at St Helen's."

If you come here with an older Pevsner and are a fan of Hugh Easton's glass (such people do exist) you might wonder why you can't find his west window. This is because this church suffered considerable damage from both of the big terrorist bombs of the 1990s, first the 1992 Baltic Exchange bomb in St Mary Axe and then the Bishopsgate bomb in 1993. The restoration of the furnishings is so perfect that you would not even know, if it was not for Nicola Kantorowicz's memorial window in the south aisle, the closest to the site of the two explosions. Better than anything by Hugh Easton, surely.

This church has a busy life, and if you are lucky you might meet the verger as you potter about. I often pop in, and if I am honest it is always with the hope of meeting him and allowing him to engage me in conversation. He is a reminder that the City still has its characters, and forty-storey office blocks can't change that.

Simon Knott, December 2015

location: Bishopsgate EC2M 3TL - 3/018
status: parish church
access: 8am-5.30pm Monday to Friday

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