Under the circumstances then, it is perhaps a little disappointing that the church is rather traditional, rebuilt on the exact foundations of its medieval predecessor, and perhaps doesn't really reflect what we know of Laudian worship at all. As Elizabeth and Wayland Young observed, it answers no questions about its time, informing one only that it was a time of change and indecision. The same may be said of the almost exactly contemporary church of St John in the city of Leeds in Yorkshire.

The dedication is an abbreviation of St Katherine Creechurch or Christchurch, for this was the site of the Augustinian Priory of Holy Trinity Aldgate, the parish of which was known as Christchurch. The people of the parish used the Priory church, which the monks seem to have found something of a nuisance, so in the 14th Century they gave the parish its own church, which Simon Bradley suggests may have been the former cemetery chapel. As the parish of Christchurch had been made up of four earlier medieval parishes, the new church took its dedication from one of them, St Katherine.

At the dissolution the parish was offered the Priory church, but they turned it down, probably because it was in a poor state of repair, or perhaps they were merely proud of the new tower built against their own church some thirty years earlier. Instead, St Katherine Cree was rebuilt against the tower, and consecrated in 1628. You step into an interior which feels much larger than seems possible from outside. At the time of the rebuilding the floor was raised up higher than the old church. The ceilings are vaulted above the deceptively powerful arcades, but it is the east window that draws the eye, a rose window like a Catherine wheel, one of the most memorable in London. Below it, the semi-circular sanctuary is simple and elegant.

Much of the glass in the east window is of the 1630s, as is that at the west end of the north aisle, for this church survived the Great Fire. Samuel Pepys described how it was used by the Corporation as a meeting place in the days after it. At the east end of the south aisle reclines Sir Nicholas Throkmorton who died in 1570, above an altar as if he were a southern European Catholic saint, and on the other side of the church above the font provided at the time of the rebuilding is another striking memorial to Bartholomew and Ann Ensor, showing them as shrouded figures leaning either side of the inscription. Bartholomew died in 1636, so this must have been one of the first new memorials in the rebuilt church. Most of the other windows are filled with late 19th and early 20th Century glass of varying quality, for this part of Leadenhall Street survived the Blitz. And so, apart from Michael Farrar-Bell's 1960 memorial glass to the victims of the German bombing of RMS Lancastria off the coast of France on 17th June 1940 with the loss of more than four thousand lives, St Katherine Cree remains in all its pre-war singularity.

Simon Knott, March 2022

location: Leadenhall Street 3/033
status: working church in parish of St Olave Hart Street
access: the church is open all day on Tuesdays.

Commission from Amazon.co.uk supports the running of this site