St Mary Aldermary

It was ten to four on a weekday afternoon when I slipped through the door of St Mary, just as its courteous and bow-tied custodian was about to lock it.

'Sorry,' I said, 'I'll come back another time.'
'Not at all,' he beamed, and gave me a guided tour. He was proud of his church, and rightly so; one needs only to glance around the interior to appreciate that there is something unique about this particular City church
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It's so... gothic.
!
This is due to the parishioners who, after the Great Fire, asked Wren to rebuild their church to exactly the same medieval design as before. Wren obliged, even using some of the fire-scarred stonework from the old building. He also created the only parish church to use fan vaulting, the ceiling a series of saucer domes and semi circles which draw the eye to a curious feature of the chancel... it's lopsided!

The reason for this is that the narrow street to the east of the church runs obliquely from the main road. The east wall follows this pattern, so that one side of the chancel is longer than the other. The guide pointed out other features, such as the plasterwork which apparently is rare for Wren, and woodcarvings which were probably by the ubiquitous Grinling Gibbons. Various Lord Mayors were buried here, although Heminges and Condell were not, as erroneously attributed in a recently published work called London City Churches. The mistake is easily made, given the similarity between the words Aldermary and Aldermanbury
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The foundation is old - St Mary de Eldermariechurche is mentioned as far back as 1080, and simply means 'Older Mary', to differentiate it from St Mary le Bow, a younger foundation just around the corner. Sometime around the turn of the sixteenth century, the Gothic church was built by a grocer mayor named Henry Keble, who donated the not insignificant sum of a thousand pounds for the purpose. This was the church destroyed in the Fire but rebuilt to the previous design by Wren, although many of its interior fittings were removed in 1876 when the Victorians - presumably with good intentions - attempted to 'medievalise' it. It still retains, however, a wooden swordresr and pulpit, font and font cover from the seventeenth century. The tall, thin, pinnacled tower is later than the body of the church - although surviving the Fire, it was damaged in the Great Storm of 1703.
St Mary appears to have had a fairly quiet history. Milton's third marriage took place here, and one of its rectors, Henry Gold, was sentenced by the Star Chamber and executed at Tyburn.

Other than this, the church never seems to have been tainted by any scandal, and has remained in its position near the Mansion House, waiting to surprise the unwary visitor with its Gothic splendour.