Categories: uncategorized
Date: 15 January 2006 17:57:30
I was walking back from Mass with the nuns this morning, Marble Arch to Liverpool St, and feeling revoltingly smug that I'd got my 10,000 step in before lunchtime. I got to that complicated junction by the Bank of England and thought "that's an unusual-looking church, " and, not being in a rush, I wandered over risked life and limb crossing the road to go and have a nose.
I found possibly the saddest ever church notice I've ever seen. Yes, folks, the Church of St Mary of the Nativity closed for Christmas on the 23rd December and re-opened on the 3rd of January.
I know the City of London Churches are a special case, and many of them concentrate on weekday services, but for a church to be closed on its patronal day, particularly a day that is so important in the Christian calendar, is just incredibly sad.
But if you happen to be in the area, St Michael Cornhill does a 1662 Book of Common Prayer Choral Eucharist at 11:00am on Sundays. It's amazing the stuff you discover when you go off for a wander and the only thing waiting for you at home is a great big stack of washing up. (Now done, huzzah).
A good map, a comfortable pair of shoes and a couple of hours to spare and you can see some amazing examples of architecture - Sir Chiristopher Wren had an opportunity that nobody had has before or since, to rebuild fifty-one of the 97 parish churches destroyed in the Great Fire, and he did a wonderful job.
Apart from anything else, many of them have such fabulous names. I think St Vedast alias Foster is simply marvellous, with St Andrew by the Wardrobe coming a very close second.