Qualla: All Hallows-by-the-Tower

All Hallows-by-the-Tower: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0. Samuel Pepys climbed this church's tower on the second day of the Great Fire of London to look east toward the blaze. What he saw he called the saddest sight of desolation. All Hallows-by-the-Tower had been a church for nearly a thousand years by then, and it survived that night because Admiral William Penn - whose son would later found Pennsylvania - ordered his men from the nearby naval yard to blow up the buildings around the church to make a firebreak. Stand beside All Hallows today, just outside the Tower of London, and you are standing on the oldest continuously sacred ground in the City of London.

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Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 4.0

All Hallows-by-the-Tower: Roman Floor, Saxon Arch

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JRennocks, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1926 and 1927 archaeologists working beneath All Hallows uncovered a Roman pavement, set down when this corner of the city was still called Londinium. They also found fragments of three eleventh-century stone crosses and confirmed an Anglo-Saxon arch built into the church's we...

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Image: JRennocks | CC BY-SA 4.0

All Hallows-by-the-Tower: Where the Beheaded Lay

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CyberCop, CC BY 3.0. All Hallows stands a hundred metres from the Tower of London, and that geography wrote itself into the parish register. Edward IV made one of its chapels a royal chantry. Bodies of those executed at the Tower were brought here first, sometimes for permanent burial, sometimes temp...

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Image: CyberCop | CC BY 3.0

All Hallows-by-the-Tower: Gunpowder and Fire

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ivory, Public domain. In 1650 some barrels of gunpowder being stored in a warehouse next door to the church exploded. The west tower came down, fifty nearby houses were destroyed, and many people died. The tower was rebuilt in 1658. Sixteen years after that came the Great Fire, when Admiral Penn's fir...

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Image: Ivory | Public domain

All Hallows-by-the-Tower: What the Bombs Left

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MarcusLiddell, CC BY-SA 4.0. Many of the older parts of All Hallows came through the war intact. The fifteenth-century outer walls still stand. The Anglo-Saxon arch in the west doorway is still there. Inside, three medieval wooden statues of saints from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries survive, and so d...

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Image: MarcusLiddell | CC BY-SA 4.0

All Hallows-by-the-Tower: Tubby Clayton and Toc H

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. In 1922 the Reverend Philip Clayton - universally known as Tubby - became vicar of All Hallows and brought with him the organisation he had founded during the First World War. Toc H started as a soldiers' rest house in the Belgian town of Poperinghe, behind the Ypres salient, and...

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Image: Public domain

All Hallows-by-the-Tower: Beating the Bounds

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jim Linwood from London, CC BY 2.0. Every Ascension Day the parish still beats the bounds, an ancient ritual in which parishioners walk the perimeter of their parish striking boundary markers with willow wands. At All Hallows the southern boundary runs through the middle of the Thames, so the procession includes a ...

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Image: Jim Linwood from London | CC BY 2.0