Qualla: St Bride's Church

St Bride's Church: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. In 1703 a baker's apprentice named Thomas Rich, working a few streets away on Ludgate Hill, decided to make his fiancee a wedding cake that would look like something other than a flat round cake. He looked up. Across the rooftops rose the new spire of St Bride's Church on Fleet Street, then only a year or two finished: an obelisk of stone in four diminishing octagonal stages, the tallest church steeple Sir Christopher Wren ever designed except for St Paul's itself. Rich copied its shape into icing. The tiered wedding cake has been with us ever since. The church kept its spire. The bakers kept the model.

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Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0

St Bride's Church: The Oldest Layer

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0. St Bride's is one of the most ancient sites of Christian worship in London, possibly Celtic Irish in origin. Tradition claims it was founded in the 6th century by St Bridget of Kildare or her missionaries, on the conversion of the Middle Saxons. The dedication itself is unusual, ...

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Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Bride's Church: Wynkyn de Worde and the Presses

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1500 Wynkyn de Worde, William Caxton's apprentice and the man who effectively founded English commercial printing, set up his press in a building next door to St Bride's. Until 1695, London was the only city in England where printing was legal, and Fleet Street became the natu...

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Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Bride's Church: Roanoke

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Asteuartw, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the late 1580s, Eleanor White, daughter of the artist and governor John White, was married in St Bride's to the tiler and bricklayer Ananias Dare. The young couple sailed with John White and the small party of English colonists who attempted to plant the first English colony i...

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Image: Asteuartw | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Bride's Church: Wren and the Second Great Fire

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Downer, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1665 the Great Plague killed 238 St Bride's parishioners in a single week. The following year the Great Fire destroyed the medieval church entirely along with most of the surrounding city. Christopher Wren took the commission to rebuild and made St Bride's one of his largest a...

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Image: Chris Downer | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Bride's Church: The Crypt Beneath

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ClemRutter, CC BY-SA 4.0. Today the crypt is open to the public as the Museum of Fleet Street, displaying Roman coins, medieval glass, and the foundations of seven earlier churches stacked one above the next. Post-war excavations also uncovered nearly 230 lead coffins with plaques from the 17th, 18th, and...

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Image: ClemRutter | CC BY-SA 4.0