Qualla: St Nicholas Cole Abbey

St Nicholas Cole Abbey: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Katie Chan, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name is a lie, sort of. There has never been an abbey here. The Cole part comes from coldharbour, a medieval word for a traveller's shelter, and somewhere along the line the colourful spelling collapsed into something that sounded like an old monastic foundation. The actual church is a small stone box on Queen Victoria Street in the City of London, dedicated to the 4th-century bishop Saint Nicholas of Myra - patron saint of children and, more relevantly to its medieval congregation, of fishermen. The earliest mention of St Nicholas Cole Abbey dates to a letter of Pope Lucius II in 1144 or 1145, which is older than St Paul's Cathedral as it stands today. By the 13th century the locals called it St Nick's behind Fish Street, because the medieval fish market clattered just outside its door. John Stow recorded that in Elizabeth I's reign a lead-and-stone cistern was set up against the north wall, fed from the Thames, for the care and commodity of the Fishmongers in and about Old Fish Street. The church was practical as much as holy.

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Image: Katie Chan | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Nicholas Cole Abbey: The First to Rise

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0. When the Great Fire of London began in a Pudding Lane bakery on the morning of 2 September 1666, St Nicholas Cole Abbey was directly in its path. Within three days the fire had consumed the church along with St Paul's Cathedral and around fifty other parish churches. King Charles...

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Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Nicholas Cole Abbey: Parson Chicken and the Great Fire's Ironies

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Salmon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Even before the fire the church had collected a small library of strange characters. In August 1553, in the very month Mary I was crowned, the rector Thomas Sowdley said the first Mass celebrated in any London church under the new Catholic queen. He had previously married a wife ...

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Image: John Salmon | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Nicholas Cole Abbey: The Crow's Nest Spire

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Basher Eyre, CC BY-SA 2.0. Look up at the church's exterior and the eye finds a strange weathervane. The northwestern tower rises 135 feet, capped with a lead spire shaped like an upside-down octagonal trumpet, and at the very top is a vane in the form of a three-masted barque sailing in the round. It didn...

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Image: Basher Eyre | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Nicholas Cole Abbey: 10 May 1941

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Salmon, CC BY-SA 2.0. London's worst single night of the Second World War came on 10 May 1941, when 1,436 people were killed in a single raid and great swathes of the City burned. Westminster Abbey was hit. The chamber of the House of Commons was destroyed. And St Nicholas Cole Abbey was reduced to a ...

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Image: John Salmon | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Nicholas Cole Abbey: St Nick's Today

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dr Neil Clifton, CC BY-SA 2.0. After decades of declining congregations and brief leases - including a long spell from 1982 to 2003 when the building belonged to the Free Church of Scotland - the church reopened in 2014 as a Centre for Workplace Ministry, supported by a coffee shop in the south aisle named The...

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Image: Dr Neil Clifton | CC BY-SA 2.0