St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, London

Photogravure by Donald Macleish from Wonderful London by St John Adcock, 1927.

The <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/norfolkodyssey/6973803969/in/album-72157629564628437/">same view</a> today.

For several reasons St Magnus is one of the best-known and best-loved of the City of London churches, so it comes as some surprise to discover that it was one of the nineteen City churches recommended for demolition by the Diocese of London's City of London Churches Commission in 1919. Three years later in The Waste Land, TS Eliot recalled sitting in the pub across the road surrounded by the busy life of the Billingsgate fishworkers while meditating on the inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold held by St Magnus's walls. In the event, only two of the churches scheduled were pulled down before the Second World War intervened, the Blitz conveniently getting rid of some and making us all the more sentimental about the rest.

Historically, this church was St Magnus ad Pontem, St Magnus by the Bridge, and this was the first church reached by travellers from the south on entering the City after crossing the Thames. It has always been a busy place. There was a church here by the 12th Century, and the dedication suggests it may have served a colony of Danish traders. Destroyed in the Great Fire, the parish started rebuilding it themselves before Wren came along to finish it for them. The pedestrian way that runs through the base of the tower was a later alteration to allow access to London Bridge after the road was widened.

It is on stepping inside that your breath is taken away, of course, for this is quite the City's Highest church, and if it is not quite so stratospheric as some west London temples it does approach the lunatic fringe of Anglo-catholicism. I say that as a person who, while not an Anglican himself, admires and enjoys these things, and if I go further and say there is the air of an ecclesiastical junk shop it is because I love junk shops and all things ecclesiastical. Much better a junk shop than a museum, in any case. The high tiered gilt white columns rise above altars, shrines, and statues. Flowers and candles abound, all beautifully kept. And who could possibly argue that Martin Travers' statue of St Magnus himself was not intended to amuse? This is a church to enjoy, robust enough in its holiness to admit at least a sneaking smile from time to time. And there's the City churches' best second hand bookshop at the west end, too.

Back outside, the setting is pretty dreadful. The traffic storms past on Upper Thames Street, the bleak concrete pedestrian walkways slice the façade in half, and worst of all is the 1925 block of Adelaide House, immediately to the west of the church. In its day it was the tallest office block in the City. Pevsner described it as a huge square cliff, but went on to say that the conjunction of the vigorous and imaginatively detailed steeple and the sheer wall of the C20 building is entirely successful, which just goes to show how wrong he could be sometimes.