St Bride, Bride's Alley, Fleet Street, London

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

It's forty years since I first set foot in St Bride's. A schoolfriend and I were exploring London, taking cheap day returns down from Cambridge to wander backstreets and stumble upon wonders. He'd found St Bride's a week or so before, and hauled me off of Fleet Street into it. First, the polished, varnished interior, still relatively new then, and then the surprise of the crypt with its history of London, particularly of the Great Fire and the Blitz. I thought it was wonderful, and still do.

But in those days Fleet Street was a hive of newspaper activity, with a sense that this really was the beating heart of the nation's intellectual life. Now, the newspapers have gone, and Fleet Street is nothing but a dull shopping thoroughfare linking Westminster with St Paul's Cathedral. But St Bride's survives, and thrives.

The medieval church was destroyed in the Great Fire, and the new church by Sir Christopher Wren is architecturally perhaps the best of all his churches, the spire his most famous, as well as being the tallest, a tiered wedding cake punctuating the space between St Paul's and the Inns of Court. The church is shoehorned into a gap behind the shops and offices of Fleet Street and New Bridge Street, and can be approached along a number of passageways, some of which come up to it from below.

St Bride was completely gutted in the firestorm on the night of 29th December 1940. Only the tower and parts of the outside walls survived. The rebuilding took nearly three years under the hand of Geoffrey Allen, reopening in 1957. Although much of the refurnishing is Wren-like in style, Allen took the decision not to rebuild the galleries. The replacement stalls face inwards in the style of a college chapel. At the east end is a rather alarming reredos, undoubtedly made in the language of Wren but so quirky that it is hard to say what it is actually trying to do. The stalls and sanctuary are enclosed in wooden screening, creating a large open area at the west end. The acoustics are rather wonderful.

You can go down into the crypt which was excavated after the Blitz, and still plays host to the exhibition, as well as two little chapels, one remembering the War dead of Fleet Street. It is all fascinating and moving, and for a moment you get a sense of the intimate life of central London before International Finance and Information Technology changed it forever.