Crypts of London by Malcolm Johnson

Author:Malcolm Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750956628
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

ST DIONIS BACKCHURCH, LIME STREET/FENCHURCH STREET

First mentioned in 1198, the church was hidden behind houses, and Cobb suggests that the name derives from a Mr Bac who was a clerk there. It was rebuilt in 1450 but destroyed in the Great Fire and replaced by a small, lofty building costing £5,737 10s 8d, built by Wren in 1670–84. In March 1845 a committee appointed by the vestry to report on the condition of the churchyard was shocked to discover that the selection of the place and depth of burial was ‘entirely left to the option or caprice of the labourer employed’, and the ‘most revolting and disgusting scenes’ had taken place ‘especially at the interment of Mr Thompson’. The grave dug for him had revealed another coffin containing a body ‘in an entire state’.

The church possessed a fifteenth-century rector’s vault under the chancel, which the architect G.E. Street described in 1858 as a parallelogram 9ft 6in north-south and 13ft east-west internally. ‘Covered with a quadripartite vault: the vault has diagonal ribs but neither wall nor ridge ribs. The ribs are’, said Street, ‘of the simplest kind, but spring from good corbels in the angles of the crypt and at their intersections there is carved a bold and effective rose. The height from the floor to the spring of the vault is only 4ft and the vault rises a similar height, its arches being everywhere four-centred … The filling-in of the vault is chalk whilst the ribs are, I think, executed in Calverley stone.’ It was filled with bodies.180 Obviously Wren kept this vault intact when he built his new church, which incorporated the Kentish ragstone of the medieval building. When interments ceased the vicar, the Revd W.H. Lyall, asked for the Medical Officer of Health’s advice, and on 15 July 1858 Dr Letherby ordered that as there was no offensive smell the coffins should not be moved but rearranged and covered with 12in of earth and 3in of charcoal. Street was asked to install ventilation and, having laid concrete over the coffins in the nave, to put down a new pavement.

The church was demolished in 1878 to widen Lime Street, and exhumation of the bodies from the vaults began on 16 May and ended on 31 July. Advertisements were placed in national newspapers and several families, including the Hargreaves, Hankeys and Rawlinsons, removed their family coffins, although twelve bodies asked for by relatives could not be traced. The Anderson relatives removed four but left three behind. The Ironmongers Company claimed two coffins containing Sir Robert Jeffery and a family member. A total of 436 coffins and cases were removed, but only 158 of these dating from 1679 to 1844 were named. There were eighty-three unnamed lead coffins and the rest were cases of bones.181 These were all taken to the City of London Cemetery, where there is a house tomb monument with Gothic tracery on St Dionis Road. During the upheaval a medieval lead coffin was discovered, and the Guildhall Library possesses a sketch of it by Henry Hodge.

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