St Bride’s Fleet Street
The steeple of St Bride’s, just off Fleet Street, is the tallest Christopher Wren ever built. The church was one of the fifty-one Wren raised after the Great Fire, completed in 1675, and the steeple followed in 1703. It rises 69 metres in four diminishing octagonal tiers, each one an open arcade, and it is the reason for the shape of every tiered wedding cake since. A baker on Ludgate Hill named William Rich is said to have copied it for his own wedding cake, and the idea stuck.
It is the journalists’ church. Fleet Street was the home of the printing trade from 1500, when Wynkyn de Worde set up his press beside it, and of the national newspapers until the 1980s, and the church has kept the connection long after the papers moved out. Samuel Pepys was baptised here. The church was gutted by incendiary bombs on the night of 29 December 1940, and its rebuilding by Godfrey Allen, rededicated in 1957, uncovered the remains of a Roman house and the foundations of six earlier churches in the crypt.
In a wide view the spire is a pale tiered needle a little west of St Paul’s, and it is one of the few Wren steeples still tall enough to show above the offices around it. Zoom in and the arcades of each tier can be counted.
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Rays Over London Panorama
A dramatic panorama of London, looking up the River Thames past Waterloo Bridge, Hungerford Bridge towards Westminster. The Sun’s rays are bursting through a stormy sky, illuminating many of London’s well known landmarks. These rays are known as crepuscular and often appear in conjunction with stratocumulus storm clouds. Visible in the panorama is the London…
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Sundown over Holborn
Panorama looking from Holborn over London at sundown. This London cityscape includes the following landmarks: Shard London Bridge; Strata Tower; Guy’s Hospital Tower; 33 St Mary Axe (The Gherkin); Tower 42; the Heron Tower; King’s Reach Tower; the Barbican; Canary Wharf; the Tate Modern; the London Eye; the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben.