File:Wonderful London (1927) 47 – St Andrew Undershaft.jpg

St Andrew Undershaft, Leadenhall Street, London

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

This late Gothic church, completed right on the eve of the Reformation, must be one of the most photographed churches in the City. People come to snap the Gherkin or the Leadenhall building, and quickly notice they can get St Andrew Undershaft in as well. This juxtaposition of the old and the new is very pleasing, and the internet is awash with photographs of it. This does disguise the fact, however, that St Andrew is actually quite a big building, dwarfed as it is by the leading lights of London's better-known skyscrapers crowding around it.

The church famously gets its epithet from the maypole which was on the green beside it before being destroyed by rabid protestants in 1547. The mad gothick at the top of the tower dates from the 1880s and was the work of one Chatfeild Clarke. Whatever was he thinking of? Rhineland castles, probably, which just goes to show what you get when you have an over-enthusiastic architect and a client with more money than taste.

As with near neighbours St Helen's Bishopsgate and St Ethelburga, this church survived both the Great Fire and the firestorm of the Blitz. Unlike its neighbours, it only suffered minor damage from the massive terrorist bombs of 1992 and 1993, and so this is one of the City's few reasonably intact medieval churches.

I'm still to get inside this church. On the last two occasions I visited it was under refurbishment for the use of the busy evangelical congregation up the road at St Helen's Bishopsgate. I suspect that we won't get a repeat of Quinlan Terry's attempt to turn that church into an operating theatre after the IRA bombs, but I look forward to finding out - watch this space.