All Hallows by the Tower

A Saxon foundation

Founded in 675 by the Abbey of Barking, All Hallows long predates the City churches around it. A Saxon archway built around the year 700 still stands at the south-west corner of the nave — a thin, plain piece of stonework that survived the Great Fire (which Samuel Pepys watched from the church tower) and the Blitz that gutted the building four centuries later.

From Pepys to William Penn

The church has a long association with the Tower next door — and with the headsman who worked above it. The bodies of Sir Thomas More, Bishop John Fisher and Archbishop Laud, all beheaded on Tower Hill, were brought here for temporary burial. William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, was baptised at the font in 1644 and educated in the schoolroom; John Quincy Adams, the future American president, was married here in 1797. The church survived the Great Fire of 1666 only because Penn's father, Admiral Sir William Penn, ordered the surrounding buildings dynamited to create a firebreak — leaving Pepys to write his eyewitness account from the steeple. After heavy bomb damage in 1940 the church was rebuilt by Lord Mottistone and rededicated in 1957, in a style sympathetic to its medieval predecessor.

What to see

• The Saxon archway, the oldest standing piece of church architecture in London.
• The undercroft museum, with Roman pavement, Crusader brasses and a model of Roman London.
• The font cover by Grinling Gibbons, c. 1682.
• Memorials to those executed at the Tower of London.

Visiting

Free entry every day, with a small charge for the undercroft museum. The church sits five minutes from the Tower of London and works well as a quiet stop before or after a Tower visit.