Crown Shrine
Saxon foundations (600s–900s)
Christian worship returned to the ruined Roman city after the mission of St Augustine to Canterbury in 597. By the end of the seventh century, churches had been founded at All Hallows by the Tower (675) and on the site that would become St Paul's. The first cathedral on Ludgate Hill was traditionally founded in 604 by King Æthelberht of Kent.
Norman rebuilding (1000s–1100s)
Edward the Confessor consecrated his great new abbey on Thorney Island a week before his death in 1066. William the Conqueror was crowned at the same altar on Christmas Day. The Normans brought a new wave of stone construction — Augustinian priories at St Bartholomew's (1123) and Southwark (c. 1106), the Templar church on Fleet Street (1185), and the rebuilding of dozens of parish churches in Romanesque arches and massive piers.
Gothic and the medieval city (1200s–1500s)
From the mid-thirteenth century, Henry III rebuilt Westminster Abbey in the new French Gothic manner. The next three centuries elaborated this style — the Lady Chapel of Henry VII, the late Perpendicular nave of St Margaret's beside the Abbey, and the dozens of small parish churches that filled the medieval City. By the fifteenth century, London had perhaps 100 churches inside its walls.
The Great Fire and Wren (1666–1700s)
On 2 September 1666 a baker's oven in Pudding Lane started the fire that destroyed 87 parish churches and old St Paul's. Sir Christopher Wren designed 51 replacement churches and a new cathedral over the next forty years. His City churches — St Mary-le-Bow, St Stephen Walbrook, St Clement Danes — set a pattern of plain Portland-stone exterior and inventive, light-filled interior. James Gibbs built on Wren's legacy with St Martin-in-the-Fields in 1726.
Victorian and Catholic revival (1800s)
The Catholic hierarchy, banned for centuries, was restored in 1850. Westminster Cathedral, opened in 1903, was the visible answer — striped Byzantine brick, deliberately unlike anything Anglican. Anglican congregations gave Southwark its cathedral status in 1905. Across London new parishes were carved out for the rapidly expanding suburbs.
The Blitz and after (1940s–today)
On the night of 29 December 1940, eight Wren churches and dozens of other buildings burned in the City. St Paul's, defended by volunteer firewatchers, became the great symbol of London's survival. Many smaller churches were rebuilt sympathetically; some, like St Clement Danes, took on new dedications — in that case as the central church of the Royal Air Force.
The story did not end in 1945. London's churches continue to host coronations and royal weddings, daily evensong, civic services, music recitals and quiet acts of private prayer. Most of those described in this guide are still in active use, a millennium and a half after the first Saxon chapel.