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Abstract
On 10 April 1992, a one-ton bomb in a white truck exploded outside the Baltic Exchange in St Mary Axe street in the City of London, killing three people and damaging the church of St Helen Bishopsgate. On 24 April 1993, a second more powerful bomb in a truck exploded in Bishopsgate, a couple of hundred yards away, directly outside the church of St Ethelburga. A newspaper photographer was killed. These bombs were planted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army.
The incidents led to great changes at both churches. St Helen’s was refurbished in a striking manner, not without criticism, when a new neo-Classical layer of fittings was added to its many phases of history; St Ethelburga’s, badly damaged, was partly reconstructed and repaired to serve as a Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, an initiative of the new Bishop of London, Richard Chartres. This paper describes the initial responses to the two blasts, and how the churches were restored. It is a record of two terrorist incidents and what happened afterwards.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Gary Gibbs, John Wall and George Legg, and to the London Journal referees, for criticism of drafts of this essay.
Notes on contributor
John Schofield is an archaeologist who worked at the Museum of London from 1974 to 2008. He has written about the archaeology of London at all periods, and about medieval towns in Britain. Since 1990 he has been the Cathedral Archaeologist for St Paul's Cathedral.
Notes
1 The glass in the window contained seventeenth-century figures, shields and mottoes. In the aftermath of the blast it was considered too shattered to repair, and the window is now plain. St Andrew’s suffered some other damage, but this is not detailed here as I wish to concentrate on St Ethelburga’s and St Helen’s.
2 Details from a conservation management plan for the Synagogue produced by Caroe Architecture Limited in 2019.
3 Eg J. Coaffee, Terrorism, Risk and the Global City: Towards Urban Resilience (London: Routledge, 2016).
4 G. Legg, ‘Security Experiments: London, Belfast and the Ring of Steel’, Divided Society (Belfast: Linen Hall Library, 2018) <https://www.dividedsociety.org/essays/security-experiments-london-belfast-and-ring-steel> [accessed 26 January 2019].
5 <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/two-thirds-of-churches-in-city-should-close-templeman-report-is-welcomed-by-clergy-andrew-brown-1410237.html> [accessed 31 August 2018].
6 Paul Drury, personal communication 2018.
7 Re St Helen’s Bishopsgate (1993) 3 Ecc LJ 256. This is a Consistory Court internal reference; these records have not been deposited at London Metropolitan Archives; they are held by the Diocese of London.
8 I am grateful to Gordon Higgott for some of the information in these two paragraphs.
9 S. Bradley and N. Pevsner, London 1: The City of London, Buildings of England (London, 1997), 222.
10 A summary of the history and archaeology of St Helen’s which includes the bombing and rebuilding is in J. Schofield, ‘Saxon and Medieval Parish Churches in London: A Review’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 45 (1994), 104–7. Apart from monumental slabs (see next note) there was little archaeological recording to do at St Helen’s.
11 The representatives were principally Stephen Freeth and Derrick Chivers, who compiled a schedule of the slabs, now London Metropolitan Archives, CLC/270/MS29517. I am grateful to Stephen Freeth for this information.
12 Higgott, personal communication, 2018.
13 Drury, personal communication, 2018.
14 N Pevsner, London 1: The Cities of London and Westminster, Buildings of England, 3rd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 155.
15 The assistance of Peter Guilder of the City Surveyor’s Department here was instrumental.
16 The main report on this work by the Museum is D. Goodburn and T. P. Smith, with J. Schofield and J. Taylor, ‘Church of St Ethelburga the Virgin, Bishopsgate, London EC2: Analysis of Timbers and Worked Stone, and an Outline of the Historical Development of the Church’, Museum of London Archaeology Service, 1998.
17 Letter from Venning to the Museum of London Archaeology Service, 7 September 1994.
18 A. Symonds, ‘Puritanism and Politics’, The Spectator, 15 May 1993, 41–2.
19 Bradley and Pevsner, London 1: The City of London, 218–19.
20 Letter from the Morton Partnership to Purcell Miller Tritton, 14 January 1998.
21 The archaeological records of the recovery project and the rebuilding are held at the Museum of London Archaeological Archive under the sitecodes SEH94, SEC98 and EHE06.
22 See https://stethelburgas.org. I am grateful to the director Dr Justine Huxley for the image in .
23 Drury, personal communication, 2018.
24 The debates about what to do with the damaged City churches, during and immediately after World War II, are chronicled in P. J. Larkham and J. L. Nasr, ‘Decision-Making Under Duress: The Treatment of Churches in the City of London During and after World War II’, Urban History 39 (2012), 285–309. I am grateful to Christine Stevenson for this reference, and for other comments which have been incorporated. The post-War rebuilding of London’s historic environment is considered by Anthony M Tung in his Preserving the World’s Great Cities: The Destruction and Renewal of the Historic Metropolis (New York: New Rivers Press, 2001), in comparison with other cities and other widespread and significant destructions, such as Rome, Paris, Warsaw, Kyoto, Cairo, Moscow and Beijing.
25 S. R. Jones, London Triumphant (London: Studio Publications, 1941), 8–9.
26 H. P. Clunn, The Face of London, nd (London, Spring Press, circa 1958), 39.
27 In all, of the forty-seven parish churches of medieval and later date in the City surviving in 1939, eight were destroyed or damaged beyond repair; a further twelve were recommended for rebuilding (one of them, St Augustine Watling Street, not to be a church but to be part of the cathedral’s Choir School).
28 Bradley and Pevsner, London 1: The City of London, 138–9.
29 The war damage and rebuilding around St Paul’s is covered in J. Schofield, St Paul’s Cathedral: Archaeology and History (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2016), 112–17.
30 C.M. L. Gardam, ‘Restorations of the Temple Church, London’, in L. Grant (ed.), Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in London, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions for 1984 (1990), 101–17.
31 F. Altiere, ‘Eighteenth-Century Restorations and the Rebuilding of St Mary-le-Bow after the Destruction of the Church in 1941’, in M. Byrne and G. R. Bush (eds.), St Mary-le-Bow: A History (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Books, 2007), 104–18.
32 P. Jeffery, R. Lea and B. Watson, ‘The Architectural History of St Mary-at-Hill in the City of London’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 43 (1992), 193–200.
33 At St Mary’s the box-pews are not yet reinstated, but remain in store.