Symbols & Secrets – Walking the City of London

More Fitzrovia! Including a vampiric Council leader and a freed slave who became a best-selling author.

On 21st May 2026

In Architecture, Art, Religion, Sculpture, Social History, Special Exhibitions

As promised last week, I’m going to write a little more about my journey ‘west’ to Fitzrovia.

Firstly, I’m grateful to the Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Association for the explanation on their website as to where the name Fitzrovia originated. Here is an extract: Biographer Paul Willetts describes the name Fitzrovia as a “retrospective label applied to a district of central London where, between roughly 1925 and 1950, the pubs, restaurants, cafés, and drinking clubs provided a fashionable rendezvous for a diverse range of writers with a taste for bohemian life. The label, which had passed into common usage by the early 1960s, acknowledged the one-time status of the Fitzroy Tavern, at 16 Charlotte Street, as the area’s pre-eminent venue. Together with Rathbone Place, Charlotte Street forms the crooked spine of Fitzrovia.” You can read more on their very informative and interesting website.

Where is Fitzrovia? A screenshot from the Association website …

I wrote about the beautiful Fitzrovia Chapel in last week’s blog and here are some more aspects of the area that I found interesting.

First up is the Fitzrovia Mural …

Here’s the key …

The area was often under threat of redevelopment, so the former leader of the Greater London Council, Horace Cutler, is depicted as a vampire. He was also famous at the time for his bow ties …

The mural started to deteriorate significantly over the years but has now been restored. You can read more about the work here.

The best view is from Whitfield Gardens …

I am indebted to the brilliant blog Ian Visits for the background to this area. There’s much more on his website.

Sitting to the north of the park is a church. The original Congregational Chapel opened in 1756 with a graveyard space to the south. Thanks to being a bit too popular, the original building was demolished and rebuilt in 1890. However, that chapel was destroyed on Palm Sunday 1945 by the last V-2 rocket to fall on London.The current chapel was built in 1957, and was taken over by the American International Church in 1972.

The original church’s graveyard had closed to burials in 1856. It was later bought by the London County Council in 1894, possibly in a deal aligned with the rebuilding of the chapel.

Although former graveyards that are turned into public parks are often lined with graves, the only noticeable one is the very easy to trip over grave for John and Mary Procter, and (in the top left of this picture) a stone plaque marking the decision of local cheese shop owners, Robert and Esther Procter to donate some land here for the public …

Nearby (but now long lost) was the grave of this man, Olaudah Equiano …

Born in about 1745, a free man in part of present day Nigeria, at the age of about eleven, Equiano was captured and enslaved. His ownership changed hands several times until one of his owners allowed him to buy his freedom in 1766. He subsequently travelled widely before settling in London where he became one of the leading lights of the campaign to end slavery …

Equiano was a shrewd businessman and his ‘Interesting Narrative’ was also a major success (it went through nine editions in his lifetime alone) and, when he died in 1797, he left a sum equivalent to about £80,000 at today’s prices to his surviving daughter (his will can be viewed at The National Archives in Kew).

You can read more here.

Just across the road is the magnificent frontage of Heal & Son …

I love the panels displaying the goods and services available …

You can read a fascinating history of the store here. For example, after John Heal the founder died in 1833 his widow renamed the business Fanny Heal & Son!

All Saints Margaret Street is the most well-known church in the area. It is built in the high-Victorian gothic style and is Grade I listed …

The 1841 specification for a ‘Model Church on a large and splendid scale’ specified that:

It must be in the Gothic style of the late 13th and early 14th centuries
It must be honestly built of solid materials
Its ornament should decorate its construction
Its artist should be ‘a single, pious and laborious artist alone, pondering deeply over his duty to do his best for the service of God’s Holy Religion

Above all the church must be built so that the ‘Rubricks and Canons of the Church of England may be consistently observed, and the Sacraments rubrically and decently administered’.

My images of this splendid building will give you an idea whether expectations were met.

You can read more about the church’s history and architecture here.

Closer to home, and just across the footbridge between the Barbican Highwalk and Moorfields, Post-it Man is back – and he doesn’t look very happy …

Finally, there are two things happening at the Barbican Centre at the moment that you may like to visit.

Origo at the Sculpture Court …

And In Other Worlds in The Curve …

I’ll probably write about both next week.

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The extraordinary Fitzrovia Chapel.

By The City Gent

On 14th May 2026

In Architecture, Religion, Social History

I went west again last week with a view to visiting some interesting places of worship having now, over the years, written about all the City of London churches (you’ll find my earlier blogs under the Category ‘Religion’).

The outside of the Fitzrovia Chapel is decoration-free red brick, offering not a clue as to what awaits you when you enter …

Nothing quite prepared me for the effect the chapel had on me when I walked in …

A wonderful sense of peace and tranquility. I immediately stepped forward, took a seat close to the altar, and sat in silent contemplation …

For over 100 years, the chapel served as a place of solace, prayer and rest for staff and patients of the Middlesex Hospital and their families. It was always open between services, and groups of different faiths (and none) from within the hospital gathered in the tiny building throughout the working week. Marriages between medical staff, or between very ill patients and their partners, took place here, as well as concerts, memorials, seasonable celebrations and choir rehearsals.

Notes on the chapel website tell us that many present-day visitors have spent time here before, whether as a medical professional, family member or patient and the memories they share contain moving descriptions of chapel life in the past. Doctors or nurses visiting to find quiet after a difficult shift; porters sitting quietly in the candlelight reflecting on a day’s work; mothers taking their first trip out of the ward with their new-borns; or families and friends returning to the chapel time after time while caring for their loved ones. This tiny chapel provided a space for the population of the Middlesex Hospital to attend to their interior lives — their needs, hopes, griefs and celebrations were routinely observed beneath its starry ceiling …

The Middlesex Hospital was founded in 1745 and, by 1757, had moved to a larger, purpose-built site on Mortimer Street, which would be its home until closure in 2008.

The hospital in 2007, just before demolition …

The three acre site in September 2008, with the little chapel preserved amid the desolation …

The hospital was originally built without a dedicated chapel. Prayers and religious services took place in the simplicity of its wood-panelled Board Room. But in the 1880s one of the hospital’s surgeons, George Lawson, suggested that the existing ‘dead-house’ could be converted into a new chapel. Lawson recommended an architect, and offered money towards the project. Within a decade sufficient funds had been raised to erect a hospital chapel on the site of the old mortuary and post-mortem room. An important tranche of funding came from a lady governor in memory of the hospital’s Chairman, Alexander Ross. The chapel’s main carcase was up and roofed by 1890, but the interior decoration took longer to complete. A commitment had been made that no money raised for the care of patients should be spent on the chapel, so the interior was completed gradually over the next 50 years, as donations large and small permitted. Appeals were run, musical concerts performed, bequests arranged, and funds for memorials collected.

John Loughborough Pearson, the architect behind Two Temple Place, was commissioned to design the chapel. Construction started in 1891 when Pearson was already near the end of his life and, after John’s death in 1897, his son Frank took over.

The fabric of the chapel was allowed to decline in the closing decades of the hospital and a £2 million restoration of the chapel was carried out by conservation architects Caroe & Partners between 2013 and 2015. It involved improvements to external brickwork, and extensive work on the mosaic ceiling, which had suffered greatly due to water ingress. The external roof had aged poorly, penetrated by rainwater which damaged mosaics and several marble panels. In some places, up to 70% of the ceiling tiles required re-gilding, and extensive scaffolding was erected throughout the chapel to enable restorers to access and restore designs.

King Charles III delivered his 2024 Christmas message from the chapel, a significant break from tradition marking the first time in over a decade it was filmed outside a royal residence …

The choice highlighted his focus on healthcare, community and unity following his and the Princess of Wales’s cancer treatment.

Here are images of some of the features of the chapel I captured for the blog.

The font in the stunning south west apse …

It’s carved from a single block of green marble …

It contains a Greek palindrome copied from the Cathedral of St Sophia in Constantinople:

Νίψον ἀνομήματα, μὴ μόναν ὄψιν
(Wash the sins, not only the face)

This inscription can also be found on the font in St Martin within Ludgate on Ludgate Hill in the City …

You can read more about this church in my blog of July 2022.

The aumbry was given in memory of Prince Francis of Teck who died in 1910 and was the younger brother of Queen Mary. It features a carving of the Pelican in her Piety, a common image of redemption in ecclesiastical design …

There is also some very good stained glass …

Rudyard Kipling’s body rested here in January 1936 following his death at the adjacent hospital before his funeral at Westminster Abbey …

In the entrance narthex, 85 plaques honour donors, distinguished hospital staff, and staff who died on duty, with many dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries …

My eyes were drawn to this plaque …

Beck became a consultant neurosurgeon at the hospital in 1947, making her the first female consultant at a London teaching hospital that did not admit women students. At Middlesex, she was the first woman and the first neurosurgeon on staff, as well as being the only consultant neurosurgeon in western Europe and North America at the time …

In 1952 she received attention in the press for performing lifesaving surgery on A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie-the Pooh two months after he suffered a brain haemorrhage.

You can read more about the chapel here. And here are some contributions by two of my favourite bloggers: A London Inheritance and Living London History.

On my church agenda was the Grade 1 listed All Saints Church, Margaret Street, a Victorian masterpiece …

I shall aim to write more about it next week along with another church of similar vintage I visited last week in my western travels. It boasted a model of the building made of matchsticks …

It was created, the notice says, ‘by a talented member of the choir’. Bless.

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Happy Anniversary America!

By The City Gent

On 7th May 2026

In Social History, Special Exhibitions

Marking the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a display in the Guildhall Heritage Gallery celebrates the political, cultural and diplomatic links that have connected the United States and the City of London over more than two centuries. Through rare documents and symbolic objects, it highlights moments of shared history during times of change, conflict and collaboration.

The parish register for All Hallows by the Tower records the marriage of John Quincy Adams and Louisa Johnson on 26 July 1797. Adams served as the sixth president of the United States of America between 1825 and 1829. He undertook diplomatic missions and was visiting London for the signing of a treaty when he met Louisa, the daughter of Joshua Johnson of Maryland. Members of the Adams and Johnson families acted as witnesses to the marriage ceremony and their signatures can be seen on the register …

For almost two hundred years Louisa was the only non-American First Lady until the inauguration of President Trump on 20 January 2017. You can read more about her later in the blog.

Peal and Company produced bespoke footwear between 1791 and 1965. Originally established in Stepney Green, their success allowed them to relocate to addresses in the West End. An early stage in the company’s process was drawing an outline of the customer’s foot (or both feet) in one of the company’s ‘Feet Books’ with measurements and irregularities noted. This information was then used to make a pair of lasts, which replicate the foot of the client. Peal and Company’s reach was international and one of the many American clients was Dean Martin, with the page from the Feet Book showing the outline of his right foot and his address in Beverley Hills …

This silk bookmark commemorates the assassination on 14 April 1865 of Abraham Lincoln, President from 1861 …

From the mid seventeenth century, labour shortages in the American colonies meant that many (mainly young) people who sought to emigrate but lacked the means to pay their fares bound themselves to serve for a specific number of years, without pay, in return for their passage. This practice, known as indentured servitude, brought many thousands of men, women and children to America. While some entered this agreement willingly, many others were misled or forcibly coerced. As the main English port to the Atlantic, London was a principal embarking point.

After working the length of the agreement, some chose to return to England; however many did not or could not. Opportunities within the colonies were available, especially for the earliest emigrants. The agreements shown here are for Robert Starling from Norwich and William Miles from Worcestershire, who were bound to serve the merchant John Dykes of London in Virginia …

The records do not provide details of their work in America or how their stories continued and the experience of indentured servants and the conditions they faced would have varied widely. Indentured service happened alongside other forms of unfree labour and large-scale forced population movements, including the transportation of convicts (many of whom served as indentured labourers) and, increasingly, the transatlantic trade in enslaved people. The economy on both sides of the Atlantic, the fortunes of a multitude of individuals and institutions and the fate of others were entwined in these practices.

Also on display is the order of service for the memorial service on 1 December 1963 at St Paul’s Cathedral following the assassination of President John F Kennedy in 22 November 1963 …

‘Letters from the American colonies’ …

By the 1770s the relationship between Britain and her American colonies had deteriorated, particularly over the question of import taxes. The City of London Corporation was very opposed to British government policy on this issue, partly for commercial reasons (merchants feared losing valuable trade if American ports were closed) and a belief that the policy was going against the English libertarian tradition.

John Wilkes, London politician and Lord Mayor between 1774 and 1775, famously championed the American cause. In April 1775 a remonstrance, or protest, was published declaring “… abhorrence of the measures, which have been pursu’d, & are now pursuing, to the Oppression of our Fellow Subjects in America”. King george III replied: “It is with utmost astonishment that I find any of my Subjects capable of encouraging the rebellious disposition which unhappily exists in some of my Colonies in North America”.

Wilkes by William Hogarth …

A letter from New York.

The General Committee of Association of the City and County of New York was elected in April 1775. At first the Committee was loyal to the British Crown (while opposing the laws of the British Parliament). It knew of the views of the City of London Corporation and the Lord Mayor, and on 5 May 1775 wrote to the City …

It expressed a wish “… on our part for an indissoluble union with the Parent State, studious to promote Glory and Happiness of the Empire…“

The Committee went on to say it was “impressed with a just sense of the Necessity of a Controlling authority to regulate and harmonize the discordant commercial interests of its various parts, we cheerfully submit to a Regulation of Commerce by the Legislature of the Parent State, excluding in its nature every idea of taxation”. The Committee appealed to the City of London to do all it could to “…restore union, mutual confidence and peace to the whole Empire”.

A letter from Philadelphia

In September 1775 another letter was sent to the City of London, this time from the Congress in Philadelphia. This letter thanks London “for the virtuous and unsolicited resentment you have shewn to the violated rights of a free people”. It also said “North America … wishes most ardently for a lasting connection with Great Britain on terms of just & equal liberty”.

Congress wished to keep relations with the City of London on a positive and friendly basis, anticipating a time when trading links could flourish. The letter was signed by its President, John Hancock …

In 1776 Hancock presided over the debate on the Declaration of Independence and was its first signatory.

The City of London continued to express its strong disapproval of government policy throughout the period of the war. In 1781, another remonstrance was issued to the King, stating “… our abhorrence of the Continuation of this unnatural and unfortunate war”. When peace came in 1783 the City congratulated George III on paying “final attention” to their petitions.

The Honorary Freedom is the highest honour the City of London Corporation can bestow and awards are recorded in the ‘Roll of Fame’. When the City wishes to honour an individual, a special resolution is passed by the Court of Common Council. Once passed the recipient is formally admitted to the Freedom by the Chamberlain of London at a ceremony at Guildhall. Recipients who are not subjects of Britain or the Commonwealth and are therefore not able to take the freeman’s oath or declaration of allegiance to the British monarch are not technically admitted to the freedom but instead appear in the Roll of Fame as having been voted the honour. Military and naval recipients were usually given a sword to accompany the grant.

On display is the Roll of Fame …

It is open at the entry for General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. The honour was given as a mark of appreciation for his part in the defeat of German Forces during the Second World War. The Honorary Freedom was voted on 24 May 1945, and the entry notes that Eisenhower was unable to make the declaration but attended Guildhall on 12 June to receive the honour.

He went on to serve as president of the United States of America from 1953 to 1961.

If you get the chance to visit All Hallows by the Tower there are connections to William Penn as well as John Quincy Adams. Items to look out for include the marriage register mentioned above.

William Penn junior was baptised in the church and this memorial to commemorate the event was erected in 1911. It was damaged in the wartime bombing …

William’s father, Admiral Sir William Penn, was Commissioner of the nearby Navy Office and his son’s baptism took place on 23 October 1644. The Baptismal Register recording the occasion …

Penn’s entry is number 23 on the right hand page.

More about John Quincy Adams’s very talented wife …

The relevant entry in the 1797 Marriage Register …

As our King Charles III declared on his recent visit there: ‘God Bless the United States, and God Bless the United Kingdom’.

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