At the corner of Love Lane and Aldermanbury, round the back of the old City of London Police HQ, is a ‘pocket park’ that was (on a hot sunny day in May) full of City and building workers eating their lunches and catching some rays.
This is the site of the churchyard of St Mary Aldermanbury, a parish church first mentioned in 1181, destroyed in the 1666 Great Fire, rebuilt by Wren and gutted in the Blitz. The original church was where Henry Condell and John Heminges were buried. These were two actors who were members of the King’s Men, the acting company to which William Shakespeare belonged and for which most of his plays were written. It is Heminges and Condell that we can thank for the ‘First Folio’, the collection of Shakespeare’s plays published in 1623 some seven years after his death. Without the First Folio edition, it is more than likely that many of the plays would have been lost to history. At the corner of the old churchyard is a memorial to the two actors, topped with a bust of Shakespeare, that was erected in 1896.
Continue reading “The Church of St Mary Aldermanbury – London and Missouri”