Never Far from Rome I

St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield

St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield

Last weekend I went to London for a flying visit to see my folks. On Sunday morning I walked from Casa Crawford in Clerkenwell down through Smithfield towards the Thames. I paused at the splendid church of St Bartholomew the Great as the Sunday morning service was underway and found a pew from where to contemplate motes of incense (it is a very High Anglican church) dancing in shafts of July sunshine which pierced the cool and atmospheric Romanesque gloom of the nave.

The gatehouse of St Bartholomew the Great

St Bartholomew the Great dates to 1123 and it owes its existence, and that of its equally ancient neighbouring hospital, to Rome. This year both celebrate their nine hundredth anniversaries. The church is a corner of London which happily survived the town planning efforts of the Luftwaffe; a glorious glimpse of the medieval below the restlessly insatiable construction of ever larger gleaming glass temples to mammon.

I suppose Bart’s must have first come into my consciousness in the winter of 1980 when I was taken to meet my sister who had just been born at the hospital. I was three and have the vaguest recollection of standing in some dog poo (London in the eighties was a great expanse of canine excrement in various stages of desiccation; Londoners’ earliest memories often involve dog poo or exhortations for the avoidance thereof).