On the City of London without its working week — the Wren churches, the empty lanes, and what a financial district becomes when it is briefly returned to the people who do not work there
The City of London on a Sunday contains approximately 500,000 people on weekdays and approximately 9,000 on Sundays. The architecture is the same. The experience is entirely different.
The City of London on a Sunday contains approximately 500,000 people on weekdays and approximately 9,000 on Sundays. The architecture is the same. The experience of that architecture is entirely different. On a weekday, the lanes between the glass towers and the surviving medieval street patterns are functional corridors — workers moving between destinations with the purposefulness that the financial district requires. On a Sunday, the same lanes are empty, and the city they connect becomes available for the kind of attention that the weekday does not permit.
Christopher Wren built fifty-one churches in the City after the Great Fire of 1666, of which twenty-three survive. On Sundays, many are open with no particular agenda — no tour group, no admission charge, no gift shop. St Stephen Walbrook, which Wren considered his finest interior, holds perhaps fifteen people on a Sunday morning, if that. The dome — a rehearsal for St Paul's, smaller and more intimate — can be examined without competition. The Henry Moore altar at the centre of the church, installed in 1987 after a prolonged public controversy about whether a circular stone in a seventeenth-century church constituted appropriate furniture, is entirely accessible. On a Sunday you can walk around it slowly.
The Inns of Court — Lincoln's Inn, Gray's Inn, the Middle and Inner Temple — are technically private but open on Sundays to those who walk in without asking for permission. The Temple Church, built by the Knights Templar in the twelfth century and used as a parish church since, is the building that the tourist literature associates with a novel and that the architectural literature associates with the finest Norman round nave in England. On a Sunday morning in February, it is quiet in the way that a twelfth-century building used as a place of worship for nine hundred years is correctly quiet.
Fleet Street, which gave its name to an industry that has now almost entirely relocated, runs from the Temple gates to Ludgate Hill. On a Sunday the street is empty of traffic in a way that reveals its proportion — wider than the City lanes, narrower than a boulevard, lined with Victorian newspaper buildings whose façades declare an era of self-confidence that the buildings no longer need to perform. The pub on the corner — El Vino, which enforced a dress code that barred women from ordering at the bar until a 1982 court ruling changed the policy — is closed on Sundays, which seems appropriate.
The City of London is most itself when it is least occupied. The architecture was not built for tourism — it was built for finance, for worship, and for the particular confidence of a trading city that understood itself as the centre of the world it was building. On a Sunday, with the finance withdrawn, what remains is the architecture and the confidence, available for close examination at no cost and with almost no company.