Medical London walk

Audio: St Andrew’s Gardens

The church of St Andrew stands half a mile or so to the south, at Holborn Circus. ‘The old wooden church’ of St Andrew’s, on top of a hill above the river Fleet, first appears in written records in 951. Stone replaced wood in the fifteenth century, and Christopher Wren rebuilt most of the church after the Great Fire of 1666 (even though the church survived the fire). It was here that William Hazlitt was married, Benjamin Disraeli was baptised, and Thomas Coram, founder of the Foundling Hospital was buried. In 1941, the church was bombed and gutted, but was restored to Wren’s original design.

But why is the churchyard of St Andrew’s here, so far from the church itself? By the mid–eighteenth century London’s medieval churchyards were becoming overcrowded with graves and bodies, and the church authorities were looking for new places to bury the city’s dead. In 1754 the parish council of St Andrew, Holborn, consecrated this patch of ground as a churchyard. Bodies were buried here until 1885, when the graveyard was landscaped and opened as a public garden.

Audio: The Royal Free Hospital
How a young doctor set up London’s first genuinely free hospital

Audio: The Light Horse Volunteers
The history of the London Light Horse Volunteer Regiment