St Olave Silver Street: The Pocket Park With Links To Shakespeare

I find walking around the City of London utterly fascinating. In some ways it is very modern with its soaring skyscrapers, but also, scattered within it, are incredible historic fragments and architectural wonders from different eras.

The City is not just about what is physically there though, but also what has been lost. Many of the City’s gardens for example are laid out on the site of lost churches or ex-churchyards. One example of that is St Olave Silver Street.

Found tucked next to the busy London Wall road, compared to some of the City’s other pocket parks it is pretty small and plain-looking, but it has a great story to tell. It was once the heart of a community, a place where thousands of weddings, funerals, baptisms and church services will have brought people together over the centuries. 

The Church By The Wall

The park today can be found here, on the corner of Noble Street and the busy London Wall.

We get our first reference in the historical records of a church on this site in the 12th century but it is likely there was a church on this site earlier. It was originally called ‘St Olave de Mukewellestrate’ or Monkwell Street. 

The church sat at the corners of Monkwell Street and Silver Street, with the name later changing to St Olave Silver Street.

It also sat very close to the city’s wall. You can see surviving sections of the old city wall on nearby Noble Street today. 

In the 17th century, the writer John Stow described the church as ‘the parrish church of S. Olave in Silver streete, a small thing, and without any noteworthy monuments’, so not a rave review. He also wrote that Silver Street was named after the silversmiths that were based in this area of the city. 

St Olave Silver Street was however notable as the place where the bodies of those dissected at the nearby Barber-Surgeons Hall would be buried. Prior to the Anatomy Act of 1832, only the bodies of those executed for murder could be used for dissection. The bodies would be used for anatomical study and then interred at St Olave’s. 

A Norwegian Ally

The church was dedicated, along with a couple of other City churches, St Olave Hart Street and St Olave Ironmongers Lane for example, to St Olaf, a Norwegian Saint and the first Christian King of Norway. ‘Olave’ is the English spelling of the name, the modern Norwegian equivalent being ‘Olav’. 

Why a Norwegian Saint? Well, Olaf II Haraldsson was King of Norway from 1015-1028, known during his lifetime as ‘Olaf the Stout’.

Olaf of Norway sided with King Ethelred the Unready of England against the Danish Sweyn Forkbeard, father of Cnut, at the Battle of London Bridge in 1014, reclaiming London for Ethelred. Ethelred and Olaf were both Christians and the Vikings were still predominantly Pagan. King Olaf died in 1030, was soon after canonised and still today is the patron saint of Norway. 

The Shakespeare Link

In the garden you will find this blue plaque to William Shakespeare. 

Shakespeare lived on Silver Street, probably overlooking the churchyard, for a few years from 1604, renting from a Christopher and Mary Mountjoy. He would have therefore most likely attended church services at St Olave Silver Street. It is probable he wrote King Lear, Othello and Measure for Measure whilst living there.

The Mountjoys were Huguenots who made luxury headdresses for ladies and theatrical costumes. We only know he lived there because Christopher Mountjoy was sued by his son-in-law over the dowry owed to him for his marriage to Mountjoy’s daughter. Shakespeare gave evidence at the trial in 1612 and the lawsuit contains one of the only surviving examples of his signature. 

When I read Peter Ackroyd’s brilliant biography of Shakespeare, I was shocked to find out how little we actually know about his life.

The Great Fire

The church was rebuilt in 1609 and in 1662 but did not last long as it burnt down in the Great Fire in 1666. 

The Great Fire destroyed roughly ⅘ of the old city and 87 churches were engulfed by the flames. Only 51 churches were rebuilt and various parishes were combined. St Olave Silver Street, probably due to its size, was not rebuilt and the parish combined with St Michael, Wood Street and later with St Alban, Wood Street in the 19th century when St Michael’s was demolished. 

The site of St Olave’s was kept as a churchyard going forward, as many were. 

The photo above is looking Northeastwards I believe, judging from the Ordnance Survey map from the 1890s below.

Blitz Devastation

This area of the City was incredibly heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe. You can see a map below of bomb damage to the North West corner of the City. The purple areas are those ‘damaged beyond repair’. 

Silver Street was totally obliterated and after the war, London Wall was laid out on the site. The garden was slightly reduced in size at this time as well. 

You can see the evidence of the Blitz all around the garden with the ruined 19th century workshops on Noble Street, as well as the Brutalist post-war Barbican estate just the other side of the main road.

The Garden Today

A couple of gravestones survive in the garden today as well as this intriguing stone tablet.

Found amongst the Blitz rubble, it says ‘THIS WAS THE PARISH CHVRCH OF ST OLAVE SILVER STREET DESTROYED BY THE DREADFVLL  FIRE IN THE YEAR 1666’.

There is another plaque that tells you that the churchyard was narrowed during a road widening in 1865. 

You will also find this large stone font-like structure, possibly created from one of the church’s old columns.

It is amazing, when you start digging, how much history there is in these little, seemingly quite mundane sites.

You can sit in this garden today and imagine Shakespeare sitting in a house nearby scribbling frantically the words of his new play. Or perhaps think of the twin disasters of London’s history: the Great Fire and the Blitz and how they totally transformed this area nearly 300 years apart. 

Thank you for reading! More of London’s incredible hidden history below.