File:Wonderful London (1927) 11 – St Katherine Coleman.jpg

St Katherine Coleman, Fenchurch Street, London

The population of the City declined drastically in the second half of the 19th Century, as the middle classes fled to the new pleasant suburbs to the north and east. The New railways opened up the south of the City to the workers of the Square Mile, and so by the start of the 20th Century there were parishes with little or no resident population. The Diocese of London's City of London Churches Commission in 1919 decided that nineteen churches should be demolished and the land sold off, the money raised used to build new churches out in the suburbs. The list of doomed churches makes interesting reading, including as it did St Botolph Aldersgate, St Botolph Aldgate, St Dunstan in the East, St Dunstan in the West, St Magnus Martyr, St Mary at Hill, St Mary Woolnoth (!) and St Vedast alias Foster. It was planned that the towers of some would be kept. In the event, only two of the churches on the list were demolished before the Second World War intervened, and one of them was St Katherine Coleman.

The church stood immediately to the east of Fenchurch Street station. The dedication differentiated it from St Katherine Cree, about a hundred metres to the north-west, and probably came from the name of a nearby yard. It was a small, late medieval church, rebuilt in the early 18th Century. No one seems to have had an enthusiastic word to say for it, and the early 20th Century guidebooks dismiss it as an uninteresting preaching box. In any event, it had more or less fallen into disuse by the 1880s, and only the burial ground was in regular use. Herbert Reynolds recalled that a final service was held on the evening of Sunday 20th November 1921 and the church was demolished soon afterwards. The money raised by the sale of the site was used to build a new church in Fulham. There was a certain amount of outcry, because we had become more antiquarian-minded since the last huge wave of demolitions by the Diocese in the mid-19th Century. Perhaps that's what staved off the destruction of some of the other churches on the list. It would be nice to think so.

The church is now the site of the 14 storey Lloyds Registry Building, opened in 2000. But a surprising amount of evidence of the earlier use of the space survives. The churchyard wall and railings on St Katherine's Row are apparently still those shown in photographs of the early 20th Century. There are grave markers beyond in the garden which was laid out sensitively in the 1990s by Richard Rogers for Lloyds.