England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
St Margaret Pattens

The Parish

The parish of St Margaret Pattens lies towards the eastern end of the city of London in the heart of what is, today, known as the financial services capital of the country. What was, at the time of this transcript, a small acreage parish packed with domestic properties and hundreds of parishioners is nowadays almost deserted in the evenings and weekends as the area is almost exclusively occupied by business premises. The parish was centred on an area roughly a little over a quarter mile west of the Tower of London and a similar distance north of the River Thames, Eastcheap being the major thoroughfare of the parish. Being just a short distance from the Thames most drainage finds its way sub-surface to the nearby river and then to the North Sea. St Margaret Pattens is sited at roughly 10 metres above the sea as land rises gently away from the Thames. A small area and a small population too, St Margaret Pattens would have held roughly 200 parishioners within its acreage.

The Church

St Margaret Pattens is one of the churches which remained after the extensive bombing of the City of London during World War 2, a fate which did not happen during the Great Fire which saw the original 12th century church destroyed. The church sits just north of Eastcheap set into the barrow lane of Rood Lane. The church was rebuilt as a "Wren Church" following the Great Fire and is a good example of the work to build atypical churches not casting back to the Gothic traditions. The church was recreated between 1684 & 1687. The most noticeable feature of the rebuilt church is the tower, topped by needle-thin pinnacles, and the stunning thin spire which rises above that. Internally the church is a rather staid rectangle broken only by a protruding chancel. Restorations have been made in both 19th and 20th centuries to arrive at today's church. Sadly the site is one difficult of access and encompassed by surrounding commercial premises exceedingly difficult to adequately photograph. From Eastcheap it is screened by fronting properties, from the west there is no room to get sufficiently far away to get adequate images, a real challenge typical of he City to photographers.