Amen Corner is located off Ave Maria Lane, just to the west of St. Paul's Cathedral and between the Old Bailey and Paternoster Square, in the City of London.
On the feastday of Corpus Christi, monks would say prayers in a procession to St. Paul's Cathedral. They set off from Paternoster Row chanting the Lord's Prayer (Pater noster... being the opening line in Latin). They would reach the final 'amen' as they turned the corner in Ave Maria Lane, after which they would chant Hail Mary (Ave Maria in Latin).
The area was notable as the site of the Royal College of Physicians until it was destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666.
The modern Amen Corner is a stub of road that leads to Amen Court, home to a short terrace of 17th-century houses where the canons of the cathedral once lived and where the first meeting of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was held in 1958 at the home of founder John Collins. Present at the occasion also were the politicians Michael Foot and Denis Healey.
There is another Amen Corner, in Tooting, south London, where the A217 road (Mitcham Road) meets Rectory Lane and Southcroft Road.
Famous quotes containing the words amen and/or corner:
“Heaven has a Sea of Glass on which angels go sliding every afternoon. There are many golden streets, but the principal thoroughfares are Amen Street and Hallelujah Avenue, which intersect in front of the Throne. These streets play tunes when walked on, and all shoes have songs in them.”
—For the State of Florida, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“At this very moment,... the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)