St Luke Old Street - History

History

The church is sited on Old Street, north of the City of London, and was built to relieve the church of St Giles-without-Cripplegate, Cripplegate, under the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, an attempt to meet the religious needs of London's burgeoning 18th century population. It was completed and the corresponding parish of St Luke's created in 1733.

The church was designed by John James, though the obelisk spire, a most unusual feature for an Anglican church, west tower and flanking staircase wings were by Nicholas Hawksmoor.

Buried in the small churchyard are architect George Dance the Elder, at one time a member of the vestry, and in a chest tomb, father and son type founders William Caslon.

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