There is a secret garden in the City of London that has a very unlikely link to Shakespeare, Winston Churchill, and Fulton Missouri in the United States of America. The St Mary Aldermanbury Garden on Love Lane was the site of the church of St Mary Aldermanbury which was first mentioned in 1181. Like many of the City churches it was burned down in the Great Fire of London in 1666 and was rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren. 🔈Listen Now: The Great Fire of London – How It Began
History of St Mary Aldermanbury Church in the City of London
The name Aldermanbury derives from “the burgh” or fortified place of the Aldermen — a nod to its proximity to the Guildhall, the historic seat of civic power in the City of London. Built in 1411, the Guildhall has served as the City’s town hall for over six centuries and continues to function as the administrative heart of the Square Mile.
Just nearby stood a church, later ravaged during one of the most devastating nights of the Blitz — 29 December 1940 — a date sometimes referred to as the Second Great Fire of London. On that single night, more than 100,000 incendiary bombs were dropped over the City, sparking over 1,500 fires. The scale of destruction was immense. Entire streets were engulfed, and many historic buildings, including a number of Sir Christopher Wren’s churches, were severely damaged or lost entirely.
Among the ruined structures was the church at Aldermanbury. Its remains, like many others across the City, serve as a stark reminder of the resilience of Londoners during wartime, and of the cultural and architectural losses borne in the defence of freedom.
St Mary Aldermanbury was one of these churches. Not all of the rent churches were rebuilt. St Mary Aldermanbury was left as a shell, only the walls were standing and there was rubble from the ruined church on the ground. Several years later in Fulton Missouri the President of Westminster College, Dr Robert Laurenson Dashiell Davidson was reading an article in life magazine about the ruined Wren churches that were slated for demolition in the City of London at the time he was looking for a fitting memorial to put in Westminster College to commemorate Winston Churchill. 📚Read more: Winston Churchill’s Cigars: A Puff of History and Tradition
Winston Churchill and the ‘Iron Curtain’ Speech
In 1946 Churchill had been invited out to Westminster College Missouri and the invitation was endorsed by President Harry Truman. It was during his visit to Westminster College that Churchill delivered his “Sinews of Peace” speech – the most known quote from it is: “from Statin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent”. And so Dr Davidson started lengthy negotiations with the City of London to buy the ruins of a Wren church, to ship it out and have it rebuilt at Westminster College Fulton Missouri. The stones were packed up and numbered and shipped over to Fulton. After nearly 5 years of what the London Times called “perhaps the biggest jigsaw puzzle in the history of architecture“, the church was consecrated, rededicated and declared open on May 7, 1969.
Shakespearean Heritage
Silver Plaque, St Mary Aldermanbury placed by Westminster College, Photo by Jenny Funnell
In the garden of St Mary Aldermanbury, you will find a silver memorial plaque featuring an etching of the church. This was a gift to the City of London from Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in recognition of the church’s later connection with the United States.
Nearby, on a slightly raised section next to the footprint of the original church, lies the former churchyard. Here stands a pink granite monument topped with a bust of William Shakespeare. This memorial commemorates John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare’s close associates and fellow actors in the King’s Men, his theatre company. Both Heminges and Condell were buried here, and both served as churchwardens of St Mary Aldermanbury.
The monument, designed and sculpted by Charles John Allen, was erected in 1895. It pays tribute not only to their friendship with Shakespeare but also to their vital role in preserving his legacy, as they were responsible for compiling and publishing the First Folio of his plays in 1623. 🔈Listen Now: Shakespeare’s London
Shakespeare famously wrote his plays to be performed, not read. As an actor in his company, The King’s Men, you would not have been handed a full script. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, paper was expensive, and producing multiple full copies of each play was impractical. Secondly, Shakespeare was understandably protective of his work and did not want full scripts circulating where rival companies could steal or adapt them.
Instead, actors were given only their individual lines, handwritten on a roll of parchment, along with their cues—the final words spoken by the previous character that signalled when to speak. This is where we get the theatrical terms “role” and “part” from: “Which role are you playing?” or “I’m playing the part of Hamlet.”
When Shakespeare died in 1616, his close friends and fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, recognised the very real risk that his words—and with them, the legacy of his work—might be lost forever. Without a collected edition, many of his plays would have vanished. Thanks to their efforts, we have the First Folio, published in 1623, which preserved 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, some of which had never before appeared in print.
The First Folio and Shakespeare’s Literary Legacy
Just imagine: so many of the expressions we use today — “wild goose chase”, “wear your heart on your sleeve”, “green-eyed monster”, and “vanish into thin air”, to name but a few — might have been lost forever, along with Shakespeare’s extraordinary plays. That was the risk his friends faced following his death in 1616. And so began a remarkable seven-year labour of love.
John Heminges and Henry Condell, both actors in Shakespeare’s company and his close companions, spent years gathering whatever they could find of his work. This meant retrieving parchment rolls — the individual “parts” used by actors — and painstakingly piecing them together like a patchwork quilt to reconstruct entire plays. With enormous dedication, they edited and compiled these texts into a single collected edition, published in 1623: the First Folio.
The Folio contains 36 of Shakespeare’s surviving plays, organised into Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Around 750 copies were printed by Isaac Jaggard, son of William Jaggard, the official printer to the City of London. Their printing house stood near the Barbican, at the sign of the Half Eagle and Key — and it is for this reason that one of the Barbican towers bears the name Shakespeare Tower today.
At the time, an unbound copy of the First Folio would have cost 15 shillings, while a plain calf-bound edition was priced at £1 — a considerable sum. In the preface to the volume, Heminges and Condell wrote of their motivation:
“Onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend and Fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare.”
Today, only around 235 copies of the First Folio are known to survive. One of them made headlines in October 2020, when a copy was sold at Christie’s in New York for $9.9 million — the highest price ever paid for a work of literature.
And so, here in this quiet garden behind the Guildhall, among flowers and stone, stands a monument that links Shakespeare, Churchill, and the United States — a story of performance, preservation, and enduring cultural connection, all centred on this small but significant corner of the City of London.
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