In 1666 the great fire ravaged London, and the medieval church of St Andrew’s was only saved at the last minute by a change in the wind direction.

However, as it was already in a bad state of repair, Christopher Wren decided to rebuild the church anyway.

He rebuilt from the foundations, making the crypt that we see today, and clad the tower in marble. It is his largest parish church.

The church houses the body of Thomas Coram, founder of the Foundlings’ Hospital in 1741, now called the Coram Family (www.coram.org). The first hospital was set up in a house in Hatton Garden.

The organ casing which adorns the west end is also from the Foundlings’ Hospital Chapel, along with the pulpit and the font, from its large premises in Bloomsbury, where the composer George Fredrick Handel would have played for his fundraising concerts.
Indeed the Coram Family still own the copy of his most famous work ‘The Messiah’.

The church was also the founding place of the Royal Free Hospital; it was on the church steps in 1827 that William Marsden found a woman dying.

He set up a hospital in Greville Street for the poor and destitute, before it moved to Gray’s Inn Road. The hospital now has its headquarters in Hampstead.