Can there really be a need for another guide to the churches of the City of London? Ever since John Betjeman published his Pitkin guide to the City churches in 1965, numerous other authors have followed in his wake. Betjeman’s little book was a masterpiece of compression. This latest volume is also of modest size, just 100 pages with brief summaries of each church accompanied by well-chosen colour photographs. An introduction sets these splendid buildings in context, with a description of the Great Fire of September 1666, which devoured eighty-seven churches, St Paul’s Cathedral and forty-four livery company halls.

Christopher Wren was involved in the designs for the new St Paul’s, and also began a radical redesign of the City landscape. Although his ideas were not taken up, he was put in charge of rebuilding fifty-one of the City churches. Wren reused the medieval footprints and where possible retained the east–west orientation, with the tower on the western side. He designed in both the English baroque and the Gothic style, preferring large windows to let in as much light as possible on to constricted sites. His steeples were in many cases added later, and some were designed by his assistants, but all together they form a crucial part of the London skyline, peeping out between the newer blocks and glass towers of the City.

Only twelve of the fifty-one churches survive in their original form, particular delights being St Benet Paul’s Wharf, St Mary Abchurch and St Martin Ludgate. St Benet’s is built in red and blue bricks with contrasting stone quoins, a style echoed by St Mary Abchurch, which retains its box pews, Grinling Gibbons reredos and a delightful painted dome by William Snow. St Martin’s was one of the last churches to be rebuilt, and similarly retains many original features, including some seventeenth-century bread shelves for distributing loaves to the poor.

John Christopher takes us on a tour of all Wren’s churches, and also includes sections on the lost churches with evocative names such as St Benet Fink, St Mildred Bread Street and St Michael Crooked Lane. All these are illustrated from contemporary prints. Christopher includes a section on St Paul’s Cathedral, officially completed in 1710 when, at the age of 76, Sir Christopher Wren watched his son fix the last stone in place on the lantern at the top of the dome. Finally, there is a chapter on Wren’s other London, describing the Monument, Temple Bar, now sitting on Paternoster Square, the Royal Hospital Chelsea, Greenwich Royal Hospital and Morden College, a set of almshouses designed for ‘decayed Turkey Merchants’. Although inevitably brief, John Christopher succeeds in giving an informative tour of Wren’s work in London, and the illustrations enable us to see these churches as first designed with a comparison of the same scene today.