On leaving Staples Court and returning to Chancery Lane, I went in search of St Dunstan in the West Buriel Ground. First I trotted (well walked at a steady pace more like) down a rather smart alley called Breams Buildings, walking right past the Buriel Ground - for I had expected the church to be nearby. In fact, as I discovered later, the church is on Fleet Street some 200 yards away to the south.Lots of offices have been built over what must have been an extensive churchyard and buried ground.
Here is what I have been informed about the burial ground:
'The garden is a fragment of the former burial ground of St Dunstan in the West, the church located further south facing onto Fleet Street. Bream's Buildings was an C18th close off Chancery Lane that was extended to Fetter Lane in 1882. St Dunstan's was the last medieval City church to be rebuilt. First mentioned in c.1185, it was later known as St Dunstan in the West to distinguish it from St Dunstan in the East. The old church escaped the Great Fire in 1666, but by the early C19th was dilapidated and a new church was built by 1833 further to the north on the part of the burial ground. What remains of the burial ground is now overlooked by 1960s offices, a small public garden entered through a modest gate, from where steps lead to a raised area of grass, trees and shrubs, re-landscaped by 2009. A few tombstones remain inside the boundary railings and in shrubbery on the west perimeter.'
It was a somewhat disappointing Pocket Park. Just shrubs and grass and lots and lots of autumn leaves.
The surrounding buildings are so high that the sun can rarely touch the beds and the grass. But I love this story culled from the church website:
'The church narrowly escaped the Great Fire of London in 1666. The quick thinking of the Dean of Westminster saved the church: he roused forty scholars from Westminster School in the middle of the night, who extinguished the flames with buckets of water.' I guess those lads were a bit upset at being dragged from their beds, but they have a place in history as the result.
