Erection date: 1884
{On the main body of the monument:}
Sacred to the memory of the dead interred in the ancient church & churchyard of St John the Baptist upon Walbrook during four centuries.
The formation of the District Railway having necessitated the destruction of the greater part of the churchyard all the human remains contained therein were carefully collected and reinterred in a vault beneath this monument AD 1884.
{Lower down:}
Rev. Lewis Borrett White, DD, Rector
John R. W. Luck, Edward White - Church wardens
An unusual and unsuccessful siting of a three-dimensional monument. One face is presented to the pavement, the rest of the monument is behind rather nice chunky railings and a nasty modern metal fence, along with 4 plaques and, when we visited, the usual detritus: traffic cones, old paint tins, litter, etc. Behind the monument is a ventilation shaft for the underground.
A number of London's monuments disguise similar shafts and we've listed the ones we know about at Dance's obelisk.
Site: St John the Baptist upon Walbrook - monument and plaques (3 memorials)
EC4, Cloak Lane
Whenever we visit this site the gate into the space beside the monument is always locked shut. The gate is made of ornamental railings with the addition of a strong metal mesh. Andrew Behan found our image on Google Street View, 2008 being the only date on which the Google camera captures the gate open.
On the back wall of this small gated enclosure are 4 plaques, the top one being for the Wilkinsons; the lowest one being for the church. The middle two read: ‘Walbrook Ward 1892’; ‘Cord.Ws Ward 1853’.
This 1828 map shows that the Walbrook Ward and the Cordwainders Ward did meet in Cloak Lane. So we take these two plaque to be boundary markers which are often dated.
This 1904 map shows that the site, after the 1884 disruption, had no buildings and that the monument was free-standing in an oblong walled off area to the west of the site. Sir Walter Besant's 1910 London City describes the layout: “The churchyard is no more; the greater part of its site is enclosed by a brick wall which screens the opening in the roof {the yellow square on the map, we think} of the station below. At the extreme west end an asphalted square has been railed in and reserved as a home for gravestones, and a large ornament {the monument}…”.
From the text on the Wilkinson plaque we think its original location was on the west wall of the space, on the building labelled "Grosvenor, Chater & Co, Ltd" on the map, and that the Wilkinson grave was north of the monument.
Besant goes on to describe what was found in the excavations: remains of the church, Roman artefacts and a channel through which the Walbrook would have run.
Mike Coleman directed us to BBC Autos - an excellent long post with lots of images, concerning cemeteries, plague pits, and the construction of the railways.
A London Inheritance has also researched this site and reports on the archaeological findings.
