All Hallows by the Tower
The oldest church in the City of London, free to visit, with a Roman pavement in the crypt and the tower Samuel Pepys climbed to watch the Great Fire.
The lowdown
Everyone queues and pays for the Tower of London next door. Almost nobody crosses the road to All Hallows by the Tower, which is free, older than the Tower itself and quietly one of the most history soaked buildings in the City. It was founded in 675 by the Saxon abbey at Barking, which makes it the oldest church in the Square Mile.
Head down to the undercroft and you walk on a Roman tessellated pavement laid when this was Londinium, alongside a little crypt museum of relics and model ships. Up above, the brick tower is the one Samuel Pepys climbed in 1666 to watch the Great Fire spread across London, calling it the saddest sight of desolation he ever saw.
The connections keep coming. William Penn, who went on to found Pennsylvania, was baptised here, and John Quincy Adams, a future American president, was married here. For a church this free and this central, it is astonishingly overlooked.
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