St Olave Hart Street
A rare medieval City church that survived the Great Fire, the burial place of the diarist Samuel Pepys and his wife.
The lowdown
St Olave's is one of the few medieval churches to survive the Great Fire of London, saved when the flames were halted nearby, and it was the parish church of the great diarist Samuel Pepys, who recorded so much of that very fire. He and his wife Elizabeth are buried here, and her memorial bust gazes down from the wall where Pepys himself used to sit.
Its macabre gateway of carved skulls so unnerved Charles Dickens that he nicknamed it Saint Ghastly Grim. Small, ancient and atmospheric, it is free to enter and a moving place to stand for anyone who has read Pepys's vivid account of seventeenth-century London.
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