It was one of the first to be rebuilt, beginning in 1671 - one of fifty-one churches rebuilt according to the designs of Christopher Wren and, to a degree that remains uncertain, his assistants Robert Hooke and Nicholas Hawksmoor. Mary was one of eighty-seven churches lost in the Great Fire. The fire spread and by the time it was done, it had destroyed much of the city north of the Thames, including most of Aldermanbury parish. On September 2, 1666, a bakery located along London’s Pudding Lane caught fire. Mary Aldermanbury in 1656, although the marriage probably took place in the nearby Guildhall. Notices of Puritan poet John Milton’s second marriage were first published at St. Two of Shakespeare’s closest friends - the actors Henry Condell and John Heminges, editors and publishers of his First Folio - attended mass there and it is likely that the Bard, who often stayed in Aldermanbury and frequented the nearby Axe Inn, did so too. It was the parish church of Robert Rich, one of the founders of the Virginia and New England colonies in North America. Later still, it became a center of the Puritan movement in London, presided over by noted Puritan clergyman Edmund Calamy. Later, by royal charter, the church became the home of the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers. In the mid-15th century, a Perpendicular Gothic-style building replaced the then-dilapidated Norman structure. Among the many curious stories connected to its early history is that of a man who called himself Christ and who was crucified there in 1222. Mary had stood in the Aldermanbury district of London since at least 1181, near the site of the ancient Saxon palace and the east gate of the still older Roman fort.
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A small rectangular-plan Norman church called St. Mary Aldermanbury as it stands today was originally built between 16, but its story is much older.
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Mary Aldermanbury, London, engraving, n.d. What the devil is it doing here, you ask yourself, the first of many reasonable questions. Mary Aldermanbury, attributed to Christopher Wren and built during his lifetime. It is in Fulton, in the middle of Missouri, in the middle of America, that you find the one building outside of England incontrovertibly connected to England’s greatest architect: St. Turning off the Interstate at exit 148, you head south for about five miles on Highway 54 to the pleasant but unremarkable town of Fulton, population 13,000, home of Westminster College - and home also of one remarkable and unexpected landmark. You drive west on Interstate 70, past fifty miles of exurban sprawl ranging in quality from bland to bleak, and on past another fifty miles of farm fields dotted by truck stops and fast food restaurants. Eero Saarinen’s gleaming arch stands poised between a muddy Mississippi River once plied by real riverboats, now lined with immovable “riverboat” casinos, and a blighted, depopulated rustbelt city center still struggling to effect its own revival the place smells faintly of hops from the nearby Anheuser-Busch brewery and more powerfully of exhausts from the freeway dividing downtown from the river. Such moves may carry benefits - rescue from demolition or decay, heightened accessibility, availability to new audiences, reuse of limited resources - but they also raise questions of aesthetic and material integrity, historical authenticity and meaning, and the value of historical and environmental context. Buildings are not usually conceived as portable, so what happens when one is transferred from its original setting to one its builders never imagined? Numerous historically significant structures, from Abu Simbel and the Temple of Dendur to London Bridge and Newark International’s Building 51, have been relocated. So it is with the practice of structural relocation. Yet some translations are more radically transformative than others. 1 We transform and translate historical images, ideas, and artifacts, their material elements, contexts, and meanings, into ones we can understand and use in our own time.
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Įvery interaction with the past involves an alteration.