St Olave Hart Street Churchyard

St Olave is the smallest intact medieval church in the city, first recorded in the late C12th. King Olaf fought with Ethelread the Unready against the Danes in the Battle of London Bridge of 1014; after his death 1025 he was canonised, soon after which a number of churches such as this one were dedicated to him, probably due to Scandinavian traders here. A stone church replaced the earlier building in the C13th, some elements of which remain in the crypt. The current building is primarily C15th although the church was gutted in 1941 and rebuilt in 1951-4. The church has strong associations with Samuel Pepys, who was buried here, and the nearby Navy Office and Corporation of Trinity House; Pepys referred to it as 'Our own Church'. It survived the Great Fire, in part due to the fact that Pepys had many of the wooden structures surrounding it removed. On the south aisle wall of the church was a doorway leading to the gallery for use by the Navy Office, which Pepys had built in 1660 in order to get to the church from the Navy Office and his home in Seething Lane without getting wet. Pepys was buried in the crypt and a monument to him and his wife (d.1669) is in the church together with a memorial plaque erected 1884 designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield. There was a churchyard by 1345 and the burial registers from 1563 onwards are well-preserved and include a record of Mother Goose being buried here on 14 September 1586. Many victims of the plague of 1665 were buried here, the first entry being on 24 July 1665 for 'Mary, daughter of William Ramsay, one of the Drapers' Almsmen'; tradition has it that the first appearance of the plague was in the Drapers' Almshouses in Cooper's Row.

The churchyard has a gateway of 1658 from Seething Lane with pediment with carved skull and crossbones after a design by Hendrik de Keyser. The churchyard also has strong associations with Charles Dickens: "My best beloved churchyard, the churchyard of St Ghastly Grim" (The Uncommercial Traveller). The churchyard garden is framed by the church spire on one side and offices on the other two sides. Until the early C20th the churchyard had many tombs set in grass but some time prior to 1920 it was laid out as it is today with a path from the street entrance to the south door of the church, with shrubs in the corners and a small path round a central bed, with some gravestones set against the walls; the most interesting is a slab set in the ground, broken but with excellent gothic German script (date indecipherable). There are excellent C18th railings and an entrance gate on the street side and railings on the boundary opposite.