St Vedast alias Foster Churchyard

A church has been on the site since 1100, with first mention of a rector in c.1291. St Vedast or Vedastus was a C6th Bishop of Arras, and 'Foster' being an Anglicisation of 'Vedastus', the church here may have received this dedication as a result of its situation on Foster Lane and it was also known as St Foster's Church (Stow). In the late C15th/early C16th Henry Coote of the Goldsmiths' Company and a Sheriff of London, built a chapel called St Dunstan's here but in the early C17th a new church was built, but was damaged in the Great Fire of 1666 and rebuilt first by the parish in 1672 and later by Wren in 1694-98 probably using the old walls as the recorded cost was not great. The spire was added in 1709-1712, 'the most Baroque of all the City church steeples' (Pevsner), possibly by Hawksmoor. After the Fire the parish was added to by that of St Michael Le Querne whose C12th church had been destroyed, and which was formerly on the north side of Paternoster Row, its churchyard the burial place of John Leland (d.1552), a celebrated antiquary and librarian to Henry VIII. In the 1880s the parish of St Matthew Friday Street was added to that of St Vedast when St Matthew's was demolished.

St Vedast's had a small burial ground on the north side of the church and among those buried here were William Trist 'Selerer to the King' (d.1425). In 1836 a stone coffin hollowed to receive the body, and other remains, were discovered in a vault beneath the burial ground when workmen were excavating for a drain; such coffins were used at an early date in Britain. St Vedast was gutted during the Blitz in WWII and the post-war restoration was undertaken by Stephen Dykes Bower who remained faithful to Wren's original conception whilst also collecting fittings from other Wren City churches to replace those that had been sadly lost. Today to the north of the church is the Rectory, No. 4 Foster Lane of 1960, and a passage between this and the church leads to a paved courtyard with wall fountain. This faces the present Church Hall, which was built in 1691 as the school-house for St Leonard Foster Lane, a church which was not rebuilt after the Fire of 1666 and whose burial ground is now within Postman's Park (q.v.).

The remains of the churchyard is now a garden of rest, a paved area with a central tree and seating along two sides; a number of commemorative plaques are set into the walls. A relief sculpture by Jacob Epstein of 1936 depicts the head of Canon Mortlock, who gave the eulogy at Epstein's funeral in 1959. The Saddlers' Company, whose Hall courtyard garden (q.v.) abuts the church wall to the east, is associated with St Vedast's. St Vedast's is a sister church to St Botolph without Bishopsgate (q.v.).