Former building The parish served by the church existed by 1108, when it was served by the
Augustinian Holy Trinity Priory, also called Christ Church, which was founded by
Maud, queen at the time of
King Henry I. The parishioners used the priory church but this proved unsatisfactory and disruptive to the priory's activities. The
prior partly resolved the problem in 1280 by founding St Katharine Cree as a separate church for the parishioners. The site of the present church was originally in the priory's churchyard and it is possible that the church began as a cemetery chapel. It took its name from the priory, "Cree" being abstracted from forms like
Crichurch, which were abbreviations of "Christ Church" (H.A. Harben,
A Dictionary of London (1918)). It was initially served by a
canon appointed by the prior but this did not prove satisfactory either, so, in 1414, the church was established as a parish church in its own right. The present tower was added about 1504. Describing the building at the end of the 16th century,
John Stow wrote:
Current building of St Katharine Cree, looking east to the altar The present church was built in 1628–30,
Bishop of London on 31 January 1631. and suffered only minor damage in the
London Blitz of the
Second World War. However, structural problems required extensive restoration in 1962. It is now one of the city's Guild churches. St Katharine Cree is a significant church of the
Jacobean period, a time when few new churches were built. It is the only Jacobean church to have survived in London. The identity of its architect is unknown. It has a high
nave, linked with the narrow
aisles by
arcades supported on
Corinthian columns. By the south wall of St Katharine's is a memorial to
RMS Lancastria, a troopship sunk at sea with huge loss of life during the
Second World War in 1940. It includes a model of the ship and the ship's bell. St Katharine's has a
ring of six bells. Lester and Pack of the
Whitechapel Bell Foundry cast five of them including the treble bell in 1754. Thomas II Mears of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry cast the tenor bell in 1842. The church clock has a bell, also cast by Lester and Pack in 1754. In the summer of 2007 they were rung for the first time since 1880. An appeal to raise £60,000 to restore the bells to full ringing order was launched in November 2007, and the project was completed in 2009. It is the only tower in the City where the bells are rung from a ground-floor ringing chamber. Today St Katharine's is a guild church and has no parish, and now serves workers in the City of London ==Notable people associated with the church==