St. James Cathedral and Odd Bits

Greetings, my darlings!

My first travels have taken me to all the sort of touristy bits of London. Well, not all of them, but the whole St. James/Buckingham area.

Some important people live here. Or something.

St. James' Church is an Anglian church in Picadilly. It is a Sir Christopher Wren design and was completed in 1684 and looks pretty much the same as it did when it was built. The clock was added during the post-WWII restorations, as it took a lot of damage in the Blitz.

Sir Christoper Wren did quite a few churches. This one's small, but very nice.

The interior is identical to engravings made back in the 1880s. It's absolutely gorgeous inside and out, but it hasn't got its own graveyard. It does have a courtyard with a gypsy-type market set up. I was on a walk with two of my flatmates (who are truly fantastic people, by the way) and we didn't really have time to shop there- it was getting dark and we were tired. We walk pretty much everywhere- London is nice and compact and walking is a joy because of how beautiful everything is. ANYWAYS I am getting touristy and I promised you I wouldn't do that.

As I said, it doesn't have its own graveyard- however, it does have crypt burials and memorial stones. 

This is Tom Durrey. We don't really know anything about him, other than that he died in 1686. 

These are some more memorial stones set into the wall.

 

Many of the smaller, more ornate memorial stones are just that- memorials. While there are burials in the crypt, they typically aren't set into the walls. These are often the stones of people who were politically significant or wealthy. In the case of this section, these people are all related to the Earls of St. Albans, which means that they are part of the family that commissioned the area for the church. However, not all of the memorial stones hold such economic significance.

These are memorial stones for men lost in WWI.

There's whole walls like this one where the bodies were never found. Anyways, let's close out with our memorial to the dead airmen and prepare for Museum Wednesday