Holborn St Andrew, Middlesex Genealogy

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Holborn St Andrews, the church of, stands at the northwast corner of Holborn hill and Shoe Lane, and is dedicated to St andrew the Apostle, who is distinguished in church history as the earliest of the apostles, and as having suffered martyrdom in Achaia. There was a church on this site as early as the year 1297, which escaped the fire of 1666, but ten years after, being found too ruinous for reparation, it was taken down, except the tower, in 1686, and the present church erected in its place by Sir Christopher Wren. It is one of the finest and most appropriate Protestant churches ub Europe. Its exterior is plain, simple and unpretending; consisting of a basement under the galleries, with low windows which light the aisles, and anupper story semicircular headed windows for the galleries and nave; crowned by a well proportioned cornice, blocking course and balustrade. The tower, which is the ancient one, nerly faced with portland stone ashlering in 1704, is square and to taste. The interior is spacious, rich and beautiful, consisting of a nave and two aisles, divided in height into a ground story and galleries. The living is a rectory worth £600 a year. The patronage was originally in the gift of the Dean and Cannons of St Paul's, who tansferred it to the Abbot and Convent of Bermondsey, who continued to be its patrons till their dissolution by Henry VIII, when that monarch granted it to Thomas, Lord Wriothesley, afterwards Earl of Southampton, from whom it descended, by marriage, to the late Duke of Montague. [Adapted from: Topographical Dictionary of London James Elmes; published 1831]