Lost on the River …..inviting suggestions

This is St Mary’s Church in Rotherhithe in the summer of 1979, although until a few minutes ago I had no idea of its name or location.

St Mary's Rotherhithe, 1979

I will have been home on holiday and as I did back then I regularly took days out in town wandering the city looking for photo opportunities.

On this particular day I wasted the return rail ticket to Well Hall and on a whim took one of those tourist pleasure trips to Greenwich from where I wandered over to Blackheath and caught the bus back to Eltham.

But enough of the travel detail, it is the picture which caught my interest and set me off on a detective hunt.

St Mary's Rotherhithe, 2023

Back then I was not very good at recording where I took the pictures, and the passage of 46 years has done nothing to locate the place or the church.

So, after a few fruitless attempts at asking various online sites for suggestions of London churches by the River I happened on repeating the journey.

Given that Manchester is now home, the trip was by Google Maps starting out by London Bridge and by degree arriving at Greenwich.

I assumed it was a Wren church and would be on the north side of the water, but no it was Rotherhithe.

The distinctive spire is still visible from the River, and the surrounding buildings look unchanged.

St Mary's from Rotherhithe Street, 2018

That said on a closer ramble around St Mary’s Street and Rotherhithe Street, the said buildings have gone the way of so many water side warehouses and are now apartments, but the Church looks good.

My Wikipedia tells me that “It was rebuilt in 1714–15, to a design by John James, a major architect of his day (and an associate of Sir Christopher Wren). 

As money was short, the tower was not finished until 1747, when Lancelot Dowbiggin, a City joiner and surveyor, completed it, perhaps to his own design, following the general plan of James.

Since then, the external appearance of the church has remained almost unchanged. It is set in a narrow street close to the Thames, surrounded by former warehouses and facing the charity school house which was built in 1703.

In 1760, Birmingham industrialist Matthew Boulton wed his second wife, Anne, here. The two had journeyed far from home to evade ecclesiastical difficulties; she was his first wife's sister, and the marriage was forbidden by canon law, but not void if no one objected when the banns were read.

In 1838, when the well-known ship Temeraire was broken up, some of her timbers were used to build a communion table and two bishop's chairs in the Rotherhithe church”.

To which I can add that it replaced an earlier medieval church which in turn stood on a building dating back to the Romans.

And brings me almost home, because it was Mathew Boulton that other half of the Boulton and Watt partnership which powered the Industrial Revolution.

A partnership which transformed my adopted city into the "shock city of the Industrial Revolution" ** and offered up that wonderful observation recorded by James Bothwell that  Mathew Boulton sold "what all the world desire~ to have-POWER,"***

Mystery spot, 1979

So, there you have it a mystery solved just leaving me to wonder about other pictures along the journey I took all those decades ago.

Location; the River

Pictures; St Mary’s Rotherhithe and unknown building, 1970 from the collection of Andrew Simpson and St Mary's from the River by Michal, 2023, and from Rotherhithe Street, 2018, courtesy of Google Maps

*St Mary's Church, Rotherhithe, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mary%27s_Church,_Rotherhithe

*Briggs, Asa, Victorian Cities, 1963

** "1 sell here. Sir. what all the world desire~ to have-POWER," Mathew Boulton to James Bothwell, 1776