Admire All Saints, West Ham

It's amazing to think about what the surrounding area might have looked like when West Ham's Grade I listed Norman church was first built in the 12th century to serve nearby Stratford Langthorne Abbey, founded by William de Montfitchet in 1135. Though the church has been enlarged considerably, with the addition of the seventy-four foot tower in the early fifteenth century, and the aisles on each side of the chancel in the sixteenth century, it still maintains the air of a rural parish church in this sometimes unrelentingly urban area of east London.


Though the church was sadly locked at the time of your author's visit, it is usually open on Sundays from 10.30am until 1.30pm and Mondays to Fridays from 10am - 12 noon during spring and summer, and the exterior and former graveyard still allow visitors to get the measure of this pretty little church. Evidence of the Abbey, the fifth largest in England until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1538, is still visible in nearby Abbey Gardens, a community garden on Bakers Row close to Abbey Road DLR station, which contains some archaeological remains, and at Three Mills, where earlier buildings than those which now stand would have been used by the abbey.

For more, see http://www.westhamchurch.org.uk/