London Urban Legends by Scott Wood

London toward Liverpool Street station. Just before you get to the corner shared with Cornhill is one side of St Peter upon Cornhill Church. Its white stone is caked with a layer of grime and three tousle-haired cherubim, with wings round their necks like ruffs, gazing aloof and detachedly across the street. You then turn from Gracechurch Street into Cornhill, glance up, and leering down at you is a red terracotta demon with a dog-like body and a yowling, distended maw. It also has breasts, and a demonic face, its arms and chest are human. On the apex of the building crouches another larger demon, smirking to himself as he watches the passers-by on Cornhill. He looks as if he is preparing to launch himself onto an unsuspecting city worker or passing vicar below. It’s a busy street, but I suspect few people feel comfortable loitering at this particular spot.
    The story is of a nineteenth-century vicar at St Peter upon Cornhill who noticed that the planned new building on 54-55 Cornhill impinged on the church’s land by 1ft. The vicar, or verger, disputed this and successfully stopped the building’s construction. The builder, or architect, had to re-draw their plans and, as his revenge, he raised three devils (there’s a smaller one beneath the top demon) onto the building overlooking the church and street to glare down on churchgoers and passers-by. In her own retelling of the story, the Shady Old Lady blog says that ‘the devil closest to the street apparently bears more than a passing resemblance to the unlucky rector’ as an extra twist. The oldest versions of the legend I have found date back to 1950, about fifty-three years after the building’s construction. One, from 22 February of that year, is in Peter Jackson’s compilation of London Evening News cartoons of London history and ephemera, titled London is Stranger than Fiction . It says: ‘Crouching high up on an office building in Cornhill, stone devils glare down at the church of St Peter, below. They were put there by an architect who had just lost a dispute with the church authorities and erected them as a small token of his displeasure.’
    William Kent’s 1951 book, Walks in London, says: ‘If we look across the road at this point we shall see high up on No.54 a devil in stone. A legend says a builder had a feud with the Church and told them to go to the devil. A curse was laid upon him, but defiantly he erected this figure.’
    In 1988, estate agents Baker Harris Saunders published details of 54-55 Cornhill when letting it, which included this urban legend as a piece of local colour. ‘Legend has it that following a disagreement between the owner of the land and the adjacent church […] the owner sought retribution by adorning the building with a crouching devil and a chimera.’ The truth of the legend is fudged and the leaflet gets the church wrong, claiming the dispute was with nearby St Michael’s Cornhill and not neighbouring St Peter’s.
    The idea of a curse only appears in Kent’s book. And was it the landowner, builder or architect who had the devils erected? Is the story true at all? The position of St Peter’s is a strange one, with the entrance to the church squashed between offices and a sandwich shop for city workers. To our twenty-first century eyes, having places of commerce built into sacred places seems odd but it was common in the City in earlier times. An image of nearby St Ethelburga’s Church on Bishopsgate, held at Bishopsgate Institute, shows shops built into the front of the church. At present, St Stephen’s Walbrook and St Mary Woolnoth each have a Starbucks built into their flanks.
    The Builder is a trade magazine for the building industry and lists every legal dispute to a building project, but does not mention St Peters or 54-55 Cornhill in its index over that period. The 1889–90 vestry minute book of St Peter Cornhill does list interactions between the church authorities and the architects of the current,