St James Clerkenwell

The parish church of Clerkenwell, St James, which dates in its present form from 1792, is on the site of a nunnery chapel which was built in about 1100.  When Clerkenwell was green fields outside the City of London, an Augustinian nunnery, St Mary's, was built here by a Norman baron.  It became rich and influential but was eventually closed and plundered by Henry VIII, and the chapel became the parish church.  The wiggly old streets round here all follow the old boundaries of the nunnery and its two adjacent monasteries.