The church that’s hosted the Virgin Mary, Benjamin Franklin and Hugh Grant

There is only one place in the world that has played host to both the Virgin Mary and Benjamin Franklin, and it is in trouble. At St Bartholomew the Great, London’s oldest parish church, the beams of the Lady Chapel are rotting. Rebuilt in the 14th century, the present chapel stands on the site of a much older structure. It was here, sometime in the late 12th century, that a monk named Hubert was visited by the Virgin. She was not best pleased; the praises offered to her, she complained, were no longer up to scratch. Hubert hurried to relay this to his fellow monks. All of them, from that time on, made sure to raise ‘a readier praise of her name’. Such was the impact of what remains, to this day, the only recorded appearance of Christ’s mother in the capital.

The centuries passed. In 1724, the young Benjamin Franklin, newly arrived in London, was looking for a job. He found one as a typesetter in a printer’s shop. The shop, once upon a time, had been the Lady Chapel of St Bartholomew’s. Much had happened to the church since the Virgin’s appearance to Hubert. The priory of which it was once a part had been dissolved in the Reformation. The majority of the monastic buildings had been demolished. The Lady Chapel had become a private residence. By the time that Franklin came to work there it was housing a dancing master as well as the shop. The chapel was to remain in private hands for a further century and a half. Only in 1885 was it bought back by the church. Only in 1897 was it finally restored to worship.

Today, the Lady Chapel needs £280,000 to save it from perhaps terminal damage.