
Few churches in London, or anywhere I would imagine, carry such a grim image over their entrance as St Olave’s in Hart Street. Look up and you are greeted with not a very cheerful threesome of skulls gazing down at you; their hollow eye sockets sending a chilling warning to anyone who enters. Not exactly a warm welcome!
Why they are here is a bit of a mystery. St Olave’s is one of the few surviving medieval churches in the city and the arched gates were erected in 1658. Seven years later London was stricken by the Black Death plague and the city’s churchyards, like the one here at St Olave’s, were used to bury the victims in plague pits. Maybe the skulls bear testament to those awful days.
Later, one of the country’s finest writers Charles Dickens, was so taken by the grinning skulls, that he referred to the church in one of his books as the ‘St Ghastly Grim.’

The church survived the Fire of London because Samuel Pepys, London’s famous diarist, was a parishioner and ordered wooden houses near the church to be torn down to create a fire break. He and his wife are buried in the church. Unfortunately, St Olave’s failed to escape the Blitz during the Second World War, having to be extensively restored.

Incidentally, the name St Olave is a tribute to the Norwegian King Olaf, a ‘good’ Viking, who sided with Anglo Saxon England against the (bad) Danish Vikings. He was credited with saving London from the marauding Danish who were charging over London Bridge to attack London. His solution? Pull the wooden bridge down and let the Danes drown, thus saving the city. It is said that the nursery rhyme ‘London Bridge is falling down’ stems from this act.