What if one of London’s most beautiful cafés was tucked away inside a 17th-century church?
In the heart of the City of London, beneath the extraordinary plaster fan vaulting of St Mary Aldermary, you’ll find HOST Café and it has become one of my favourite places in London. The church has stood on this site for centuries. Destroyed in the Great Fire of London, it was rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren in the 1680s unusually, not in the fashionable Classical style, but as a remarkable celebration of its older medieval Gothic roots.
Today, amongst all that history, you can sit on a pew with a cup of coffee and a slice of frankly dangerous chocolate-chip banana cake. But what I love about HOST is that it isn’t simply a beautiful café. St Mary Aldermary is still a living church: a place of worship, community, conversation and welcome, sitting amid the extraordinary bustle of the modern City. Old London and new London, sharing the same space.
These are the places I love finding — corners of the city where history isn’t locked away behind glass, but is still being lived in.
📍 HOST Café, St Mary Aldermary, Watling Street, City of London
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