Museum of The Order of St John

The Gates of the Museum of the Order of St John
The window above the gate is the Council Chamber

I went up to London to collect some train tickets today and decided to make the trip worthwhile by fitting in a museum! This one had been on my list for a while, so I headed over to Farringdon to visit the Museum of The Order of St John (what we know today as St John's Ambulance). The guided tour had already left when I arrived but I was able to catch up with it and hadn't missed too much (just one room - The Chapter Hall - which I glanced at). The tour took in parts of the building you wouldn't see otherwise, like the Old Chancery where all the silver is kept. Did you know that silver is known for its anti-bacterial properties? That's why silver chalices are used in churches - all those lips at the communion wine! We ended up walking through the Council Chamber while a meeting was going on. Our guide told us before we entered everything to look out for because a 'walk through' was all we could do. Everything fell silent as we passed through! We re-assembled in a tiny corridor on the other side lined with prints of Hogarth's (who did a lot for the Order).

The tour then took us out of the building to admire the gates and we found out that Shakespeare came here to renew his licence and when the building was a tavern (The Jerusalem Tavern) Charles Dickens drank there. The original priory would have been huge with outer and inner courtyards.We moved across the Clerkenwell Road to the Priory Church which was bombed in the war. In fact someone in our party said his father saw the fire - the whole church roof was alight and fell in. The outer walls are rather bland but as we walked through the gates we came across a lovely cloister garden which contains medicinal herbs and plants, including a cousin of the St John's Wort plant, these days used for mild depression.

The inside of the church is vast and spacious. It has three original walls, but going by the pictures in the museum book the original church had pews and balconies and was more impressive. All the chairs have the symbol of the Order on them and on each side of the church are banners representing countries where the Order is established. We then went down to the crypt. This is the original and the space is currently being used to stage a play. What an atmosphere! It's dark and quite a large area with a couple of tombs and altars.

That was the end of the tour but I headed back to the museum to look at the galleries which sets out the history. It was a very interesting museum to visit. I had no real plans after that. I decided, once I had checked my map for a general direction, to put it away and go native walking wherever I felt like. This is a part of London I don't know so well. I walked down the Farringdon Road (one mass of building work for Crossrail) and was blown away by the bridge crossing the road. I ended up in Fleet Street and walked along The Strand. I ate my sandwich in Temple Gardens overlooking the river and caught the Tube from Embankment.

The great thing about London is that you can't really get lost. Just keep walking until you come to Tube station and then work out a route home!