St John's Churchyard, Wapping

St John's Churchyard, Wapping, East London

Visited October 2015

Walk along Wapping High Street and across the road from the Town of Ramsgate pub is a rather nondescript little park, with no signs indicating what it's called. Go inside and it's mainly grass with a few mature trees, some benches and a lot of pigeons. But look more closely and you'll spot a few rather weathered table tombs among the grass, and gravestones leaning agains the wall in two corners. This is the former churchyard of St John's, Wapping. The church itself was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War - all that remains is the tower, and that's been incorporated into a modern block of flats.

A small plaque high up on the wall notes that this churchyard was the burial place of Thomas Rainsborough, a colonel in the New Model Army who was killed in the Seige of Pontefract in 1648 during the English Civil War. No trace of his grave remains today.

Next to the church tower on Scandrett Street is a building dating to 1760 which used to house the St John's Charity School, and which has a sculpture on teh fron showing a boy and a girl in their school uniforms.