HIGHLIGHT: The Church of St Magnus the Martyr
I am standing on the left bank of the Thames beside London Bridge. To the south is Southwark, where Chaucer’s pilgrims began their journey to Canterbury, and the tomb of the murdered St Thomas Becket.
If I were to walk a little way south down Southwark Bridge Road I would find a galleried inn, the George, which is very similar to the Tabard, from which Chaucer’s 21 departed.
But I am going to turn my back on all that and, with a band of fellow pilgrims, walk north on a very different pilgrimage.
One that was a far more popular destination than Canterbury in the 16th century, but which – lacking a Chaucer to fix it in the popular consciousness down the centuries – has been eclipsed.
My pilgrimage is to Walsingham, and a shrine dedicated not to a slain priest, but to Mary, Christ’s mother. St Magnus the Martyr’s connection with pilgrimage is a profound one.
Half way across the old bridge was a chapel dedicated to St Thomas, administered from St Magnus. It appears in stained glass in the church, which was destroyed in the Fire of London and rebuilt by Wren. But there is something else that makes St Magnus the Martyr the perfect place to begin my pilgrimage. It holds a shrine to Our Lady of Walsingham.
St Magnus’s connection to Walsingham pilgrimage, severed at the Reformation, was re-established when a new rector, who followed the Anglo-Catholic tradition, came to the parish in 1921. Henry Fynes-Clinton was great friends with Alfred Hope Patten, who established the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham. Fynes-Clinton became a patron there, and organised pilgrimages starting at this church.
He also created a shrine to Our Lady of Walsingham in St Magnus’s, as part of extensive work to beautify the building, transforming it into a baroque church in the Catholic tradition.
Among the church’s admirers was the poet T.S. Eliot who writes, in The Wasteland, of its ‘inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’. Ample reason, then, to make this church the official start-point for the revived London to Walsingham Camino.
I am very fortunate that its rector, Fr Philip Warner, has agreed to send us on our way with the traditional prayers from the itinerary of the Walsingham Manual, a blessing for those beginning a journey. Then he sprinkles us with Holy Water and, now fully protected, we are on our way.
Find out more
For all you need to know in order to follow the London to Walsingham Camino, check out the guidebook
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