But “Safety first” was a motto with King Edward, he wanted no more wooden scaffoldings. A stone platform was built, just in front of the old church of St. Mary-le-Bow (making it extremely dark on the street side), from which he and his court could view the tournaments with minds at peace; for centuries this was the regular royal stand, whenever there was a procession or other fine doings in the City. Look at Bow Church, that glory of Cheapside, the work of Sir Christopher Wren, and, in the stone gallery running round the graceful steeple, you will see how, ever mindful of tradition, he commemorated this fact when he built his new tower to flank the pavement adjoining the site of the old grand-stand. When I last went into Bow Church I chatted with the lady who was engaged in scrubbing the floor, and she told me the curious fact that in this English church in an English city, with its memories stretching through the ages (for it is built on the site of a much older one and you may still see the fine old Norman crypt), the Russians in London were then assembling, Sunday by Sunday, for a service in their own ritual, St. Mary’s congregation amiably going to another church near by. The City Churches that were missed so sorely, after the Great Fire, by the merchants, tradesmen, shopkeepers, apprentices, with their families, maids and servants, who lived all round about them and dutifully worshipped there, now stand empty and neglected. Here and there, as in the tiny fourteenth-century church of St. Ethelburga’s in Bishopsgate Street, the magnet of eloquent wisdom and sincerity draws men and women from all over London to worship, so that the seats are never empty, but in the majority of the City churches, a perfunctory service connotes a perfunctory congregation of caretakers and their wives, inhabitants of a quarter that is only populated in the working week-day hours. The best time to see any of the City churches is at the lunch hour, when they are sure to be open. In many of them short musical services are then held. I know few odder sensations than to walk in the City on a Sunday morning and hear all the sweet bells of the fifty-odd churches calling to prayer in the silence of the solitary streets. Practical people would pull the half of them down and devote the money from the sale of their sites to other much-needed religious purposes. But, even if these little churches no longer serve their original object, they are still shrines of the past, each one with some special memory, some special charm, and typical all together of a great phase of English architecture.