THE DUCHESS OF CORNWALL WILL ATTEND A COMMEMORATIVE SERVICE AT ST BRIDE’S CHURCH
TUESDAY 29TH OCTOBER 2019
The Duchess of Cornwall, Patron, the Guild of St Bride, will attend a service to commemorate journalists, camera-crew and support staff who have lost their lives on the frontline.
St Bride’s Church is located on Fleet Street and considered by many to be the spiritual home for journalists throughout the world. The church contains the Journalists’ Altar, commemorating those who lost their lives reporting the news.
The church hosts an annual service commemorating journalists, camera-crew and support staff who have lost their lives on the frontline. This year the service is entitled “Bearing Witness” and serves to remind us that there are many journalists who are missing or held captive, and many who continue to report at great risk.
An Address will be given by Photographer and Filmmaker, Paul Conroy, and Readings will be given by other senior figures across the media industry. The Service will be led by Canon Alison Joyce, Rector of St Bride’s and attendees are expected to include the families of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese investigative journalist murdered in 2017 and Christopher Allen, a British-American journalist murdered in South Sudan in 2017.
Her Royal Highness became Patron of the Guild of St Bride in 2012 and has attended the service three times before, in 2017, 2012 and 2010.
Following the service Her Royal Highness will meet families of those who have lost their lives before attending a reception at The Humble Grape.
St Bride’s Church
St Bride’s is the church of the media and the press. To enter its doors is to step into 2,000 years of history, which had begun with the Romans some six centuries before the name of St Bride, daughter of an Irish prince, even emerged from legend to become associated forever with the site.
The story of St Bride’s is inextricably woven into the history of the City of London. By the time the Great Fire of 1666 left the church in ruins, a succession of churches had existed on the site for about a millennium, and the area had already assumed its unique role in the emergence of English printing. It took nine years for St Bride’s to re-appear from the ashes under the inspired direction of Christopher Wren, but for the next two-and-a-half centuries it was in the shadow of the church’s unmistakeable wedding-cake spire that the rise of the British newspaper industry into the immensely-powerful Fourth Estate took place.
Then, in 1940, St Bride’s fell victim once again to flames as German incendiary bombs reduced Wren’s architectural jewel to a roofless shell. This time 17 years elapsed before rebuilding was completed, although a series of important excavations in 1953 amid the skeletal ruins, led by the medieval archaeologist Professor W. F. Grimes, came up with extraordinary results, uncovering the foundations of all six previous churches on the site.
