The present building on this site, located on St John Street just north of busy Clerkenwell Road, is not ancient, but the site itself was once part of the Priory of the Knights Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem, whose property extended south to where St John’s Gate still stands. It is one of several London churches impossible to date, being a mixture of several periods and not rebuilt entirely at any one time.
It was originally consecrated in 1185 by Heraclius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, who also consecrated the Temple Church. The building then consisted of a round chancel and a rectangular nave. This was burned to the ground in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. It was reconstructed in the early sixteenth century, partly destroyed during the Reformation, reopened as a private chapel in 1623, turned into a Presbyterian chapel in 1706, gutted by a mob in 1721 and made a parish church in 1723. In the twentieth century it was returned to its first use as Priory Church of the Order of St John. In 1941 it was burnt out by enemy bombs but was restored and rededicated in 1958.
The exterior of St John’s, Clerkenwell, with its pleasant memorial garden in the rear, is modern and gives no hint of its long and eventful history. The interior, however, is another story. In the main church one may see the colourful banners of the present-day Order of St John, and behind the altar is the famous fifteenth-century ‘Weston Triptych’ (two side wings only) painted by the school of Rodger van der Weyden. The crypt is an even greater surprise, being the original twelfth-century structure virtually unscathed. It shares the distinction, with the Chapel of St John the Evangelist in the Tower and St Bartholomew the Great, of being one of the three Norman church structures left in London.