The Square Mile Churches
Square Mile Churches represents the historic parish and guild churches of the City of London, commonly known as the Square Mile after the small area the district covers. Before the Great Fire of 1666, over 100 parish churches stood within this one square mile; the fire burnt 87 of them to the ground. Sir Christopher Wren and his team rebuilt 52 churches in the decades that followed, and 38 of these historic churches remain active today, almost all Grade I-listed, with one Grade II* church among them, cared for collectively by the City Deanery of the Diocese of London.
The challenge
The Square Mile Churches had an existing website that needed renewing. The new site needed to launch as the hub for Wren300, a year-long programme marking the 300th anniversary of the death of Sir Christopher Wren, with its own events, school visits and a dedicated online exhibition, so at launch the design gave Wren300 significant prominence alongside the churches.
Once the anniversary year ended, the website needed to settle into its ongoing role representing 38 individual churches, each with its own community, events and identity, as a single, navigable experience, serving visitors, worshippers, schools and clergy with very different needs from the same platform, without carrying the weight of a campaign that had already finished.
The solution
We built a flexible template system, including dedicated page types for church listings, education content, flexible content pages and events, giving non-technical editors control over very different kinds of content across dozens of churches without needing developer support for every update.
An interactive map lets visitors find all 38 churches, switching between a map view and a list view. Clicking a church reveals its details and links through to further information and any upcoming events, connecting discovery and attendance in one journey.
For the Wren300 schools programme, we built a dedicated education section with session information, booking details and downloadable resources, which remains in active use today, giving teachers everything they need to book a class visit.
As part of Wren300, we built “A City Full of People”, an online companion to the pop-up exhibition that ran across four City churches in autumn and winter 2023. It remains live on the site today, organised into three sections: profiles of individual craftspeople and residents connected to the rebuilding, the histories of the four host parishes, and broader historical themes such as migration and social change in the City. Profiles were built as their own content type, so new ones can be added by the content team without developer involvement, while the parishes and themes stay fixed to the scope of the original exhibition.
The results
- A single website now represents 38 distinct churches and their communities, giving each one visibility within the whole while serving visitors, worshippers and schools from one platform.
- The site carried the Wren300 anniversary campaign at launch, and the content built for it, including the online exhibition and schools programme, remains live and in active use today rather than being retired once the campaign year ended.
- The Wren300 schools programme has grown from its original pilot into a structured, ongoing offering for the 2026 to 2027 school year, delivered in partnership with the Temple Bar Trust.
- “A City Full of People” remains a permanent, growing online resource, long after the physical exhibition panels came down.
Visit: squaremilechurches.co.uk
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