I WAS in London the other day, speaking to a group of American pastors at St Martin-in-the-Fields. After a good lunch in the church’s wonderful crypt-café, they bundled me into an Uber to get me back to Liverpool Street Station in time for my train to Norwich. It is very rare for me to drive or be driven through London, as I almost always use the Tube, where I have nothing but the repetitive ads, or, much better, the endlessly various faces of my fellow passengers, each with their stories, their sorrows, and their joys, to observe.

This time, I was gazing out of the window of the Uber while the City of London rolled past me. So it was that I caught my first glimpse of St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe. What a dedication! Naturally, my mind turned to Narnia, and I nearly stopped the Uber to search for the Wardrobe in the hope that I might soon be pushing past fur coats that give way to snow-covered fir trees, and, kindling its friendly light in the distance, a lone lamp post.

Sadly, the church is not named after that storied wardrobe, but after another one: a royal wardrobe that has its own fascinating history, and, like the Narnian one, was closely bound up with the making and the robing of kings and queens. This royal wardrobe was a house originally acquired in 1359 by King Edward III and used to store not only all his state and ceremonial robes, but also those of the whole royal household — ambassadors, ministers, and Knights of the Garter — and for storing and keeping safe all the great tapestries, cloths, and hangings used on state occasions, coronations, and royal funerals.

What a wonder it must have been to move among those precious and beautiful things, all hand-stitched and embroidered, silks and cloth of gold shimmering with pearls and precious stones! And there, too, they kept the royal arms and armour: heraldically emblazoned shields, bright swords, breastplates, and helmets. Like the original church, the Wardrobe itself, with all its contents, went up in flames in the Great Fire of London. Sic transit gloria mundi, one might be tempted to say. But a phoenix can rise from the ashes, and after death there is resurrection.

So it was for this church, though not for the Wardrobe. First mentioned c.1170, St Andrew’s had stood for half a millennium: 500 years of patient prayer, of eucharistic presence, of witness to the death and resurrection of our Saviour, before it went up in flames in 1666.

But help was at hand in the form of Sir Christopher Wren, and it rose again, in beautiful, restrained, classic simplicity, in 1695. Again, the church resumed its long witness, and, again, it was consumed by fire, this time in the Blitz; and, yet again, it rose from the ashes, as did the nation, to be built up and fully restored in the last century.

And what of the Wardobe? Perhaps this church is, and always was, like every Christian church, the real wardrobe, indeed the royal wardrobe: the place where we come in our spiritual nakedness and poverty, “as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved”, to be clothed again with ‘compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience’; to be clothed, again, in Christ.