St Martin-in-the-Fields
St Martin-in-the-Fields is a Church of England parish church dedicated to Saint Martin of Tours, and it anchors the north-east corner of Trafalgar Square. Long before the square existed, this was farmland and fields beyond the London Wall, yet a church stood here from at least the medieval period. The earliest surviving reference dates to 1222, when a dispute over control was decided by the Archbishop of Canterbury in favour of Westminster. Underneath the current story, there is an even older one: excavations in 2006 uncovered burials dating to around A.D. 350, including a sarcophagus burial from about A.D. 410—at a burial site outside Roman city limits, unusually far west-south-west of Ludgate. By the 18th century, the medieval and Jacobean fabric was near failure. James Gibbs designed the present neoclassical church in 1722–1726, commissioned for a parish that had become increasingly important as Westminster’s population grew.
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