St Mary Staining

• St. Mary Staining is a lost church in Oat Lane, northeast of St. Paul's Cathedral.

• The first reference to it is to "Ecclesia de Staningehage" in 1189, probably deriving from a family from Staines holding land in the area of the church. It was destroyed in the Great Fire in 1666 and not rebuilt.

• Its parish was united to St. Michael Wood Street in 1670 and later to St. Alban Wood Street in 1894, and finally St. Vedast Foster Lane in 1954.

• Nikolaus Pevsner found a "few battered tombstones" in nearby Oat Lane.

• Since 1965 its site has been a City of London Corporation garden, containing a historic tree; an adjacent office block was built semi-circular so as not to damage it.