[1] Recorded since the 13th century, the church was destroyed in the Great Fire of London of 1666, then rebuilt to the designs of Sir Christopher Wren.

The earliest surviving reference to the church is in a document of 1216, although the discovery of a 10th-century wheel-headed cross in its former churchyard suggests a Saxon foundation.

The most significant event in the pre-Fire church was the marriage there, on 10 September 1662, of the Puritan divine Richard Baxter to Margaret Charlton.

The parish registers record the death of the church warden, Thomas Sharrow, in 1673, from falling in a vault in Paternoster Row and lying there undiscovered for 11 days.

More than twenty City churches were to be demolished over the next century but in 1840 the demolition was enough of a novelty to elicit protests from Edward John Carlos in The Gentleman's Magazine, and from the parish.

This left an irregular site on which to build, which Wren dealt with by rebuilding St Benet's to a decagonal plan.

It had a square dome surmounted by a bell cage, and, uniquely for a Wren church, a ball and cross, instead of a vane.

The backs of houses constructed in Sweetings Rents – a lane demolished in the rebuilding of the Royal Exchange - were partly built over the churchyard, and these were supported by pillars, forming a colonnade.