The earliest surviving reference to the church is in a document from the reign of Henry III, as “St Matthew in Fridaistret”.

In 1631, Hugh Myddleton, the entrepreneur who had engineered the New River to supply water to London (and which still survives between Hertfordshire and Stoke Newington) was buried in St. Matthew Friday Street.

After Laud's fall and execution, Burton published “The Grand Impostor Unmasked, or a detection of the notorious hypocrisie and desperate impiety of the late Archbishop (so styled) of Canterbury, cunningly couched in that written copy which he read on the scaffold”.

[1] In his diary entry on the day the Act came into effect, Sunday 24 August 1662, Samuel Pepys recorded a visit to his uncle's house for dinner, and recounted:Among other things they tell me that there hath been a disturbance in a church in Friday Street; a great many young people knotting together and crying out "Porridge" often and seditiously in the church, and took the Common Prayer Book, they say, away; and, some say, did tear it; but it is a thing which appears to me very ominous.

[2] The parish was combined with that of nearby St Peter, Westcheap which was not rebuilt, its site being retained as a graveyard, which survives today as a public space off Cheapside.

[3] The Commissioners responsible for rebuilding the churches after the Fire contemplated moving St Matthew's to a more convenient location.

Due to the move of population from the City to the suburbs in the second half of the nineteenth century, the church became redundant and was demolished in 1885 under the Union of Benefices Act 1860.

The parish was joined to St Vedast alias Foster, the site sold for £22,005, and the proceeds used to build St. Thomas Finsbury Park.

The reredos, by Edward Pearce, was acquired by the London decorating firm of White, Allom & Company, who suggested to Margaret Greville (the Honorable Mrs. Ronald Greville: 1863–1942), a noted society hostess, that it should be rebuilt in the hall at Polesden Lacey, her house at Great Bookham, near Dorking in Surrey – where it remains.