St Nicholas Cole Abbey is a church in the City of London located on what is now Queen Victoria Street.

Recorded from the twelfth century, the church was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666 and rebuilt by the office of Sir Christopher Wren.

The incumbent rector, Thomas Sowdley, had obtained a licence to marry during the reign of Edward VI and was deprived of his living as a result.

Snowdel, [i.e. Sowdley] whom they nicknamed 'Parson Chicken', was carted through Cheapside, for assoiling an old acquaintance of his in a ditch in Finsbury field; and was at that riding saluted with chamber-pots and rotten eggs".

A century later, the living of St Nicholas Cole Abbey was owned by Colonel Francis Hacker, a Puritan who commanded the execution detail of Charles I.

[3] Charles II promised the site to the Lutheran community but lobbying prevented this from being granted and the parish was combined with that of St Nicholas Olave, a nearby church also destroyed but not rebuilt.

In 1737, the early Methodist leader George Whitefield preached a sermon on "Profane swearing in church" at St Nicholas Cole Abbey.

Smoke generated by underground trains so blackened the exterior that in the late 19th century, the church became known as "St Nicholas Cole Hole Abbey".

Shuttleworth was a Christian Socialist who installed a bar, established a prodigious musical programme and made the church a centre for debate.

This had an effect, as by 1891 St Nicholas Cole Abbey had the largest congregation of any City church, numbering up to 450 worshippers on a Sunday evening.

A contemporary vicar commented: "In St. Nicholas Cole Abbey there is good preaching and divine worship is also carried out in the most reverential manner.

[5] In 2006, the Church of England announced that St Nicholas Cole Abbey would become a national centre for Religious Education: the Culham Institute, a Church of England educational body which promotes and develops RE in schools, would move its headquarters to St Nicholas Cole Abbey from Oxford.

In 2014 the building reopened as the home of the St Nicholas Cole Abbey Centre for Workplace Ministry,[6] with a supporting cafe known as The Wren.

[8] The parish is within the conservative evangelical tradition of the Church of England, and it has passed resolutions to reject the ordination of women and/or female leadership.

[10] In March 2023, after the church's General Synod approved the principle of blessings for same-sex couples, the Senior Minister of St Nicholas, along with the guild vicar of St Botolph's, Aldersgate, announced they had established a new "deanery chapter", separate from the official diocesan structures, for clergy who felt "compelled to resist all episcopal leadership from the House of Bishops".

[13] On the northwestern corner of the church is a square tower surmounted by a lead spire in the shape of an upside down octagonal trumpet.