St Dunstan-in-the-West and Sweeney Todd

Look up at the clock jutting out over Fleet Street. It dates from 1671 and is said to have been the first public clock in London with a minute hand. In the little temple above, two giants, often identified as Gog and Magog, strike the bells with their clubs every hour. In 1828, when the old church was pulled down to widen the street, the Marquess of Hertford carried the clock off to his villa in Regent's Park. Lord Rothermere brought it back in 1935.

1A queen in stone

Above one of the doors stands a statue of Elizabeth I dated 1586. It once stood on Ludgate, one of the gates in the city wall, and is thought to be one of the few images of the queen carved in her lifetime.

2The barber of Fleet Street

And now, the legend. The story goes that Sweeney Todd had his barber's shop next to this church. His customers sat in a chair that tipped them into the cellar, where Mrs Lovett turned the bodies into filling for her pies in Bell Yard.

Sweeney Todd was born in 1846 in “The String of Pearls”, a serialised penny dreadful. No document proves he ever existed.

In 1979 the writer Peter Haining argued that the barber was real, but researchers have found neither the trial nor the execution he described. Todd is a child of the Victorian sensational press, and Fleet Street was for centuries the street of newspapers.

3What to look for

• The two giants on the clock, with their clubs.
• The statue of Elizabeth I, to the left of the entrance.
• The signs of old newspapers on the fronts along Fleet Street.