At 12.30pm last Friday, computer programmer Rowan Laurence, 32, saw a strange sight on Brick Lane ”” “as is quite normal down there,” he says. The sight in question was a well-dressed man in dark skinny jeans and brown brogues carrying a large wooden crucifix on his back, striding under the railway flyunder in the direction of Aldgate East. As is also quite normal down there, Laurence snapped what he saw and uploaded it to Instagram, captioning the picture “Jesus Lives”.
Two hours later, the good people of St Matthew’s, the lovely 18th-century church 10 minutes’ walk away in Bethnal Green, were in a panic. Their beautiful and historic altar cross, installed in the church after it was bombed on the first day of the Blitz in 1940, was gone. There was no trace of further damage in the church, nor anything else stolen, so the Rev Kevin Scully emailed his parishioners for help. By 4.15pm a local blogger informed of the theft had seen Laurence’s image from Brick Lane and a parishioner sent it to the vicar….