The church, located near Smithfield Market, is London’s oldest parish church and was founded in 1123.
It is marking the 300th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s first visit to London with a series of talks and events.
The Lady Chapel of St Bartholomew the Great was separated from the rest of the church because of the Reformation. In 1725 it was home to the printing shop of master printer Samuel Palmer.
Franklin had been an apprentice printer in the US. Dissatisfied with his lot, he came to the UK in his late teens, arriving on Christmas Eve 1724.
“Without money or influential friends he crossed the Atlantic to learn from the leading printers in London, which was the centre of the print trade in the English-speaking world,” Great St Barts explained.
Palmer gave Franklin his first job in London, and he worked for him as a compositor.
“He set the type for the third printing of Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated, a controversial theological work which influenced Enlightenment thought in both Britain and America.”
An example of the book will also be on display.
A working replica hand press of the type of “English common press” used by Franklin is on loan from the University of Reading, and has been installed in the Lady Chapel. Its design is similar to the press used by printing industry founding father Johannes Gutenberg.
The original Franklin Press is in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington.
Bookings can be made to see the press in operation on selected dates during February and in early March. Tickets are free.
Great St Barts said that some of the leading hand press printers in the country would be involved with the demonstrations, printing commemorative broadsheets and keepsakes with some items available for purchase afterwards.
Franklin was a polymath and became a famous man of letters.
Described as being “among the most influential intellectuals of his time”, he went on to become one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, and was a signatory to the Declaration of Independence he helped draft.
He was also the country’s first postmaster general.
A number of talks looking at different aspects of Franklin’s life are also being held.
