St Olave's has a modest exterior in the Perpendicular Gothic style. with a somewhat squat square tower of stone and brick, the latter added in 1732. It is famous for the macabre 1658 entrance arch to the churchyard, which is decorated with grinning skulls.Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner, London: the City Churches (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), . The novelist Charles Dickens was so taken with this that he included the church in his book of sketches The Uncommercial Traveller, renaming it "St Ghastly Grim".Charles Dickens, "Chapter XXIII: The City of the Absent", The Uncommercial Traveller (New York City: Hurd and Houghton, 1869), page 329.
