St George's, Bloomsbury

IT may seem a contrarian’s choice to pick St George’s, Bloomsbury, London W1, as Nicholas Hawksmoor’s masterpiece ahead of his East End wonder, Christ Church, Spitalfields. The latter, the subject of a high-profile conservation campaign in the 1980s, has been variously described by architectural writers as ‘the grandest’, ‘most stirring’ or ‘stupendous’ of Hawksmoor’s creations.

- Nicholas Hawksmoor

In fact, each of the six churches he designed after the Act of 1711, which authorised the building of new places of worship for London’s expanding population, carries a fascination of its own. Most importantly, they still function as places of worship, but, for the casual visitor, it is their exteriors that leave a lasting impression. As Owen Hopkins, author of From the Shadows: The Architecture and Afterlife of Nicholas Hawksmoor, has written: ‘Colossal in scale, of brilliant white stone, stark and austere in design yet resonant with allusions to architecture distant in time and place, these churches still dominate their areas even as the city has grown around them.’

South of the Thames, St Alfege, Greenwich, on which construction work finished in 1714, was the first, its demonstration of Hawksmoor’s capacity for overwhelming massiveness somewhat offset by John James’s graceful tower. The other five are north of the river. Of his three Stepney churches, St Anne’s, Limehouse, is cliff-like and rather sinister. Once standing in fields running down to the Thames, for years this giant structure also served as a shipping navigation point. St George-in-the-East, at the bottom of Cannon Street Road, is similarly eerie, with creepy octagonal turrets and a pervading air of gloom.

Discovering a genius

For years, Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661– 1736) was damned as the low-born assistant of Sir Christopher Wren and Sir John Vanbrugh (he assisted in the design of Wren’s St Paul’s and his City churches, and of Vanbrugh’s Castle Howard in North Yorkshire) and an inferior architect. His six London churches were the most important body of work undertaken in his own name.