Forgotten for 200 years
Nicholas Hawksmoor was an English architect and leading figure of the English Baroque style of architecture in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. He worked alongside the principal architects of the time, Sir Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh, but his powerful style fitted awkwardly between Wren’s classicism and Georgian Palladianism. A monumental tome on London Churches 1630-1730, published in 1896, could only say of St Anne’s Limehouse that ‘it betrays Hawksmoor’s peculiarities’.
Maintenance of his masterpieces was neglected during the first half of the 20th century. By the 1950s, the first scholarly studies of Hawksmoor’s work sparked renewed interest. Although St Anne’s Limehouse survived the WWII blitz unscathed, a declining parish roll and rising repair bills caused the diocese to consider demolition of both Christ Church Spitalfields and St Anne’s in 1960!
Eventually, passionate campaigns raised awareness of the plight of several of Hawksmoor’s buildings. Christ Church led the way. It had been threatened by imminent structural collapse and the Hawksmoor Committee secured funds for its urgent repair. The result was a handsome restoration of the church and an associated music festival that made the most of its landmark position where the East End meets the City.
The astonishing variety of interpretations of Hawksmoor and his work during the 1970s and 1980s – whether by writers, architects, or artists who were drawing increasing attention to the East End – was due in many ways to the simple fact that for the first 200 years after his death Hawksmoor had been all but forgotten.
Nowadays there is renewed interest and St Anne’s hosts regular history evenings about Nicholas Hawksmoor’s extraordinary buildings.
Though overshadowed by Wren and Vanbrugh in both life and death, the buildings Hawksmoor designed independently are easily on a par with, and, for some observers exceed, the achievements of his more famous colleagues. The best known today are the six churches he built across London in the first decades of the 18th century. 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 up around them. They appear timeless and eternal, yet are continually spilling new secrets.
Includes some edited extracts from Nicholas Hawksmoor (c1661-1736) | Architectural Review
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Very little is known about Nicholas Hawksmoor (probably 1661 – 25 March 1736) until the age of 18, when he entered Sir Christopher Wren’s office. Over the 1680s and 1690s, he worked his way up from a lowly clerk to become Wren’s right-hand man, deeply involved in the final and critical stages of St Paul’s Cathedral: the dome and west-end towers.
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We have a tranche of Hawksmoor’s drawings which demonstrate an architectural imagination of stunning power and range, despite – or maybe because of – the fact he never left Britain. These appear, even now, startling in their originality, deliberately conflating perspective and elevation to render an allusive image of how buildings might appear in actuality; the architectural form emerges literally from the shadows created by the pale ink wash.
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St George in the East, Wapping
Hawksmoor also contributed to the design of some of the most notable buildings of the period, including St Paul's Cathedral, Wren's City of London churches, Greenwich Hospital, Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard.
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The final years of Hawksmoor’s life were ones of frustration and disappointment. He was the last survivor of the English Baroque – that extraordinary flowering of architectural invention that took place around the turn of the century. By the mid-1720s architectural taste had changed fundamentally, so that upon their completion his churches were met with immediate censure by Palladian critics.
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Elizabeth and Wayland Young spearheaded Hawksmoor’s revival in their book Old London Churches of 1956, launching a formidable campaign to restore his reputation and save threatened masterpieces of English baroque architecture. The poet John Betjeman took the chair, and members included T.S. Eliot, the singer Bud Flanagan, and the TV magnate Sidney Bernstein. Architects of every persuasion lent support, from the radical Alison and Peter Smithson to the arch-classicist Sir Albert Richardson. Exhibitions at the Arts Council in 1962 and a Whitechapel Gallery show in 1977 celebrating Hawksmoor and the English Baroque received wide publicity.
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Architects began to notice Hawksmoor, often re-conceiving his work in relation to their own ideas and practice. For Denys Lasdun, Hawksmoor was a sculptor-architect, obsessed by the materiality of stone; for Robert Venturi, he was a pioneer purveyor of architecture that revelled in complexity and contradiction; while for James Stirling, Hawksmoor was a powerful forerunner for his own vigorous compositions of ideas, references and geometries.
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Charles Dickens’ godfather Christopher Huffam lived near St Anne’s Limehouse.
T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922) mentions St Mary Woolnoth.
In the novel Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938), Algernon Stitch lives in London, in a ‘superb creation by Nicholas Hawksmoor’.
Iain Sinclair’s poem Nicholas Hawksmoor: His Churches, appears in his collection of poems Lud Heat: A Book of the Dead Hamlets (1975). Sinclair imagined forms of Theistic Satanism (with no documentary or historic evidence for this) in the architect's style of architectural composition.
Peter Ackroyd embellished the Satanic interpretation in his novel Hawksmoor (1985), in which the historical Hawksmoor is refigured as the fictional devil worshipper Nicholas Dyer, whilst the eponymous Hawksmoor is a twentieth century detective investigating a series of murders at Dyer's (Hawksmoor's) churches.
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell continued the theme in their graphic novel, From Hell, which speculates that Jack the Ripper‘s victims were satanically murdered in Hawksmoor's buildings. In the appendix, Moore reveals that he met with Sinclair on numerous occasions while developing the core ideas of the book, one of which was that the locations of the churches form a pentagram with ritual significance.