COLLECTING STEEPLES: NICOLAS HAWKSMOOR'S LONDON CHURCHES
Among
my many peculiar enthusiasms for the six London churches of English Baroque
architect Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736). Why is difficult to pin down, a
combination of their diversity, eccentricity, excellence in execution, and the
strange mythos they have accumulated around themselves like iron filings around
magnets. Hawksmoor wasn’t quite as socially well-connected as his close
colleagues Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh, but he did share in
their genius. He had Wren’s sense for the articulation of volumes, and
something of Vanbrugh’s theatrical flamboyance, but the eccentric synthesis he
arrived at was all his own. For me they represent a kind of exotic “other”, a
historical architectural stratum I could never find in New Zealand; shades of
Lord Macaulay’s “when some
traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his
stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's”.
Part
of the fascination is that we know so little about him. We know he was born in
Nottinghamshire, East Drayton or Ragnall of yeoman stock. For a while he was a
legal clerk, and then went to London where Wren recognised his talents and took
him on, first as a clerk and later as an assistant. He worked with Wren on
Chelsea Hospital, St Paul's, Hampton Court
Palace and Greenwich Hospital, and with Vanbrugh on Blenheim Palace
and Castle Howard that stood in so splendidly for Waugh’s Brideshead in the
1981 television series. His college buildings at Oxford and Cambridge, and his
churches, however, are entirely his own inventions. They are a fascinating
counter-classicism that take the recognisable vocabulary of classical
architecture, but rearrange it ways that distinctly alien to the classical
canon.
The
rest is largely a mystery and has tended to attract speculation and the
outright fabulous within the mythology of London. Poet, novelist and
psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, Novelist and biographer of the city, Peter
Ackroyd, and graphic novel auteur Alan Moore all have portrayed Hawksmoor as
some sort of ritual magician carving out a gigantic pentagram across the city
with his churches. Colourful nonsense, but the facts are rather more mundane.
In 1666 the Great Fire gorged itself on the wooden muddle of London. The
population of the metropolis continued to grow. In 1711 parliament passed an
Act requiring the building of fifty new churches for London and Westminster. A
commission was established, which included Wren, Vanbrugh, and various clergy,
who in turn appointed Hawksmoor as one of two supervising architects.
That’s
not to say these authors are without their uses. Sinclair writes of the
churches, “Certain features are in common: extravagant design, massive, almost
slave-built, strength – not democratic. A strength that is not connected to
notions of ‘craftsmanship’ or ‘elegance’. They are not easy on the eye, and do
not enforce images of grace. Metaphors inflate at their own risk. The mind is
not led upwards to any starry nest.” This is true. The churches are not elegant
in the way Wren’s are, nor do they offer much in the way of anticipation of
salvation. They are very much terrestrial monuments of the material world.
Hawksmoor doesn’t strike me as having had much faith in angels.
In
the end only a dozen churches were completed. Of these, six were designed by
Hawksmoor alone, and two in collaboration with the architect John James. Of the
latter, St Luke Old Street and St John Horsleydown, the only obviously
Hawksmooresque features were the extraordinary spires – the former a fluted
Egyptian obelisk, and the latter a tapering column topped with a weathervane in
the shape of a comet. The latter was destroyed in the Blitz, but the former
still stands impressively.
A
visit to London in 2008 gave me ample opportunity to indulge my interests in
Hawksmoor’s six sister churches. I arrived in London by train from Brussels,
and upon exiting St Pancras Station, around the corner, my first Hawkesmoor
church found me: Christ Church, Spitalfields. Historically Spitalfields offered
haven to immigrants and refugees going back to those Huguenots who fled France
just before the churches were built. These days London gentrification has
tidied the area up with a bit of greenery. Christ Church was a revelation in
the flesh, tall and narrow, and given the pokey street location, difficult to
photograph. It’s a domineering presence built on ancient plague pits. It was
here that “Saucy Jack” performed his nefarious crimes. The monumental portico
is an intriguing variation on the Serlian window cribbed from the then newly
fashionable Palladio. This is topped by an intimation of a Roman triumphal
arch. The soaring point of the spire and the circular, porthole-like windows
gives the impression of a rocket ship about to launch.
Hawkesmoor’s
spires were intended as urban markers to let you know where you are. Making use
of London’s efficient public transport and following the curve of the Thames,
the two Georges (St George’s, Bloomsbury and St George in the East) are about
half an hour apart. St George’s, Bloomsbury was familiar from Hogarth’s
engraving Gin Lane (1751), brooding
disapprovingly over the debauchery of what was one of London’s worst slums, the
Rookery. The portico is based on that of the Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek in
Lebanon. The tower is striking; a steep-sided pyramid based on Pliny the
Elder’s description of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus (one of the seven wonders
of the ancient world) surrounded by writhing lions and unicorns (a reference to
the recent conclusion of the First Jacobite uprising) and topped by a rather
ridiculous-looking (if you squint) statue of King George I in fanciful Roman
pomp. Only a few blocks from the British Museum, it was quite convenient to get
to and wander around, gazing up vertiginously at the off-centre spire like a
barbarian in Rome.
The
fortress-like St George in the East in Wapping is an altogether more sedate
affair, but just as strange with its twin pepper pot towers and the
lantern-shaped main tower – a classicised version of the tower of the
Romanesque Ely Cathedral, each pilaster capped with a version of a round Roman
altar. This is the last of Hawksmoor’s churches, and quite probably his most
elegant. From last to first. St Alfege’s in Greenwich has, as one would expect,
an eye-catching Hawksmoor tower, but the lantern drum lacks his later
extravagance, as if the architect hadn’t quite gotten away from Master Wren’s
shadow.
St
Mary Woolnoth, a Starbucks up her arse, the only Hawksmoor church in the old
City of London, seems completely out of left field, built on the ruins of
Anglo-Saxon and Roman places of worship going back two millennia. At first it
seems to vanish into London greyness. Given the peculiar corner site, to modern
eyes there seems to be something almost proto-brutalist about the small,
blocky, fortress-like church’s imposing rusticated façade proudly thrust out
sans portico, the pared back decoration, the functionality of the openings
piercing the façade, and the two squat, square turrets on top like speakers on
a stereo. It lacks the grandeur and more obvious attractions of the other
churches, “with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine” (T. S. Eliot). It’s
possibly my favourite simply because it’s the most un-typical of all of them,
of any European baroque (maybe a Lequeu,
Ledoux, or Boullée) and quite intimidating. It was slated
for demolition even in the 1950s.
St
Anne’s Limehouse is far from the others, an orphan and the only surviving
Hawkesmoor church across the river. It’s the most awkward to get to, not easily
be incorporated into the usual circuits of puttering tourism. Special effort
must be made, but well worth it. It’s so close to the Thames and the docks, it
has always had nautical connections, particularly with the Royal Navy. The clock
on the tower is the highest of any in London, visible to the docks. The
elaborate tower, with its angular octagonal lantern (with just a hint of
Borromini’s undulations, though shorn of curves and made rectilinear) capped
with miniature pyramids, is topped by a time ball. I wonder if the architect
had in mind Varro’s description of the monumental Etruscan mausoleum of Lars
Porsena with its pyramids and bronze ball?
Hawksmoor’s
genius lay in recombining the trappings of antiquity. The bodies of the buildings
take their lessons from interpenetrating internal volumes of the Italian
Baroque and Masonic interpretations of the Temple of Solomon. The lineaments of
the spires are fundamentally those of Early English ecclesiastical Gothic
executed in classical details borrowed from the Roman, Greek and Egyptian, and
the symbolic forms of Freemasonry. When questioned about the overtly pagan
references, Hawksmoor claimed they were a reference to the simpler, purer
Christianity of the fourth century. Bollocks. Personally I think he merely
wished to signal to the greatest city in the world that he was the equal of the
architects of Rome, something out of the ordinary, an Ozymandius statement
“Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair”. His churches in the flesh certainly
confirmed that for me.
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