Nicholas Hawksmoor
Hawksmoor began as Wren’s assistant and worked with Vanbrugh on Blenheim. His own London churches are heavy, idiosyncratic and full of ancient quotations, and he designed the west towers of Westminster Abbey.
Nicholas Hawksmoor was born in 1661 or 1662 in Nottinghamshire and came to London as a young man, where he became Christopher Wren’s clerk and assistant. He worked under Wren on the building of St Paul’s, Greenwich Hospital and Hampton Court and learned the trade in practice. He never travelled abroad but studied antiquity and the Renaissance closely through books. He also worked with John Vanbrugh, first on Castle Howard and then on Blenheim Palace, where he directed the work after Vanbrugh had been dismissed.
When Parliament decided in 1711 to build fifty new churches in London, Hawksmoor was given six of them to design. Christ Church Spitalfields, St Anne’s Limehouse, St George in the East, St Mary Woolnoth, St George’s Bloomsbury and St Alfege in Greenwich are heavy buildings with powerful towers, in which he combined Gothic, classical and Egyptian elements. St George’s Bloomsbury has a tower modelled on the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, crowned by a statue of George I. He also designed parts of All Souls College in Oxford and the west towers of Westminster Abbey.
Hawksmoor died in 1736. In the 18th and 19th centuries his churches were thought too idiosyncratic, but in the 20th century he has been appreciated anew, not least for his ability to work with mass, light and shadow. The churches of east London also became part of a literary mythology around him. Today he is regarded as one of the most original English architects, and his west towers on Westminster Abbey show that he could unite Gothic and classicism.