St George's Church Bloomsbury

This church in central London is one of six designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor between 1710 and 1730 in response to the need for new churches in the growing city of London. Hawksmoor was a Nottinghamshire man and was in his fifties when he designed these buildings having begun his architectural career as a clerk in Wrens office at the age of 18. He worked on all the major buildings of the age from St Paul's to Blenheim Palace, but only a few attributed to his hand alone survive. They display a prodigious talent, using forms and motifs from Classical architecture in a completely free and original way. Some have argued that he was the creative force behind both Wren and Vanburgh. His mausoleum at Castle Howard is a work of genius.

St George's Bloomsbury has an unusual plan due to the tightness of the site and has the nave orientated at right angles to the superb corinthian portico. The man atop the ziggurat spire is George I. In this drawing I have demolished the adjoining Victorian buildings which ruin the church's setting with their overbearing scale, and replaced them with buildings from the surrounding streets that were its contemporaries.