The Hawksmoor Churches have become minor cultural icons over the last half century, despite being almost forgotten since their construction in the early 1700s, but perhaps not in the way their creator, Nicholas Hawksmoor, may have wished. Since Iain Sinclair's poem Nicholas Hawksmoor: His Churches first espoused the notion of some satanic connection others have picked up on and expanded the theme, notably in Alan Moore's From Hell and in Peter Ackroyd's post modern novel Hawksmoor. It is from the latter that I became aware of the churches and intrigued by the tremendous power they had over the writer and his unfortunate characters.
So it is I recently completed a rather different sort of pilgrimage to explore these apparently arcane creations dotted throughout London's East End, from St. Alfege's at Greenwich in the South to St. George's in Bloomsbury. Exploring the city on foot reveals the power of these structures even now when most are surrounded on all sides by ever taller buildings and their fundamental grandeur is still undiminished by man's constant expansion towards the heavens. Their spires, which once denoted the promise of safety and worship, now became beacons for the architecturally curious as they appear and disappear between more modern titans of brick and glass. They still rise into view, filling what space is afforded them between cramped houses and businesses and narrow streets. The sheer confidence of their power cascades down from their towers, each quite different but sharing a common power to enthral and silence even the most casual of viewer.
Their varying characters react to the changing landscape of London and its teeming inhabitants, seeming to capture the spirit of the place in all its guises. St. Alfege's is perhaps the calmest of the six, an impression helped by its now curiously backwards composition. The main road passes by the rear of the church with its serene columns and large stained glass window whose true beauty is only revealed to the worshippers within. Meanwhile its ornate tower and frontage is turned away from the casual spectators as they pass by and instead faces back towards the church's grounds and school. Even this tower when fully revealed has a solemnity to it uncommon to Hawksmoor's other more challenging designs. This, perhaps more simplistic, creation slots into Greenwich with a distinct ease, reflective of the slower pace of this tranquil part of London. In Hawksmoor's time this would have been a place of recuperation and reflection as injured sailors recovered in the new Royal Hospital for Seamen whilst man watched the stars from the Royal Observatory. Perhaps Hawksmoor was also aware of the placement of the church near to one of the many great triumphs of his master, Sir Christopher Wren. The Royal Naval College looks out onto the Thames with supreme mastery and even a work of Hawksmoor's true power may have struggled to live beside it. Whatever the cause, St Alfege's is a place of welcoming worship, where all feel free to saunter inside its gates and place themselves in His domain. A place of worship is perhaps the simplest of the purposes of a church but it is not the only reason for their existence nor is it the only face of the church as an institution.
Hawksmoor's St. Alfege came to be after a previous church on the site was too badly damaged to be repaired. Its parishioners petitioned the crown for help and from that movement came legislation to build 50 new churches throughout London. However, only twelve were ever built and the six Hawksmoor churches make up half of that quota. The churches were deemed necessary in response to new religious threats that had rushed into the city after the Great Fire, sweeping up lost congregations into new orders. Anxious for their drifting flock, the masters of government deemed new churches a priority to provide places of shelter and worship. Hawksmoor may have been aware of the lost souls and degrading power of the national religion, but perhaps he felt the people of Greenwich needed no such allures as their campaign had created the rush of building, hence the calm, inviting style. However, other areas of London needed to be reminded of the raw power of the church, perhaps none more so than the notorious squalid lands of Spitalfields.
Christ Church Spitalfields is less a church than a searing imposition of will upon the surrounding area. Soaring above all around, it demands attention and plunges its neighbours into the metaphorical and literal shade. The narrow façade shoots skyward, turning into a steeple pointing towards heavenly bodies as if it is an eternal reminder of His presence. The surrounding area had long been a slum area, and was now home to the establishment's permanent bête noire, mass immigration, as Huguenots ploughed into London. Its poverty led to desperation and perceived moral decline, long held historical rumours of thieves and prostitutes mixed with the religious threat of new chapels built by the French immigrants. A hundred and fifty years in the future Jack the Ripper would plunge the area into terror and grimy mythology but even in Hawksmoor's time it was notorious. Nowadays it is a new sort of godlessness as the casual urban youth, ironic, detached and cynical, meanders about in the faux decay and measured detachment of modern cool. Hawksmoor's call to order and God stands watchfully over the low market stalls its power undiminished but its influence waning. His harsh walls and geometric shapes do not offer comfort, only a calculated kind of perfection, an icon of the possible if one devotes to God. Rising out of the squalor it was designed to send a message to all, that ascension is achievable, even from the foetid earth and rancid meat of an 18th century marketplace. Its clean, white stone contrasting with the surrounding mud and filth. The church as an ideal, as a hope, as a saviour.
Where, perhaps in Hawksmoor's view, the people of Spitalfields needed enforced inspiration, the smallest of his churches represented a very different view. The only Hawksmoor church within the City of London, St Mary Woolnoth, is crowded on all sides by old and modern monuments to economic advancement. In its day it was overshadowed by the Royal Exchange, and soon after its consecration, the Bank of England. Now it sits above a tube station that at once stage threatened to demolish it, on one side of the church a lift to the platforms and an inevitable coffee shop have been built flush to its original walls. Hawksmoor responded to these threats and the tiny allotted space with an altogether different style of church. St Mary Woolnoth appears almost as a fort with high ramparts jutting into the sky. Its compact, box like shape implying solidity and untold depths of resilience. Built as the power of finance was becoming clear it is perhaps designed to be a last redoubt for religion in the square mile where economic imperative frequently triumphs over moral direction. In its limited space Hawksmoor packs in feature after feature, not the tall, silent walls of Christ Church Spitalfields but an ever more complex mesh of lines, pillars, arches and windows. So often stuck in the shadows it takes on a brooding countenance, watching, waiting, unmoving as the City's perpetual state of flux speeds round it. Once St Mary Woolnoth has your eye it will not let go, each feature leads into another. Constantly changing parameters as your eye is drawn to its distinctly unecclesiastical peak. No spire or steeple for the City, it would soon be outmatched by more dominant neighbours. Instead its square towers suggest there is a force to this church, a sense it will never leave. This church feels ready for battle with its monetarist surroundings and represents the church as defender of faith in the face of the ideological modernity of the City.
While St Mary Woolnoth finds Hawksmoor in combative mood, St George's church in Bloomsbury finds him at his most whimsical. The front of the church is an almost Roman-esque design of tall columns supporting a distinctly temple like roof. Designed to give the gentry of the day an alternative to other local churches principally located in slums, St George's is a stately, regal presence, now partially hidden by office blocks. This church is not about power, or even much about God, as much as about societal expectations of the church. Impressively ornate, the frontage of the church is back from the street, allowing it to be properly appreciated and this feels like a church designed for proper appreciation, and it does not dominate or impose like its siblings. This theme of societal ideals and regal solemnity extends to the steeple, one of Hawksmoor's most unusual creations. A stepped tower inspired by Roman architecture is beset with figures of lions and unicorns, seemingly contesting for space, while at its peak stands George I in Roman dress, watching over his city with a patrician's gaze. It is one of Hawksmoor's more bravura moments but it is in keeping with the lofty ideals of the church. It seems to represent the building's pre-occupation with the social order of the church, the monarch as literal head of the church with the power to look down upon all who worship there. Perhaps one of the reasons this church feels so out of step with its current surroundings, particularly compared with his other works, is that this social structure no longer comes from the church. Whilst his other buildings still have a modern, relevant power to them, St George's Bloomsbury feels more like a relic of a forgotten time, a place to think about what was, not ponder what is and what will be. In that respect the face of the church it represents has shifted, once it was the social order of the church, now it is the church as link to the past. One cannot look upon its set columns and restrained façade without reflecting on the church through time as the constant line in a mismatched frenzy of history. This is the church at its most solid and comforting but also its least relevant.
If St George Bloomsbury detaches the church from religion and God by marshalling it into a social order and hierarchy, the St Anne's Limehouse wallows in the spirituality at Christianity's core. Something ethereal and otherworldly seeps out of the very stone of the walls and the ground of the churchyard. Only adding to the air of a mystery is a pyramid that was originally destined for the top of the church but which now sits, isolated and without context in the grounds. It is no wonder that this is the source of so much of Hawksmoor's recent association with the demonic and malevolent. There is an air of the dead that makes itself known as you wonder around the grounds kept in shadow by bending, twisting trees. Unlike his other churches St Anne's feels sunk into the ground, as if it its being gradually reclaimed by the former worshippers buried all around it. St Anne's is of the earth but also free from worldly concerns, not only out of its time but also out of its place. When you enter the churchyard you are transported as if to another place, one where London is not present, where there are no cars, no shops, no Mondays, nor any other earthly concern. Again it is tempting to think that Hawksmoor saw the needs of the surrounding area and accommodated them in this extraordinary creation. Limehouse of the time was another of London's desperate slums and remained so for centuries after, supported by the dockyards it was the home of disease, hard labour, and strife but without hope. The dockyards would always be the dockyards, the necessary and unpleasant side of becoming a global trading super power. Without the promise of salvation on this earthly realm Hawksmoor may have tried to give them something else, a brief window into the everlasting afterlife. A place where the soul could free itself of mortal concerns and consort with the angels of promised freedom. St Anne's is the church as a spiritual place, a side of Christianity that is increasingly obscured by our obsession with earthly matters. Maybe this is why modern writers feel the satanic breath upon them here, as we have so forgotten its angelic equivalent. Hawksmoor did not mean for this place to be so interpreted but modern faith has stripped heaven of its incorporeal qualities while allowing the devil and his cohort of demons to take their place as the epitome of the supernatural.
It is the last church of Hawksmoor's set where this divergence between the church of his time and the current church becomes all too obvious. St George in the East is a towering, magnificent and imposing structure, imbuing all who see it with a simple message that God is Great. This is distinct from a wrathful or terrifying God, but a God that is bountiful in His magnificence. Hawksmoor's building inspires as a symbol of what mankind can achieve when its sets its eyes on His countenance and fills the viewer with an awe of religion. This is perhaps the crucial aspect of the church of Hawksmoor's era, it was the sole owner of spectacle, it had a distinct faith in its own richness that no other body could match. Science and godless culture were yet to attain the brilliance and grandeur that He and His representatives could claim. Hawksmoor's creations are astounding because the great creator was astounding. They harnessed His power but in modern times the church has fallen behind.
Spectacle is now mass produced, packaged and sold piece by piece. Architecture has moved on from the baroque of Hawksmoor to new styles and ever more impressive feats and heights. The swagger of Hawksmoor's works are now replicated by any large company or product with a power untamed by any religious force. St George in the East is now looked down upon by that new edifice to our current churches of commerce and capitalism, the Shard's neo-brutalist spire of steel and glass. A phallic protuberance reaching ever higher, piercing His perfect canvas with all the arrogance and temerity that has become the hallmark of our godless consumerism. The ephemeral transience of the City's new glass towers, to go with their glass empires of imagined money and digital data, contrasts with Hawksmoor's hard stone. The fragility and transparency of these building's almost implies they are built ready for a time when they and their money will not be needed, whilst Hawksmoor's solid, eternal churches are crafted with a certainty that an Earth without God is as impossible as unimaginable. But modern Christianity does not have Hawksmoor's faith, it has yielded in the face of these threats and has become lesser. Indeed, it has forgotten that God is Great, instead God is now nice. Never was this clearer than the interior of St George in the East.
Rebuilt after destruction during the blitz, the interior of the church has been built in what could be called the church's modern style. The baroque grandeur that once was has been replaced with inoffensive pastel walls, wide spaces and a pulpit no higher than its congregation. God is equal. The walls are adorned with stories about cake sales and bike rides, nothing that could be objected to, nothing which could imply the existence of heaven. Here God's mission is more likely to explore the intricacies of baking than the afterlife. Faced with threats, the church has turned in on itself and removed the potentially distressing parts such as, faith, sin, the wonder of God's infinite love and the spirit of His staggering creation. When one looks for God's greatness in the modern church one can only see the fearful hatred and retching disgust aimed at the hell-bound. God used to be Great, he once created all life out of love. Now He condemns homosexuals and abortionists to fiery hell and endorses turgidly minor acts of everyday charity. But God can be great without being vengeful, He can be magnificent without hating. If one needs the proof you need only look at the works he inspired in Hawksmoor, not just staggering works of boundless genius but works reflective of the forgotten faces of Christianity. A welcoming call to worship, an transcendent ideal, a defence against ruthless capitalism, an attachment to the past, a deep spiritualism and a boundless brilliance. Even as an atheist it is hard to deny the raw power of such ideas, and sad to see them so dissipated in the modern faith.
No comments:
Post a Comment