St Mary Woolnoth

St Mary Woolnoth in the City was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666 by Christopher Wren  between 1670-75, in the Modern Gothic style, and then again by Wren’s brilliant pupil and later successor Nicholas Hawksmoor between 1716-27, in the Later English Baroque style.  If Wren’s general style was about gracefulness and lightness, Hawksmoor’s was  about  geometry and solidity, although in such perfect  balance as to be equally aesthetically pleasing, and arguably even more expressive (as  Pevsner put it, “the effect is of powerful forces firmly held in check”).

Classical Corinthian columns, St Mary Woolnoth

Baroque keystones, St Mary Woolnoth

Interior, St Mary Woolnoth

St Alfege Greenwich

Hawksmoor’s other London churches are the equally impressive, yet individually distinct, Christ Church Spitalfields, St Anne Limehouse and St George-in-the-East (as pictured in the recent “Hawksmoor Churches viewed from the Shard” blog here); and  St Alphege Greenwich and St George Bloomsbury. 

Close-up of St Alfege Greenwich – conveying a sense of deep foreboding!

St George Bloomsbury

St Michael Cornhill

He was also responsible for the tower of St Michael Cornhill, completed in 1724, and the west towers of Westminster Abbey, completed in 1745; and jointly responsible for St Luke Old Street, with its striking, obelisk-like spire, and for St John Horselydown, just off Tooley Street.  The last-named  was substantially destroyed during or demolished after the Blitz of the Second World War, and  the surviving parts were subsequently incorporated into the London City Mission.  A photograph of the bombed church taken in 1940 still survives.  It shows a spire in the form of a fluted Ionic column similar to that of St Luke Old Street, topped by a weathervane supposed to be shaped like a comet, but in actuality more like a louse.

Close-up of St Michael Cornhill

West towers, Westminster Abbey

St Luke Old Street

(Site of) St John Horselydown