Goth Walk XXX: The Devil's Architect

On Sunday 12th we went walking around central London again, this time tracing the history and pseudo-history of that mysterious and intriguing architect Nicholas Hawksmoor. Our journey took us from his Spitalfields masterpiece, Christ Church, through a near-impenetrably busy Brick Lane, into the eerie weekend desertion of the City, and back out again to St Luke's Old Street. I found it quite a challenging talk to put together because there's so little known about the man himself: he wrote very little, apart from letters complaining about how badly he'd been treated in the latter part of his working life, and, as Iain Sinclair so vividly put it in Lud Heat in 1975 - the prose-poem that sparked off Hawksmoor's transformation from fairly obscure 17th and 18th-century architect to secret Satanist - 'his motives remain obscure. His churches are his medium, full of the dust of wooden voices'. So I ended up stringing together the weird appearance of the buildings, the fact that so many of his grandiose projects came to nothing, and the fiction that's built his modern and dubious reputation.

Of course all the stuff about Hawksmoor being a devil-worshipper is nonsense, but there remains the oddness of the churches. If you only had St Luke's to go on, rather than the Stepney gems, you'd think the architect was an idiot rather than a genius, sticking a fluted obelisk on top of a tower; what was he playing at? And then, at St George's Bloomsbury, the tower consists of a Greek temple portico beneath a pyramid based on the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, topped with a statue of George I; is this a celebration of authority, religion and power, or a statement so ludicrous and over-the-top it amounts to a subversion of it, a joke? Why are there no Christian motifs anywhere in Hawksmoor's churches? Was he trying, as his latest examiner Vaughan Hart suggests, trying to construct a new visual vocabulary for Anglicanism by making use of ancient pagan imagery, or was he just an ancient pagan? He remains an enigma.

Photo, taken in St Michael's Alley, by Mr McHenry.