Nicholas Hawksmoor and the Wren City Church Steeples’, the Georgian Group Journal, Vol
Anthony Geraghty, ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor and the Wren City church steeples’, The Georgian Group Journal, Vol. X, 2000, pp. 1–14 TEXT © THE AUTHORS 2000 NICHOLAS HAWKSMOOR AND THE WREN CITY CHURCH STEEPLES ANTHONY GERAGHTY hree hundred years ago, as the seventeenth St Bride Fleet Street, St Magnus-the-Martyr and Tcentury drew to a close, Wren’s architectural St Edmund-the-King. practice entered a remarkable final phase. These Hawksmoor’s obituary states that he entered were the years of Greenwich Hospital, the Whitehall Wren’s service ‘when about years of Age’. As he Palace schemes, the City church steeples and the was probably born in he is normally supposed skyline of St Paul’s – projects which have a boldness to have arrived in Wren’s office in the late s. of silhouette and intricacy of detail not encountered He can only be documented in London, however, in Wren’s earlier work. These late works coincide from January , when he witnessed Hugh May’s with the early career of Nicholas Hawksmoor, the will. In the years immediately before this he had greatest of Wren’s pupils. Hawksmoor had arrived in travelled extensively in England. A topographical Wren’s office by and from the early s he was sketch-book, n ow at the RIBA, confirms that he receiving delegated commissions. But the extent to visited Nottingham in and , Bath in , which he contributed to the older man’s designs and Coventry, Warwick, Bristol, Oxford and remains one of the unsolved mysteries of English Northampton at about the same time. Perhaps his architectural history.
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