Posts
Moloch. the Virgin, Thetis, Devil, Jove
Pan, Jahweh, Vulcan, he with the 'awful' Rod
Jesus, the wondrous straw man, all one God"
It was a remarkably sunny, blue skied, day in November and I was stood near the entrance to Bank tube station reciting a 'spell' that I'd (vainly) hoped would incite dark energies to rise up in the British capital. Yet Satan, Lucifer, Beelezebub, Old Nick, or even Boris fucking Johnson refused to appear. Even his ertswhile homunculus Michael Gove remained in his dungeon.
The reason this was all happening was because I was taking back control of my season (or series if you prefer, debate still rages hard) of London by Foot:The Capital's Curious Circuits walks and this one was based on the London churches of one Nicholas Hawksmoor.
I'd met with Adam, Shep, Tina, Dena, Pam, and Colin in Waterloo at 1100hrs (and eaten a very messy burrito) and Neill would join us later on the walk. Departing the terminus, we crossed the Thames, passed through a few snickets on a scenic tour of Covent Garden, and arrived beneath the majestic steeple of St.George's in Bloomsbury.
Hawksmoor was born in, or around, 1661 in either Nottinghamshire (Wikipedia) or Northamptonshire (an information board outside one of his churches). Perhaps due to being the son of farmers the details of his early years are sketchy. So sketchy we can't even be sure where, or even when, he was born.
He first enters the history books at the age of eighteen when Christopher Wren, thirty years his senior, takes him on as a clerk and his first official post is as Wren's Deputy Surveyor at Winchester Palace from 1683 to 1685, a job that earned him two shillings a day.
Over the next fifteen years, Hawksmoor worked with Wren on Chelsea Hospital, Greenwich Hospital, and St.Paul's Cathedral. He then worked for a while with Sir John Vanbrugh at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire and Castle Howard in Yorkshire. Though, undoubtedly, Wren and Vanbrugh influenced Hawksmoor it would be incorrect to assume it was one way traffic, Hawksmoor too inspired the older Wren and the younger Vanbrugh in the way he mixed the baroque styles of the age with the classical, the Palladian, and the gothic.
In 1713 he submitted plans to complete King's College in Cambridge but that job eventually went to James Gibbs. Many other grand schemes were also thwarted, including one for the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford. The making of the man came with the 1711 Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, an Act of Parliament aimed at providing more worshipful spaces for the rapidly expanding capital.
These 'Queen Anne churches', named after the incumbent monarch, never got anywhere near fifty (politicians were as full of shit then as they are now) but they did include St George the Martyr in Southwark, St Giles-in-the-Fields, and buildings by Thomas Archer and Basingstoke's own John James (!) as well as the refurbishment of St George's in Gravesend, the final resting place of Pocahontas.
Hawksmoor was solely responsible for six of these churches and helped James with two others. One, St John Horsleydown in Bermondsey, was so badly damaged by WWII bombs that it was destroyed some years later but the other, St Luke's on Old Street is still there and it was to be our next port of call.
But first I had to don my 'spielspecs' and give a little history of St.George's. Like most of the churches we'd be visiting it was built between 1711 &1730, this was the last to be consecrated. Novelist Anthony Trollope (some of the walkers remember seeing the house he shared with his mother, Fanny Trollope, in the delightful suburb of Monken Hadley on a recent London LOOP walk) was baptised in St George's in 1824. In 1913 it was the funeral of Emily Davison, the Suffragette who died under the king's horse at that year's Derby, and in 1937 Haile Selassie attended a controversial requiem for the dead of the Abyssinian War. The church is the setting for the Bloomsbury christening in Dickens' Sketches of Boz and, perhaps most famously, appears in the background to William Hogarth's Gin Lane
The steeped tower is influenced by Pliny the Elder's description of the mausoleum at Halicarnassus in present day Turkey (as you no doubt already knew) and the portico on the Temple of Bacchus in Baalbek, now part of Lebanon. Atop the steeple, above the lions and unicorns fighting to symbolise the end of the First Jacobite Rising, perches George I in Roman dress. A sight that inspired Horace Walpole to pen this couplet:-
"When Henry VIII left the Pope in the lurch, the Protestants made him the head of the church
But George's good subjects, the Bloomsbury people, instead of the church made him head of the steeple".
Oh, how we laughed. Our laughter was the fuel that carried us down Theobald's Road, Clerkenwell Road, and Old Street to St.Luke's. now a music centre operated by the LSO (St George's hosts comedy nights, a comedy museum, and 'shape singing') it was built, initially, to relieve St Giles-without-Cripplegate (the anomalous church within the ground of the Barbican, whose towers stood proud to our south).
The aforementioned John James was St Luke's principal architect but Hawksmoor added the unorthodox obelisk that acts as its spire. The graveyard contains the burial site of fellow architect George Dance the Elder and, with a quick visit to the churches rear aspect, we were able to very clearly observe the lopsided windows caused by subsidence in this previously marshy area.
Some of my walkers were already making noises about drinks, food, and 'comfort breaks' but I forced them to plod on. I may be a benign dictator but I am a dictator! A quick trot through Shoreditch bought us to Christ Church, Spitalfields where we met with Neill, a man who despite now living in Bath knows more about London than the rest of us put together. It's always a pleasure to have his expertise and his unique, and often frank, perspective on things.
Despite its majesty and its almost pristine Portland stone I found there to be very little history available about Christ Church other than the less than scintillating fact that it was designed to assert Anglican authority over Stepney's large Huguenot population. You can see the Huguenot houses on nearby Fournier Street. Gilbert and George live in one of them now and, according to Neill, the Chapman brothers live next door.
We now cut back on ourselves a little and wended our way through the towering glass and steel skyscrapers and cranes of the city, past the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, the Mansion House, and a statue of the Massachusetts born philanthropist George Peabody whose buildings can be seen almost everywhere in London. My friends Dan and Misa live in one near Brockwell Park.
Everybody loves a juxtaposition but some of us are also suckers for a well thought through set piece and with the London Underground sign that marks the entrance to Bank station and the church of St Mary Woolnoth we certainly got one of them. T. S. Eliot made St Mary Woolnoth a character in his epic 1922 poem The Waste Land:-
"A crowd had flowed over London Bridge, so many
I had not thought that death had undone so many
Sighs, short and frequent, were exhaled
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the stroke of nine
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson'
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae'
The anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce worshipped within the walls of Woolnoth (I was glad I'd not had a pint when I read that out) and traces can be found of earlier Roman and Pagan buildings. The 'baldaquin' is modelled on one by Bernini in St Peter's, Rome and, nowadays, the church is used by London's German speaking Swiss community.
In 1985 Peter Ackroyd released the novel 'Hawksmoor' (Tina was reading it and had a copy to hand) which tells of the 18c architect Nicholas Dyer who built seven churches in London for which he needs, and gets, human sacrifices. There is also a detective, Nicholas Hawksmoor, in it who is investigating a series of murders taking place at the present time, the 1980s, in those churches. Dyer has contempt for his rational boss, Wren, and calls London 'a monstrous pile', the 'nest of death and contagion', a 'hive of noise and ignorance', and 'the capital city of the world of affliction'. At which point, as if to prove these assertions correct, a crane lorry nearly decapitated Colin!
Once we'd been assured that Colin's head was still attached to his body (the London by Foot accident book is yet to receive an entry and that would have been a fairly stark debut) I was able to get back to Ackroyd and his fictional detective. A man who believes Christ is the 'serpent who deceiv'd Eve' and that 'Sathan (sic) is the God of this World and fit to be worshipp'd'.
In the book, Dyer's churches are believed to make up 'the Proportion of the Seven Orders' that control the planetary spheres and, because of this, can exert evil power over London. Dyer is taken with Babylonian occultism and sympathetic magic and the four line 'spell' that I recited, and repeated at the top of this account, expresses the syncretic nature of the sect to which he belongs.
Ackroyd was inspired by the psychogeographical studies of situationist Guy Debord, by the poetry of Eliot and William Blake and, primarily, from Iain Sinclair's 1975 poem Lud Heat in which Sinclair proposed a 'system of energies' coming from the churches of Hawksmoor which he contended were built to form the shape of a pentacle or pentagram, thus giving rise to the belief that Hawksmoor was the architect of Satan.
Now, like the dead of Eliot's Waste Land we too flowed down King William Street, past the Tower of London, and Tower Bridge, and east towards St George-in-the-East, famous for its pepperpot towers and the only church we were able to enter. There was a man sleeping on one of the pews. This is what churches should be used for.
St George-in-the-East appears in the 1980 film The Long Good Friday and survived, just, bomb damage during the Blitz in 1941. The original interior was destroyed so they simply built another church inside the outer walls of the elder church. A church within a church, and a church, that for some reason, had a selection of conkers resting on a table in the doorway! God, and Hawksmoor, work in mysterious ways.
Next we took the Highway. The mystery of why my camera was adding unwanted text to my photos was as nothing compared to that of the Ratcliff Highway Murders which saw, across twelve days in December 1811, the vicious slaying of seven people by one John Murphy. Murphy later committed suicide in his prison cell and no explanation for his crimes has ever been given. Had he, perhaps, been subject to a system of dark energies that had emanated from Hawksmoor's pentacle?
A dark story and one that juxtaposed exquisitely with the low, and brilliant, sun that cast the towers of the city, and Docklands, in shadow and bathed Shadwell Basin with a delicious golden hue. We'd certainly arrived at the right time and, via a slightly confusing diversion, we soon arrived Thames side to witness a trio of bequiffed herons ('vermin' said Neill) lording it up over their avian accomplices.
We had now, definitely, earned a drink and what better place to stop on a walk like this than in a pub owned by an actual wizard? Okay, somebody who is famous for playing one. Sir Ian McKellen, Gandalf to you, is the owner of The Grapes in Limehouse, a charming if crammed little boozer that looks out to the river. I had a pint of Timothy Taylor Landlord.
Limehouse crops up a lot in fiction. It's been written about by Dickens (obvs) in Our Mutual Friend, Oscar Wilde (A Picture of Dorian Gray), and Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes would visit the area to buy opium from Chinese immigrants. Francis Bacon lived two doors from The Grapes and Whistler painted one of his beautiful, evocative, nocturnes from a vantage point nearby
We continued on to St Anne's whose steeple seemed to be beckoning us from afar. Our feet rustled in the autumn leaves (is that okay, Adam?) as the light was dying around us, it really was quite wonderful - even if that first drink had made us crave another.
Queen Anne had decreed that being near to the river St Anne's would be a good place for sea captains to register maritime events and thus awarded it the right to display the White Ensign, the second most senior ensign of the Royal Navy. It's been gutted by fire and refurbished twice and its pipe organ won first prize in the Great Exhibition of 1851, but it's most famous now for the two separate Grade II listed 'things' in the graveyard.
There's a white stone memorial with a bronze figure of Christ which, perhaps shamefully, we never even bothered looking for and, most curiously of all, a mysterious pyramid supposedly (we couldn't read a word) engraved with the legend 'the wisdom of Solomon'. The smart money is on the pyramid being intended as a roof decoration that never made its final journey but isn't it more interesting to speculate that Hawksmoor had more sinister, Masonic, or even Satanic intentions for his creation?
Neill left us at this point (he turns into a pumpkin if he goes south of the river) and the rest of us continued on to the Isle of Dogs. Past the temples of commerce that now dwarf even the mightiest of churches, past corporate riverside eateries, and past the occasional relic of the area's industrial past. To the days when dockers and sailors would drink, fight, put their cigarettes out on each other's faces, and swear with gay abandon. Something we'd all enjoy too as we worked our way to the Greenwich foot tunnel.
A first for some, and if you're a Londoner and you've never walked the foot tunnel what are you waiting for? Opened in 1902 and designed by Alexander Binnie who was also responsible for the Blackwall Tunnel and Vauxhall Bridge. You can say what you like about Binnie but there was a man who knew how to cross a river.
Once we'd crossed this particularly wide stretch of the Thames, resurfacing near the Cutty Sark, there was just time for one last donning of the spielspecs and a brief outline of the history of St Alfege's. Originally dedicated to an 11c Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry VIII was baptised at St Alfege's in 1491 but that was a different, medieval, building which later collapsed to be replaced by this heavenly Hawksmoor. The crypt once served as an air raid shelter and the Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis sleeps for all eternity in the graveyard.
We bade a fond adieu to Dena at this point, grabbed a pint or two in the nearby Mitre pub (there were a couple in there on a date and they were sharing one bottle of water - wtf?), and made haste to the three storey Mogul Indian restaurant on the periphery of Greenwich Market. There we were taken downstairs to a delightful booth which turned out to be a political bubble in which we could all agree with each other that the Tories are rotten, Brexit is a complete disaster, and that Coldplay are shit. Controversial opinions, eh!?
Adam and Tina left and Pam, Colin, Shep and myself repaired for 'lasties' in the Spanish Galleon Tavern. It wasn't as heavy as last week's TADS season finale in Hampstead but it was a good 'workout' nonetheless. Should we survive the winter and not fall foul to the dark energies we unlocked by taking this circuitous, serpentine, route round the devil's architect's finest creations we'll be back in March, dressed in green, to welcome in the spring in a little walk I'm calling Sometimes I Feel Lonely:To be on the Lea. Thanks, once again, to Colin, Pam, Shep, Adam, Tina, Dena, and Neill for joining me on this walk and thanks, too, to everyone else who has attended one of these walks this year. That's Bee, Neil, Sanda, Darren, Teresa, Ed, and Wen.
No comments:
Post a Comment