The Church of St George, Bloomsbury

Plans for this historic Georgian church in the heart of London – one of fifty new churches whose construction was authorised by an Act of Parliament of 1711 – were prepared by both James Gibbs, the Italian-trained architect who subsequently designed King’s College Cambridge and the Radcliffe Library, Oxford, and John Vanbrugh, the flamboyant Baroque designer of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard.

The Church Commissioners approved Vanbrugh’s plan 1715, but site constraints saw this design was replaced by another the following year. The 1716 design was submitted by Nicholas Hawksmoor, a City Surveyor and one of the most prominent Baroque architects of the age.

Neither Vanbrugh’s nor Gibbs’s designs of St George’s Church survive. However, AHP used Hawksmoor’s 1716 drawing – as well as unrelated drawings, publications and previous work which were likely to have influenced the architect – to provide both a context for the design, and an insight into how the problems which beset the previous plans were overcome.

St George’s Church was completed and consecrated in 1730, but the parishioners soon found fault with the internal arrangements. The vestry complained of a leaking roof, poor acoustics and bad sightlines, and demanded that the Commissioners pay for a western gallery to increase the number of seats. Substantial alterations were also made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and AHP’s report charts all of these – and the reasons they were commissioned – as closely as possible.

No historic building can exist in isolation, which is why AHP’s report charted the socio-economic development of the area and provided a comparative analysis with contemporary London churches. The report also provides a summary of contemporary architectural critique on the church, including the following scathing comment by James Ralph in his Critical Review of the Publick Buildings of London and Westminster, published in 1734:

’tis built all of stone, is adorn’d with a pompous portico, can boast many other decorations, has been stinted in no expense; and yet, upon the whole, is ridiculous and absurd even to a proverb.

Public

Central Fire Station, Birmingham ›
Manchester Square Fire Station, London ›

Commercial

203-221 Regent Street, London ›
Bolton Market Hall, Lancashire ›

Town

7 St James’s Square, Westminster ›
9 & 11 Duke Street, London ›

Country

New Lodge, Windsor ›
Plas Newydd, Anglesey ›

Ecclesiastical

St George’s Church, Bloomsbury ›
St James’s Church, Liverpool ›