St George's Bloomsbury, the work of Nicholas Hawksmoor, is one of the finest Baroque churches in London and indeed has been described as ‘one of the capital’s most wonderful buildings’.
Bloomsbury, Greater London
The Commissioners for the Fifty New Churches Act of 1711 realised that, due to rapid development in the Bloomsbury area during the latter part of the 17th and early part of the 18th centuries, the area (then part of the parish of St Giles in the Fields) needed to be split off and given a parish church of its own.
They appointed Nicholas Hawksmoor, a pupil and former assistant of Sir Christopher Wren, to design and build this church, which he then did between 1716 and 1731. This was the sixth and last, of his London churches. St George's was consecrated on 28 January 1730 by Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London.
The Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope was baptised here in 1824. Richard Meux Benson, founder of the first Anglican religious order for men, Society of St John the Evangelist, the ‘Cowley Fathers’, was also baptised in the church. The funeral of Emily Davison, the suffragette who died when she was hit by the King's horse during the 1913 Derby, took place here that same year. Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia attended a controversial requiem for the dead of the Abyssinian war in 1937.
The famous stepped tower is influenced by Pliny the Elder's description of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, and topped with a statue of King George I in Roman dress. Its statues of fighting lions and unicorns symbolise the recent end of the First Jacobite Rising.
These symbols would’ve been well known at the time because of the popular nursery rhyme; 'The lion and the unicorn were fighting for the crown, the lion beat the unicorn all around the town'.
The Portico is based on that of the Temple of Bacchus in Baalbek, Lebanon. The tower is depicted in William Hogarth's well known engraving ‘Gin Lane’ (1751) and Charles Dickens used St George's as the setting for ‘The Bloomsbury Christening’ in Sketches by Boz.
City of London, Greater London
The Dutch Church is a reformed church on the site of the 13th century Augustinian friary, the original building granted to Protestant refugees for their church services in 1550 was destroyed during the London Blitz.
City of London, Greater London
The church lies over the remains of the Basilica, the northern most part of the great Roman Forum built in the first century AD.
Marshfield, Gwent
Mae Eglwys St Mair, Maerun, yn eglwys brydferth sy’n dyddio nôl i’r ddeuddegfed ganrif. Yn nythu’n glud yn y llain las rhwng Caerdydd a Chasnewydd, mae bellach yn adnabyddus am fod yn lleoliad ar gyfer un o episodau Dr Who!
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