St George in the East
St George in the East is one of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s six London churches, three of them in Tower Hamlets. And its design is as idiosyncratic as followers of the brilliant and eccentric architect might expect - no Hawksmoor church is like the next.
Hawksmoor was a builder who people tended to love or hate (though his churches are much more appreciated than they once were). Architecture critic Mervyn Blatch got it about right back in the 1970s when he said ‘we can again stare in wonder or dismay at this strange building’. ‘Again’ because St George’s was very nearly lost to Luftwaffe firebombs. What Blatch was viewing was the fairly recently spruced up church, which had been saved by an imaginative plan from architect Arthur Bailey in 1960. Bailey proposed repairing the walls and tower, building a smaller, modern place of worship in the eastern part of the old nave. He would then transofrm the space between the west end of the new church and the old into an open courtyard. The space formerly occupied by the galleries would now become flats. Below, the old vaults would be cleared and a new parish hall put in their place.
The work was carried out between 1960 and 1964, and the church reconsecrated on 26 April that year. Two and a half centuries after its inception, St-George-in-the-East had been redesigned for the changing needs ot the 20th century. Back in 1711, the church had been commissioned for a swiftly changing Stepney, the huge parish being broken up into smaller units as the river traffic and population grew. This area of Upper Wapping qualified for a church of its own, on a site ‘in pleasantly wooded fields’. This new parish was one of people who built, owned and worked on sailing ships, but they would have to wait a long time for their new church. The Parliamentary Act of 1711 had provided tax money for 50 new churches for the capital, but only a dozen were ever built as the money ran out. Hawksmoor faced a constant struggle for funds for St George’s. Work took from 1714 to 1726. Even then, it took another three years for funds to be produced to pay for a priest and the consecration.
By the 1850s, the area had changed beyond any recognition. The Ratcliffe Highway (now The Highway) had become notorious for vice, drunkeness and crime. St George’s, meanwhile, became an epicentre of the battle between High and Low Church, which was splitting the Church of England and tapped into deep-seated fears of the power of the Roman Church. St George’s saw ’some of the most disgraceful scenes of modern times to take place in a Christian church’ when the Revd Bryan King and curate CF Lowder, High Churchmen both, adopted a very moderate form of ritual, donning surplices instead of the usual black gown.
The pair had been encouraged by the example of their bishop, another High Churchman. But when he was succeeded by a new bishop, born a Presbyterian and determined to stamp out High Church ritual there was trouble. The new bishop nominated a militant Low Churchmean, Hugh Allen, the vicar of a nieghbouring parish, to give afternoon lectures at St George’s. Soon there was organised disruption whenever King or Lowder tried to hold a service: pelting the altar with rubbish, catcalls and jeers, men still wearing thier hats and smoking their pipes, trombones being blown and, on one occasion, dogs drugged to make them howl were brought into the church. Press reports encouraged hooligans to come from all over London to join the fun, while local magistrates - egged on by Low Church members of the Vestry - turned a blind eye. Eventually the rector’s health gave way and a locum took over.
The once respectable area had now become a slum, with narrow dirty streets, brothels, rough taverns and much crime. In the late 1700s, church had gained new east windows, designed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the Victorians decorated the apse with Venetian glass mosaics in 1880, but much was swept away by incendiary bombs in May 1941. The exterior of the church gives away little of the changes wrought within during the 1960s repair. A bright, white exterior of Portland stone supports a massive, 160ft tower, with tall rectangular openings and deeply recessed windows at the west end. The crown is an open octagonal lanatern with eight rectangular buttresses topped with Roman altars. Buttressed turrets, topped by copper-roofed cupolas, resemble a cluster of pepper pots, and once contained stairways to the galleries. Projections at the west and east ends mark where the transepts once were, forming a double Greek cross. At the east end, an apse projects from the middle of a flat wall with a large pediment.
St George’s has had a mixed history. Built by an architect some writers have argued was a Satanist*, disrupted by the mob, fallen on hard times in a sinking area, and bombed out by the Luftwaffe … but this unique building lives on, still serving its community.
*see Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd and Lud Heat by Iain Sinclair.