Qualla: Christ Church, Spitalfields

Christ Church, Spitalfields: Introduction

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Doyle of London, CC BY-SA 4.0. Parliament passed the act in 1711, the brief was audacious — fifty new churches for London's expanding settlements — and of the twelve that were actually built, six were designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. Christ Church Spitalfields, completed in 1729 after fifteen years of work, is widely considered the greatest of them. Its commission was also openly political: the parish had been carved from the old Stepney parish to serve an area dominated by Huguenot refugees, French Protestants who had fled Catholic persecution and established their own plain chapels here. Christ Church's bombastic English Baroque was a statement of Anglican power in a neighbourhood that had chosen, rather pointedly, not to belong to the Church of England.

Image: Doyle of London | CC BY-SA 4.0

Christ Church, Spitalfields: Hawksmoor's Abruptness

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Wright, CC BY-SA 2.0. The great architectural critic Robert Venturi wrote that Hawksmoor's tower at Christ Church is 'a manifestation of both-and at the scale of the city.' It is both wall and tower. At the bottom, the structure extends outward into buttress-like wings that terminate the view down the...

Image: David Wright | CC BY-SA 2.0

Christ Church, Spitalfields: The Organ of England

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Winfield, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1735, organ builder Richard Bridge installed the instrument that would become, for over a century, the largest organ in England. With more than two thousand pipes, it was built at a moment when the church was still new, its Huguenot neighbourhood still maintaining its French i...

Image: John Winfield | CC BY-SA 2.0

Christ Church, Spitalfields: The Long Rescue

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1960, Christ Church was close to ruin. Services had moved to a former Huguenot chapel on Hanbury Street while the roof was declared unsafe. The then Bishop of Stepney, Trevor Huddleston, proposed wholesale demolition. The Hawksmoor Committee stopped him, and the roof was rebui...

Image: Diliff | CC BY-SA 3.0

Christ Church, Spitalfields: Spitalfields as It Was and Is

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Salmon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Standing on Commercial Street today, with the market behind you and the Hawksmoor tower ahead, it is possible to feel the layering of this neighbourhood's history. The Huguenots who built their plain chapels here in the 18th century eventually assimilated into English life. Their...

Image: John Salmon | CC BY-SA 2.0