East End Preservation Society Lecture: Owen Hopkins on Hawksmoor

In the worship space built in the Blitzed shell of Hawksmoor’s magnificent St George-in-the-East, perhaps the most original of his three East End churches, Owen Hopkins draws on From the Shadows: The Architecture and Afterlife of Nicholas Hawksmoor, his groundbreaking account of the architect. Chronicling Hawksmoor’s career and the decline of his reputation, Hopkins offers fresh interpretations of many of his famous works, notably his East End churches. Hopkins charts Hawksmoor’s return to prominence in the twentieth century – the recent passionate campaigns to save and restore Hawksmoor’s churches, such as Christ Church Spitalfields, demonstrates the powerful attraction his distinctive architecture still holds.

Owen Hopkins is a writer, historian and curator of the Architecture Programme at the Royal Academy of Arts. He is has written widely on architecture and is author of Reading Architecture: A Visual Lexicon (2012) and Architectural Styles: A Visual Guide (2014). He regularly leads a variety of walking tours of London architecture.

The East End Preservation Society’s Will Palin has called St George-in-the-East “…the most emotionally powerful building in London ... the closest we have to the pyramids of Egypt or the temples of Rome, with all the romance and strangeness of a ruin ... Almost 300 years after landing in the fields of Wapping, this architectural meteorite still dominates the landscape.” The Guardian, 1 September 2003.