The Friends of Christ Church Spitalfields | Newsletter

Work has now started on the restoration of the interior of Christ Church. This has been made possible by a second large contribution of £3.5 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund, bringing their total contribution to the restoration to £5.9 million, the largest grant it has ever made to a parish church and a reflection of the building’s international standing.
Following a competitive tender process, the £5.7 million project has now started. The main contract has been awarded to Wallis of Bromley, part of the Kier Group plc. Wallis have been building for over 140 years and were given a Royal Warrant in 1995 for their work at Windsor Castle. They have also worked on such historic buildings as Ightham Moat for the National Trust; Danson House, a Grade 1 listed house in Bexleyheath, and Canada House in London. The architects to the restoration are Purcell Miller Tritton and the project managers are Malcolm Reading and Associates; a full list of the professional team can be found on our website.
The contract runs for seventy weeks and should finish in the summer of 2004. The works include a new Purbeck stone floor with underfloor heating; reinstating the two east end staircases; putting back the joinery which the Friends has been storing since it was removed in the 1960s; reinstating Hawksmoor’s aisle galleries, using where possible salvaged material from the galleries formed from the eighteenth century

joinery when Ewan Christian reordered the church in 1866; returning the Sanctuary to its eighteenth century layout; providing basic toilets; disabled access linking the church with the crypt; full renewal of electrical services and redecoration.
Programming the works has been a major challenge. Laying the new floor with its incorporated services should take about eight months if all goes smoothly. The very high scaffolding (60 feet, 18 metres) necessary to redecorate the ceiling cannot be put up until the floor is finished.
It has proved impossible to carry out the works without both closing the church and relocating one of the summer music Festivals. The Spitalfields Festival has risen to the challenge and will be operating from multiple venues around the locality this year including St. Leonard’s Shoreditch and Wesley’s Chapel, both also important architectural and historical monuments.
Wallis took possession of the church and started preliminary works on the site in early December. The church has been totally cleared and the lighting and heating ‘helicopters’ installed as a temporary measure twenty years ago have been taken down. The brick infill to the nave floor is being removed exposing the brick vaulted structure beneath.

Hawksmoor’s original heating system incorporating ducts in the walls of the aisles has been opened up as well as other heating provisions made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some of the schemes included horizontal flues cut into the tops of the brick groin vaults connected to coal fired stoves installed in the aisles between the box pews. The structural damage caused when these flues were cut is now being repaired. In addition a series of permanent bases for internal scaffolding for this phase of the work and for use in the future are being formed.
At the east end, the concrete floors which were inserted when the maisonettes were put in during the early 1970s have been removed. The brick infilling of the window and door openings between the galleries and the east staircases put in by Ewan Christian in 1866 has been removed. This work is at an early stage; it complements the unblocking of the staircase enclosures at the west end of the church carried out in earlier phases of the restoration. Its completion will restore Hawksmoor’s spatial intentions and allow the whole ‘box’ of the nave and stairs to be perceived as a unity.
The works that the Heritage Lottery Fund are funding need to be ‘match’ funded by money raised by the Friends. This is being found from individuals, institutions and grant making charitable trusts. There is, however, a substantial amount of further work to be done to make this great building fully functional as a place of worship and for public uses. Upgrading the crypt, providing seating and other furniture are necessary items not funded by the HLF. The Friends has launched an appeal to fund this. Please see the back page for details of how to support these works.

The Richard Bridge organ of 1735 has been carefully dismantled and removed to a place of safety for the duration of the building works. It was last played in the 1950s and will itself be the subject of a major restoration once the church interior is ready to receive it back. A separate appeal has been launched for this restoration.

New postcards

In 2002 The Friends published three new postcards to designs by Gordon Cullen, pictured above, and two by Gilbert & George: Christian, 1982, and Watch, 1988, reproduced by kind permission of the artists. These and the Friends’ other cards are illustrated on our website and can be obtained here.

Visit to Easton Neston
Easton Neston in Northamptonshire is the only country house designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor between 1868 and 1702. The Friends are planning to visit the house which is not generally open to the public and also the church and gardens on Thursday 19 June 2003.

Hawksmoor’s London Churches bus tour
The next tour will be on Saturday 13 September 2003. Although the interiors of Christ Church and possibly St Anne’s Limehouse may be inaccessible because of restoration work, this remains an opportunity to see all six of Hawksmoor's London churches in a day, and to have an expert guide to explain their history and significance.

Spitalfields Festival
While Christ Church is being restored, Spitalfields Festival visits other outstanding venues from 9-27 June. Join them as they go ‘on the move’. For details see www.spitalfieldsfestival.org.uk or call the Festival Hotline on 020 7377 1362. Booking opens 9 April.

The Friends Office is run with a small number of staff in order to keep our overhead costs to a minimum.
Volunteers: we need volunteers for work in the office, which might include help with the mailings, and also at our special events. Please contact us if you would like to become involved.
Postage: if you or your business could help with postage facilities this would help greatly with our mailings. Please contact the Friends offce: 020 7859 3035 or friends@christchurchspitalfields.org

On the chancel beam high above the heads of the congregation is a fine rendering in Coade stone of a rather rare version of the royal arms which was only in use for the twenty-one years between 1816 and 1837.
Over the centuries the arms used by the sovereign have altered to reflect changes in claims and dynasties. On Queen Anne’s death in 1714 George, Elector of Hanover, became king and the arms of Hanover were added in the fourth (bottom right) quarter of the royal arms. In 1801 they were moved from the fourth quarter to a small shield in the centre of the larger shield (‘in pretence’).

At first they were topped with an Electoral Bonnet, a soft cap of red velvet and ermine representing the status of the king of Hanover as an elector of the Holy Roman Empire, but when in 1816 the electorate of Hanover was elevated to the dignity of a kingdom the bonnet was replaced with a royal crown. It is this version of the royal arms, borne by George III for the remainder of his reign and by George IV and William IV, that is depicted at Christ Church. It ceased to be used in 1837, when Victoria succeeded to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland but did not succeed to the throne of Hanover which under Salic law could only descend through the male line.
The detail of the arms at Christ Church can be distinguished from ground level only with the help of binoculars. They reveal in the smaller shield ‘in pretence’ the arms of Brunswick (two lions), Luneberg (a lion amongst hearts) and Westphalia (a running horse) with, in the centre, the crown of Charlemagne, the badge of the Arch Treasurer of the Holy Roman Empire. The surrounding shield has the three lions of England in the first and fourth quarters, the rampant lion of Scotland in the second and the harp of Ireland in the third.
On either side of the shield the lion and unicorn supporters are shown in the near recumbent pose so typical of the period. The crown, garter, motto and various roses, thistles and shamrocks are carefully arranged around the shield to complete an interesting and attractive presentation of the royal arms during this short period early in the nineteenth century.

At the start of this restoration contract the church was handed over to the contractors which meant that the Friends had to move out of their office in the Old Vestry Room. We have been extremely fortunate in being given office space by law firm Ashurst Morris Crisp for the duration of the restoration. In addition they even provided a van and a man and helped us to move. We have kept the same postal address, but please note our new telephone numbers.
The campaign to restore Christ Church relies on the support of many people. We would like to thank the following people who have recently given us support in kind: Ashurst Morris Crisp for printing this issue of Columns and other material. We are also grateful for the help with printing from Herbert Smith and Linklaters & Alliance.
Thank you to our volunteers who come and help both in the office and at special events. We are particularly grateful to Fona Ligonnet and Christopher Woodward who provide reliable and regular back up in the office throughout the year.

Book Review

NICHOLAS HAWKSMOOR; REBUILDING ANCIENT WONDERS
by Vaughan Hart
Yale University Press, 299 pp., £35, 2002
0 300 09699 2

Christopher Woodward

Kerry Downes’ pioneering study of Hawksmoor was published in 1969. You wait more than thirty years for another book on Hawksmoor and then two turn up in two years: Andrew Martindale reviewed du Prey’s book in Columns 16 (Pierre de la Ruffiniere du Prey, Hawksmoor's London Churches; Architecture and Theology, London, 2000.) 1959 Downes’ pointed out the need for a study of Hawksmoor’s style and sources’, and Hart intends his book to fill this gap, to explain ‘why Hawksmoor’s esoteric buildings look the way they do’.
The book is in two thematically organised parts. The first deals with Hawksmoor’s ideas and sources the evidence for which is in his correspondence and his library: his interest as a post- Vitruvian man in the natural sciences; in the exotic, including Byzantine, Ottoman and Greek architecture; in the odder rather than canonical Roman; and of course the Gothic of All Souls and Westminster Abbey. Freemasonry, the continuing attempts at reconstructing Solomon’s Temple, the speculative arrangements for worship of the ‘Primitive Christians’, the use of motifs from Palladio and Serlio are all invoked.
The second, longer, part identifies ten themes, two of which discuss the London churches: their ornamentation and their remarkable ‘memorial towers’ in which mausolea, obelisks and urns suggest ‘Gardens of Remembrance’. As well as the scholarship he brings to this discussion, Hart has two insights: that while the 1711 Commissioners fairly closely prescribed the general arrangement of the churches they sponsored, they had little to say about towers or steeples: it was in these that Hawksmoor could give free rein to his ingenuity. Secondly, he proposes that the programme of ornament for each church was ‘sitespecific’, so that the astylar plainness of St Anne Limehouse might be thought suitable to the taste of its first congregation of plain sea-farers. Further studies discuss Hawksmoor’s urban schemes at Oxford and Cambridge and are illustrated with innovative computer-generated models. The book concludes with a study of the magnificent Mausoleum at Castle Howard.
Readers looking for a chronologically organised ‘life’ of Hawksmoor or a monograph of Christ Church Spitalfields will not find either in this volume. Those who already have both, though, will find a wonderfully detailed compendium of the origins of the architect’s ‘ingenuity’, his frustrating and enigmatic styles. The book is beautifully produced and for once ‘profusely illustrated’ means what it says: every spread contains at least one picture; some have eight.

The start of the restoration of the interior was marked by a benefit concert given on 24 September 2002 by the eminent cellist Raphael Wallfisch who played the complete Suites for Solo Cello by Johann Sebastian Bach. This was the ideal place to hear such sublime music. The Suites were written in Cöthen, Germany in around 1717 at exactly the same time that Christ Church Spitalfields was being built. The concert raised £8,500 for the restoration. This translates into nearly £43,500 worth of building work because the Friends can claim the tax back on nearly all these donations through the Gift Aid scheme and then use this to draw on our Heritage Lottery Fund grant. We are extremely grateful to Raphael Wallfisch and all those who contributed to make this such an auspicious occasion.

The Friends has recently launched this website. Please browse the site and tell your friends about it.. It is now possible to make a gift to the restoration online through a dedicated service affiliated to CAF; this is quick, simple and secure to do. The more visitors the site attracts, the more prominent it is likely to be in the results of search engines like ‘Google’.

We have devised the short quiz below for our readers. All the answers can be found here on the website.

Please either e-mail us with your answers or send them to the Friends’ office. The first correct entry pulled out of a hat on 28 April will win a selection of fifteen postcards.

The Friends are grateful to the many individuals and organisations who are giving with such generosity to the Restoration Appeal. We value donations large and small. We would also like to acknowledge the many people who support us by their regular standing order contributions.

We would like to thank the following for their recent donations, and other generous donors who wish to remain anonymous.

Gifts of between £100 and £200
Sheila Adam
All Souls College
Henry Barlow
Andrew Blake
Martin Beard
Byrne Charitable Trust*
Miss B J Cadbury
Francis Carnwath
Ralph Cunningham
Dilettanti*
Steven Elliott*
Peter Ellis
John J S Farmer*
Mr J R Fowling
Charles Franklyn
Glossop Pryor Foundation
Mr M I Godbee
Francis Johnston
Howard W Kingsbury*
Rosalind Kossoff
Peter Lerwill
Andrew Luff
Sir Richard MacCormac
Victoria McNeile
Nicholas Monck
Deirdre Munro
James T Nelson
Hilary E Pearson
Sue Prickett
Eleanor A Robbins
Mr C J H Simpson
Mr C K Stratton-Browne
Derek and Jean Sugden
Mr S L Tanner
G Walton
Brian Ward
David West
Sir William Whitfield
Peter C Wilkinson
Nick Winterton

Gifts of between £200 and £500
Artemis Trust
Rolfe Birch
Charles Clark
W & E Harris Charitable Trust
Roland J Jeffery
Pauline Pinder
Peter Cazalet
Fergus Partnership Consulting Inc*
Pamela Ann Freshwater
Mrs M C Hodgkin
Hamish Parker
Mr N P Riddell
Mrs E J B Rose
Mr & Mrs P Smith
Peter Stormonth Darling
Sir Walker Carter Charitable Trust

Gifts of between £500 and £1,000
The Amber Trust
Rosemary Burton
Eric Elstob
Foreign & Colonial Management Limited
Mr G H Josselyn
Allan Murray-Jones
Eric Rowe
Philip Vracas
David H Whitaker

Gifts over £1,000
Allchurches Trust
The Atlas Fund
F&C Smaller Companies PLC
George Palmer* (Legacy)
Spitalfields Development Group

If you would like to support the restoration please go to the support us page for more details.