Christ Church Spitalfields: Hawksmoor's White Giant
Why is it significant?
Cross to the far pavement of Commercial Street and tilt your head right back. Christ Church Spitalfields rises above you like a stack of white stone boxes, topped by a needle of a spire more than sixty metres high, and its portico looks almost too grand for the street, as if a cathedral had been…
Key Facts
| Place | Christ Church Spitalfields: Hawksmoor's White Giant |
|---|---|
| Address | Commercial Street, London E1 6LY, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.51910, -0.07380 |
| Part of Walk | Four Waves of Newcomers: Whitechapel, Spitalfields & Brick Lane in London's East End |
| Generated | Generated |
Cross to the far pavement of Commercial Street and tilt your head right back. Christ Church Spitalfields rises above you like a stack of white stone boxes, topped by a needle of a spire more than sixty metres high, and its portico looks almost too grand for the street, as if a cathedral had been squeezed into a side road.
It was designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, Christopher Wren's brilliant assistant, and built between 1714 and 1729 under an Act of Parliament that promised fifty new churches for London's growing suburbs. Only about a dozen were ever finished. And there was a message in the stone. This was a district full of French Protestants with their own chapels and their own language, and a huge Anglican church in the middle of it said, politely but firmly... this is England, and this is the Church of England.
Beneath your feet is the crypt. In the 1980s archaeologists carefully removed around a thousand coffins buried there between the 1720s and the 1850s, and many of them still had name plates, so for once the researchers knew exactly who each person had been. Huguenot names fill the list. Silk weavers, their wives, their children, all studied to understand how Londoners of that age lived, aged and died.
In the autumn of 1888, several of the five women murdered by the killer the newspapers called Jack the Ripper lived in the cheap lodging houses of the streets around this church. For more than a century the story was told through him. In 2019 the historian Hallie Rubenhold wrote The Five, a book about the women instead: Mary Ann, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary Jane, daughters, wives and mothers pushed into poverty. If you remember anything of that story here, remember their names.
By the late 1950s the church was so dilapidated that it was closed as unsafe, and there was talk of pulling it down. A long rescue followed, and today it shines again, its organ of 1735 restored and playing once more. Now walk east along Fournier Street, perhaps the most perfect Georgian street in the East End, past the weavers' houses with their long attic windows, to the corner of Brick Lane.