About St George’s Bloomsbury
- A short history
- A tour of St George’s Bloomsbury
   - Interior: alterations to Hawksmoor’s
     original design
   - Nave
   - Galleries and organ
   - East apse and furnishings
   - Undercroft
   - South front and steeple
   - North front
   - Further reading
- Restoration
- Family history research

St George’s Church, Bloomsbury was consecrated on the
28th January 1730 by Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London,
and is the last of the twelve churches built under the 1711 Act
for Building Fifty New Churches. This Act of Parliament was
passed in 1711 by the new Tory government in response to
the increasing number of non-conformist chapels and places
of worship in London, all of which were intended to serve its
rapidly growing population. The Commissioners of the Act,
led by Sir Christopher Wren, quickly set about identifying
those areas of London most in need of new places of worship directly controlled by the Church of England.

At this time, Bloomsbury was part of the parish of St Giles in
the Fields. Not only was St Giles unable to meet the needs of
the increasing parish population, but it was also surrounded
by one of London’s most notorious slums; the Rookery.
Hogarth’s Gin Lane (1751), with the spire of St George’s
clearly visible towards the top of the picture, gives us an idea
of the squalor and despair that characterised the area.
Regular visits to St Giles in the Fields would hardly have
been an attractive proposition to the nobility, gentry and well to-do taking up residence in the fashionable streets and
squares of Bloomsbury, built and managed by the Duke of Bedford.

The land on which the church is built (‘Ploughyard’) was
bought for £1,000 from Lady Russell, widow of the Whig rebel Lord John Russell who had been executed in 1683. This is not an insubstantial sum, which begs the question why it was spent on a narrow, rectangular plot of land on a North-South axis that was hemmed in by buildings on all sides; a purchase which seemed to fly in the face of the
Commissioners’ 1711 stipulation that “no site ought to be
pitched upon for the erecting [of] a new church where the
same will not admit the church to be placed East and West.”
Perhaps the orientation of the site was deemed a
surmountable obstacle, especially since the site met the
needs of the commissioners in that it was situated “amongst the… better sort… [and on] the larger and more open streets, not in obscure lanes, nor where coaches will be much obstructed in the passage.”

The land purchase was the work of one of the two surveyors
appointed by the Commissioners of the 1711 Act: Nicholas
Hawksmoor. Unlike others appointed by the Commissioners, Hawksmoor continued to work as a surveyor of the 1711 Act churches until his death in 1736. Of the twelve churches completed, he would ultimately be responsible for designing six, of which St George’s Bloomsbury was the last. His final designs for St George’s, however, were only commissioned and then adopted after earlier designs by James Gibbs and Sir John Vanburgh (who proposed building a church with the altar in the north) were rejected by the Commissioners.

To continue the tour, click here