Nicholas Hawksmoor built six extraordinary churches and has been posthumously accused of encoding occult geometry into London. He was not.
Hawksmoor Seven Dials holds a 4.6 from five thousand three hundred and eighteen people and is, by common consent, one of the best steak restaurants in Britain.
And it is named after an architect who has been dead for three hundred years and who is now, thanks largely to a novel and a graphic novel, widely believed to have been a satanist.
What he actually was
Nicholas Hawksmoor was Wren’s clerk. He worked on St Paul’s. He worked with Vanbrugh on Blenheim and Castle Howard. He was, by every professional measure, one of the two or three greatest architects this country has produced, and he spent most of his career being somebody else’s assistant.
And then, under the Fifty New Churches Act, he was given his own commissions – and he built six churches in London that do not look like anything else in Europe.
Christ Church Spitalfields. St George in the East. St Anne Limehouse. St Mary Woolnoth. They are enormous, strange, top-heavy, and faintly menacing, and they are built out of a vocabulary that is classical but wrong – proportions pushed to the edge, towers that do not resolve, mass where you expect lightness.
They are unsettling on purpose. That is what he was doing. He wanted a church to feel like it had weight.
The occult thing
In 1975 the poet Iain Sinclair wrote a book suggesting that the churches formed a pattern across London with occult significance.
In 1985 Peter Ackroyd wrote a novel called Hawksmoor in which the architect is a devil-worshipper who buries a body under each church.
And in the 1990s Alan Moore built From Hell on top of it – the Ripper murders, the churches, the geometry, the lot.
None of it is true. Hawksmoor was a working architect, an Anglican, and a professional, and there is no evidence of anything of the kind. The pattern only works if you choose which churches to include and ignore the ones that spoil it.
And it has completely, permanently attached itself to his name – which is exactly what we have watched happen at the Churchill Arms, the Elephant and Castle, and the Prince of Wales feathers.
The story wins. It always wins. The truth is that he was very good at his job.
Seven Dials
Which is worth its own line: a junction of seven streets around a pillar with sundials on it, laid out in the 1690s, and which became one of the worst slums in London within a century – the rookery Dickens wrote about.
The original pillar was pulled down in 1773 by a mob who believed treasure was buried under it. There was not.
Verdict
Superb steak, superb bar, serious money. The Sunday roast is one of the best in London.
Why the steak is that good
Since we are here, and since five thousand people cannot all be wrong.
Hawksmoor buys whole animals – native breeds, grass-fed, from named farms – and dry-ages them properly, which means hanging beef in a cold room for weeks while it loses water and the enzymes break down the muscle.
It is expensive because it is wasteful. A dry-aged carcass loses a substantial proportion of its weight to evaporation, and the dried outer crust has to be trimmed off and thrown away, and you are paying for all of it.
Which makes it the exact reverse of the angels’ share we described at the Melody Whisky Bar in Notting Hill – where a quarter of a cask evaporates into the air of the warehouse and you pay for the bottles that were never filled.
The best things in this survey are, almost without exception, expensive because somebody threw a great deal of it away.
Verdict
Superb steak, superb bar, serious money. The Sunday roast is one of the best in London.
Go. And do not worry about the churches. He was fine.
Paige Shiver has established herself as a cornerstone of modern British satire through her work at Prat.UK, where she serves as a lead political commentator and cultural critic. With over a decade of experience in investigative journalism and comedy writing, Shiver specializes in deconstructing the absurdities of Westminster and the nuances of the UK’s social landscape.
Her expertise is rooted in a deep understanding of British policy, allowing her to deliver biting critiques that are as factually grounded as they are humorous. Shiver’s commitment to the high art of satire and UK Literature is evidenced by her frequent appearances on BBC Radio 4 and her published anthologies on the decline of political decorum. At Prat.UK, her transparency and rigorous research ensure that even her most satirical takes provide valuable, trustworthy insights into the national conversation.
Paige Shiver @ PaigeShiver.com
Britisk komedie handler om å være alvorlig mens man er morsom og morsom mens man er alvorlig.