Hawksmoor and the English Gothic Church

This seminar will address a significant question of architectural style in early eighteenth-century Britain: What was Nicholas Hawksmoor’s relationship with the Gothic church?

This seminar will illuminate a new source of Hawksmoor’s experience surveying, repairing, and rebuilding England’s gothic churches, including Beverley, St Albans, and Westminster Abbey. It will uncover Hawksmoor’s little-known involvement in surveying England’s great religious compounds – the largest buildings he likely ever saw – and preparing extensive historical surveys, prints, and designs for them.

It will argue that Hawksmoor’s approach to interpreting and inventing architecture within the style of the ‘Gothick manner’ was fundamentally (and intellectually) linked to his experience training in Sir Christopher Wren’s Office.

Dr Elizabeth Deans is an architectural historian of seventeenth-century Europe and specialises in architecture of the post-Restoration period in Britain. She is currently writing a book, Working in Wren’s Office: A Material History of Architectural Training in Britain, 1660-1730. Currently, Elizabeth is Assistant Director of the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture at the University of Cambridge and lectures in the Faculty of History of Art.