Restoring Hawksmoor

To celebrate restoration of St George's Church, Bloomsbury, substantially funded by the estate of Paul Mellon and by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Paul Mellon Centre is organising this symposium with the World Monuments Fund in Britain. The work st St George's has revealed new information about the history of building in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and raised fundamental questions about the nature of conservation and restoration in the early twenty-first century. The recent parallel case of the internal restoration of Christ Church Spitalfields adds to the timely nature of this symposium, and further depth will be given by consideration of the histories of three other Queen Anne churches by Hawksmoor; St Anne's Limehouse (reconstructed after fire in the second half of the nuneteenth century), St Alfege's, Greenwich, and St George's-in-the-East at Shadwell (both gutted by bombs in 1941 and rebuilt in diametrically opposed ways).