Concrete and Clay

Every time I walk to Liverpool Street station, the endless procession of pigeons, blackboards, pink scooters, suits, sodden flyers, bagel wrappers and faded stencillry is broken into pieces by a huge white spire that towers over Spitalfields market. As soon as you get round the corner of the Truman Brewery building you see it there looming all awful and grand, like a temple of doom, or a lost ark, no matter where you look all the way to Liverpool Street. You can’t hide a piece of broccoli in a glass of milk. There’s something about the way this huge pile of ancient looking marble towers precariously over everything.

Not that much is known about Nicholas Hawksmoor, the man who designed it way back in 1714, except that he was a mason who might have had some issues, as he allegedly built the church on some pagan point of significance, above a huge roman burial ground, and in alignment with the other churches he was commissioned to build in London. If you mark the five other churches he built on a map of London they form the "Eye of Horus", an ancient Egyptian symbol of power and death also known as the "All Seeing Eye", which now takes pride of place on all dollar bills.