A noisy thoroughfare en route to the restaurant, the Royal Academy's Architecture Space encourages contemplation as much as it flatters its subject matter. In the case of this exhibition about the English baroque architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, whose six London churches, crowned by the mighty Christ Church Spitalfields, make for an epic architectural journey, the urge to get the hell out and see the real thing is great. Give the show time, though, and its initially meagre offerings yield invigorating results.
Printed on the walls are texts – including mentions of Hawksmoor churches in Dickens, TS Eliot and Moore and Campbell's 'From Hell' – and reproductions of paintings by, among others, Leon Kossoff and Celia Paul, whose School of London impasto styles really deserve to be seen in the flesh. A few actual art works, including a print after Hogarth depicting degenerate London unfolding beneath the spire of St George's Bloomsbury, and some short films complete this scattershot reappraisal of 'Wren's apprentice'. |n one film, architect Ptolemy Dean enthuses about St Mary Woolnoth in the City, admiring Hawksmoor's dramatic exaggeration of form from bottom to top as a way of capitalising on the church's narrow site. Dean reminds us that Hawksmoor was never interested in making form follow function, which helps to explain compliments from a postmodern architect like James Stirling, printed nearby.
More esoteric is Iain Sinclair's contribution, a magical few minutes in which the author takes us from his job as a gardener at St Anne's Limehouse in the 1970s, via Dickens, Eliot and Sax Rohmer's 'Fu Manchu', to the underworld. Sinclair talks of Hawksmoor 'conceiving a city in terms of quotations', which is what our chief psycho-geographer also does beautifully. You'll still want to make a Hawksmoor pilgrimage, but with Sinclair's words ringing in your ears, that feels like a positive outcome of the show.