This fascinating book tells the story of the creation of Nicholas Hawksmoor's celebrated eighteenth-century London church, St George's, Bloomsbury, and its recent multi million-dollar restoration, underwritten by the World Monuments Fund in Britain and the Paul Mellon Estate. Commissioned by Parliament in 1711 and completed in 1731, the church, best known from its depiction in Hogarth's 1751 engraving, Gin Lane, has been hailed as a masterpiece of Late Baroque architecture and one of the finest churches in England built between the Reformation and the nineteenth century. The renovation, due to be completed in late 2007 with the reconstruction of a new gallery to match the original, has restored the church as it was designed by Hawksmoor, re-establishing its original orientation and reinstating the whimsical lions, unicorns, festoons and crowns that originally graced its celebrated spire. The statues had been removed in 1871, having been declared 'very doubtful ornaments'. Horace Walpole once described the whole tower as 'a masterpiece of absurdity'.
St George's, Bloomsbury is the second in a series of books co-published by Scala and the World Monuments Fund (WMF), the foremost private organization dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage around the globe through a comprehensive program of fieldwork, advocacy, training, and grant-making. Since its founding in 1965, WMF has worked to stem the loss of more than 430 irreplaceable sites in 83 countries