NICHOLAS HAWKSMOOR ARCHITECTURE MODELS

Nicholas Hawksmoor spent much of his career in the shadow of more famous men — apprenticed to Wren, collaborating with Vanbrugh, completing buildings that others had begun. His reputation as an original architect, rather than a brilliant assistant, took centuries to establish. It is fully established now.

The churches are the reason. Built under the Commission for Fifty New Churches in the early eighteenth century, Christ Church Spitalfields and St Mary Woolnoth are among the most singular buildings in London — heavy, theatrical, and charged with an atmosphere that has never been satisfactorily explained. They draw on classical Rome and ancient Egypt and English Gothic and seem to belong to none of them entirely. Both are represented here at the larger end of our range, hand-cast in fine plaster at a scale that rewards close study.

The Royal Naval College at Greenwich shows a different register: expansive, collaborative, and conceived as part of one of the great set-piece urban compositions in Britain. Hawksmoor worked on the building across several decades alongside Wren and Vanbrugh, and our models of the Queen Mary Court and King William Court capture the paired facades that frame the view of the Thames.

Westminster Abbey's west towers, completed to Hawksmoor's designs after his death in 1745, complete the collection — available as a PopArc wall piece.

Each model is cast in fine plaster and finished by hand in our West Sussex studio.