After the Fire – A glorious photographic survey of the London churches built in the sixty years after the Great Fire
‘LONDON was but is no more!’ In these words diarist John Evelyn summed up the destruction wrought by the Great Fire that swept through the City of London in 1666 from 2nd – 5th September. The losses included St Paul’s Cathedral and eighty-seven parish churches (as well as at least thirteen thousand houses). In After the Fire the celebrated photographer and architectural historian Angelo Hornak explores, with the help of his own stunning photographs, the churches built in London during the sixty years that followed the Great Fire, as London rose from the ashes, more beautiful – and far more spectacular – than ever before. The catastrophe offered a unique opportunity to Christopher Wren and his colleagues – including Robert Hooke and Nicholas Hawksmoor – who, over the next forty years, rebuilt St Paul’s and fifty-one other London churches in a dramatic new style inspired by the European Baroque.
After the Fire
London Churches in the Age of Wren, Hooke, Hawskmoor and Gibbs
By Angelo Hornak £50, 21st July 2016, Pimpernel Press
• Published to coincide with the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London
• A fascinating account of the building of London – and the creation of its fabled skyline – in the late seventeeth and early eighteenth centuries
• In a unique photographic experiment, detailed close-ups of weathervanes, finials and other distant details have been captured by the use of an astronomical telescope as an extreme telephoto lens.
Limehouse, Christ Church Spitalfields and St George’s Bloomsbury. By the 1720s
the pendulum was swinging away from the Baroque of Wren and Hawksmoor, and it was James Gibbs’s more restrained St Martin-in-the-Fields that was to provide the prototype for churches throughout the English-speaking world – especially in North America – for the next hundred years.
Angelo Hornak first took an interest in London‘s Baroque churches when he was studying history at Oxford in the late 1960s. He went on to combine his passion for buildings with an enthusiasm for photography and became an architectural photographer, a career which has lasted more than forty years. Besides numerous guide books to churches and cathedrals – including St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey and the cathedrals of Canterbury, Wells, Exeter and Ely – he
Forty-five years after the Fire, the Fifty New Churches Act of 1711 gave Nicholas Hawksmoor the scope to build breathtaking (and controversial) new churches including St Anne’s
has also written and illustrated two previous books of his own Balloon Over Britain (Walker Books, 1991) and London From The Thames (Little Brown, 1999).
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