When Henry VIII left the Pope in the lurch,
The Protestants made him the head of the church,
But George’s good subjects, the Bloomsbury people
Instead of the church, made him head of the steeple. 
— Horace Walpole 

One picks up the damnedest bits of trivia when one studies English baroque architecture

So: a lot going on with this 1730 church, rather late for Nick Hawksmoor (who died in 1736), and I had no time to look at it too closely. As a matter of fact, due to a Korean-language service that Sunday, I didn’t have chance to go inside to study the wild contortions of the plan forced on Hawksmoor by the liturgical requirement, at least during the architect’s era, that the altar be situated in the East part of the nave, while the site required the temple-front entrance, based on the maximum-pagan Temple of Baachus at Baalbek, to face South. 

That steeple: the step pyramid from the Graeco-Persian Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the very last of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, with a Roman altar (something like a ribbon-wrapped, stubby Tuscan column) on top, with a statue of the late King “Hanover” George (d.1727) on top of that in the armor of a Roman general, in honor (somehow) of his triumph over the Jacobite rising of 1715 — which triumph in fact probably had more to do with the incompetence of the Stuart’s general, the visionary but hapless Earl of Mar who did such a wretched job that prog-rockers Genesis wrote a wistful tragic-comedy song about him.

And the “Beasts of Bloomsbury”, English Lion and Scottish Unicorn: chasing each other about the base of the pyramid (so there is a pair of each), as described in the eighteenth century nursery rhyme:

The lion and the unicorn
Were fighting for the crown
The lion beat the unicorn
All around the town.

Some gave them white bread,
And some gave them brown;
Some gave them plum cake
and drummed them out of town.

( With some difficulty, Alice — because it must be served first and then cut — distributes the plum cake to the Beasts in Through the Looking Glass.)

Everyone hated the steeple from the start; Hawksmoor was much criticized; finally someone “restored” the beasts off the church in 1871 and conveniently lost them somewhere. The current ones are painstaking 1996 recreations by architectural sculptor Tim Crawley <link>.