Unreal City,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying, “Stetson!
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
— T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922

No brown fog, but a light rain, dramatic skies, and a great deal of unreality thanks presumably thanks to jet-lag. Saint Mary Woolnoth (Nicholas Hawksmoor architect, 1727) — worn out, eviscerated of galleries and crypt, stained, surprisingly toylike and very odd architecturally — was the first site I photographed after arriving in London today. There is a very good coffee shop tucked into the tiny narthex; the business owner rents the space from the diocese. She said that there is only one service a week, on Thursdays, for the essential reason that few churchgoers apparently live in the parish in the City anymore. She opens and closes the church other days, and sells flat whites to office workers. There have been particularly less of those, though, since the pandemic, which may prove a problem for the shop. And yes, she has read the Ackroyd novel (where the church is the site of two different murders, centuries apart but carried out by the same architect-murderer). 

As I drank my excellent expresso concoction while sitting in a pew, staring up at the lunettes lighting the square nave, I found myself wondering how often trivia from Hawksmoor comes up when people are paying for their coffee. Also: why do I feel like I am on stage set, albeit a disused one, right now? Something about the overhead lighting? The geometric drama going on behind the classical stucco-work? I should be wearing a dark silk justacorps, with a black overcoat. My walking stick and tricorne should be resting on the bench beside me. And — feeling my head — am I wearing a periwig?

I really need to get some rest.

Anyway, I actually have been cribbing some Hawksmoorian baroque details from this poor old church. And no, I wasn’t being cool with cube-in-cube concepts. Something more frivolous: jet-lag daydreams aside, I was happy to discover today that I had guessed correctly about some facade elements that weren’t visible in my Hawksmoor books. The Tuscan columns wrapped in streamlined rustication do not in fact have visible bases.