St George's Church

The Commissioners for the Fifty New Churches Act of 1711 realised that, due to rapid development in the Bloomsbury area during the latter part of the 17th and early part of the 18th centuries, the area (then part of the parish of St Giles in the Fields) needed to be split off and given a parish church of its own. They appointed Nicholas Hawksmoor, a pupil and former assistant of Sir Christopher Wren, to design and build this church, which he then did between 1716 and 1731. This was the sixth and last, of his London churches. St George's was consecrated on 28 January 1730 by Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London.    

The Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope was baptised here in 1824. Richard Meux Benson, founder of the first Anglian religious order for men, Society of St John the Evangelist, the "Cowley Fathers", was also baptised in the church. The funeral of Emily Davison, the suffragette who threw herself in front of the King's horse, took place here in 1913. Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethopia attended a controversial requiem for the dead of the Abyssinian war in 1937.   

It was until recently the subject of major conservation work led by the Worlds Monuments Fund and closed to visitors, with the congregation continuing as normal in its parish life, holding services in a nearby chapel. The building reopened fully from October 2006, including a new exhibition on the church, Hawksmoor and Bloomsbury housed in its undercroft.