The Church East and West: Orienting the Queen Anne Churches, 1711-34

Abstract

This article presents the results of an investigation carried out to determine the orientation of seventeen churches and one church plan that are directly or indirectly associated with the 1711 and 1712 Acts for Building Fifty New Churches (for London). The buildings represent an important episode in the history of western ecclesiastical architecture, the visible manifestation of a Tory government-High Church plan to rekindle a "purer form of Christianity" based on the "primitive churches" of the Near East. Our data indicate that few, if any, of the buildings were aligned using the rising or setting sun on important Christian feast days, the method adopted by many of the medieval church builders. Whether this break with tradition was deliberate or not is a matter for conjecture. Nicholas Hawksmoor seemed particularly keen on getting a "correct" alignment and did so for three of his six sole-author buildings. In fact, we suggest that two of Hawksmoor's churches at St. Anne Limehouse and Christchurch Spitalfields, and James Gibbs's St. Martin-in-the-Fields, were so accurately aligned that the only feasible technique for achieving this was through the use of declination-corrected compasses. We speculate that the scientist Edmond Halley provided information and logistical assistance to Hawksmoor.