St George's, Bloomsbury, London (World Monuments Fund)

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This fascinating book tells the story of the creation of Nicholas Hawksmoor's celebrated eighteenth-century London church, St George's, Bloomsbury, and its recent multimillion-dollar restoration, underwritten by the World Monuments Fund in Britain and the Paul Mellon Estate. Commissioned by Parliament in 1711 and completed in 1731, the church, best known from its depiction in Hogarth's 1751 engraving, Gin Lane, has been hailed as a masterpiece of Late Baroque architecture and one of the finest churches in England built between the Reformation and the nineteenth century. The renovation, due to be completed in late 2007 with the reconstruction of a new gallery to match the original, has restored the church as it was designed by Hawksmoor, re-establishing its original orientation and reinstating the whimsical lions, unicorns, festoons and crowns that originally graced its celebrated spire. The statues had been removed in 1871, having been declared very doubtful ornaments. Horace Walpole once descr