NICHOLAS HAWKSMOOR ARCHITECTURE MODELS

Nicholas Hawksmoor spent much of his career in the shadow of more famous men — apprenticed to Wren, collaborating with Vanbrugh, completing buildings others had begun. His reputation as an original architect in his own right, rather than a brilliant assistant, took centuries to establish. It is fully established now.

What makes our collection of Hawksmoor models so varied is how differently his buildings speak. Christ Church Spitalfields (1714–29) and St Mary Woolnoth (1716–27) are the reason his reputation endures at all — heavy, theatrical, and charged with an atmosphere three centuries of scholarship has never quite explained, drawing on ancient Rome and Egypt and English Gothic without settling into any of them. Both are among the larger and more complex pieces in our range, each presented under a glass dome. Greenwich shows a different register entirely: the Royal Naval College — its paired King William and Queen Mary Courts — is expansive and collaborative, conceived across decades alongside Wren and Vanbrugh as part of one of the great set-piece urban compositions in Britain. Kensington Palace, by contrast, shows Hawksmoor's early career at its most pragmatic — brick rather than stone, built at speed as clerk of works under Wren, and comfortably domestic where his churches are monumental. And Westminster Abbey's west towers, completed to Hawksmoor's designs after his death, round out the collection as a PopArc wall piece — retaining the full plaster depth and shadow of the original stone.

Together, the six span a career spent largely in collaboration, and the handful of years in which Hawksmoor worked entirely alone. Each model is cast in fine plaster and finished by hand in our West Sussex studio.