St Mary Woolnoth Architectural Model

This architectural object is inspired by St Mary Woolnoth at 1 King William Street, in the heart of the City of London — the only church Nicholas Hawksmoor built within the City walls, and one of the most original small churches in Britain. Designed from 1716 and completed in 1727 under the Act for Building Fifty New Churches, it stands on a tiny, awkward island site at the corner of Lombard Street and holds its ground among the office towers that have risen all around it.

St Mary Woolnoth is Grade I listed and remains an active church — famous additionally for the extraordinary fact that, when Bank Underground station was extended in 1897–1900, its crypt was cleared and the building underpinned on steel girders so that the station's booking hall could be built directly beneath it.

Read the full St Mary Woolnoth architecture guide

Monumental at miniature scale

Handed a cramped corner plot with effectively only one façade to make an impression, Hawksmoor made it count. St Mary Woolnoth is an exercise in making a very small building look monumental — broad, heavy, tightly controlled, with no wasted ornament, only mass, proportion, and the play of light across deeply cut stone. It is Hawksmoor's originality at its most concentrated.

This architectural object captures the church's front façade — the elevation that defines the building — because that is where the whole drama lies:

• the heavy rusticated base, its deep horizontal banding giving the building a fortress-like solidity
• the broad upper stage crowned by twin squat, flat-topped turrets, set side by side
• the clusters of Corinthian columns that support them — an arrangement unique among English churches of its period
• the blunt, emphatic silhouette, quite unlike the elegant single steeples of Wren's nearby City churches

Presented beneath a glass dome, it is one of the most complex pieces in the Chisel & Mouse range.

Why St Mary Woolnoth works as an architectural object

The building translates with exceptional power into object form because its architecture is governed by:

• mass and proportion rather than fine carving — exactly what survives reduction to plaster
• the deep rustication, which reads with real depth and shadow at any scale
• a single, unmistakable façade conceived to do all the work of the whole building

Rather than functioning as a literal miniature, this object captures the architectural character of St Mary Woolnoth.

Craft, materials, and finish

Each St Mary Woolnoth object is hand-cast in fine plaster with etched metal detailing and finished by hand in our West Sussex studio, then presented under a glass dome. A raking light from one side will throw the horizontal shadows of the rusticated base into relief.

The result is an object that sits naturally within:

• architectural and design studios
• curated interiors
• bookshelves and workspaces

It appeals to architects, lovers of the English Baroque, devotees of Hawksmoor, and admirers of the City of London. It pairs especially well with our Christ Church Spitalfields model — the two great Hawksmoor churches together.

The church above the Tube, and in the poetry of the City

St Mary Woolnoth has a particular hold on the literary imagination of the City. The poet T. S. Eliot, who worked nearby in the early 1920s, invoked the sound of the church's bell in The Waste Land — fixing it forever as part of the modern myth of the City as a place of crowds and routine. That a Hawksmoor church should survive, structurally, balanced over a Tube station, only adds to its strangeness: it is a building that refuses, against every odd, to be anything other than itself.

Product details

• Subject: St Mary Woolnoth, 1 King William Street, London EC3V 9AN (front façade)
• Architect: Nicholas Hawksmoor
• Commission: Commissioners for Building Fifty New Churches
• Architectural style: English Baroque
• Completed: 1727 (designed from 1716)
• Designation: Grade I listed
• Designed and made by: Chisel & Mouse

Learn more about St Mary Woolnoth

For the full story of the building — the difficult island site, the cube of light Hawksmoor created inside, and the remarkable engineering that saved it when Bank station was built beneath — see our in-depth architecture guide:

St Mary Woolnoth Architecture: Nicholas Hawksmoor's City of London Masterpiece