St George’s is a parish church, fronting on busy Bloomsbury Street, which serves especially the University of London and the British Museum, located just a block away. It was built by the famous architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, an assistant to Christopher Wren, and completed in 1730. Anthony Trollope, author of the Barchester novels of the nineteenth century, was baptized here. It also figures in a minor way in one of Charles Dickens’ little stories in Sketches by Boz called ‘The Bloomsbury Christening’. The facade of St George’s, Bloomsbury, with its massive Corinthian columns, was modelled after the description given by Pliny of the tomb of Mausolus in Carla. In our times its grand classical design appears dignified and in keeping with its neighbour, the British Museum. But to many of the Victorians it was, as described in a guidebook of the day, ‘at once the most pretentious and the ugliest ecclesiastical edifice in the metropolis’. The detached tower and steeple, topped by a statue of King George I in a Roman toga (a gift of a local brewer), especially came under ridicule. Horace Walpole spoke of it as ‘a master stroke of absurdity’ and penned the following epigram:
When Harry the Eighth left the Pope in the lurch, The people of England made him ‘Head of the Church’; But George’s good subjects, the Bloomsbury people, Instead of the Church made him ‘Head of the Steeple'.