st.george hanover square, westminster, london

built in 1712-24 by john james as one of the 50 planned churches of the 1711 tory commission , with a good portico and a well articulated north face, but let down like all of james' work by areas of design weakness, which just show how easy hawksmoor made it seem. here the tower in particular seems not just flat but irrelevant, and the plan and eastern elevation make clear james' inability to bring a sense of inevitability to the relationships between spaces , masses and voids that is the hall mark of a great baroque building. it should be more than the sum of its parts; here parts excite, but the whole fails to fulfill the portico's promise. at present [2010] the church is being restored, and so we do not even have the somewhat muddled consolation of the early c16 glass from antwerp that fills the eastern window. perhaps in keeping the jesse tree shows st.george, minerva and victory but had no space for god, who went to wiltshire.