St George’s Hanover Square Church, built between 1721 and 1724 in the reign of George I, was one of the grandest new parish churches to rise in early eighteenth-century London.
Its architect, John James (1673–1746), a pupil of Christopher Wren, designed the church in a restrained Palladian style typical of early Georgian London. The exterior is dominated by a tall portico of Corinthian columns surmounted by a classical pediment, while the west tower rises in three diminishing stages. Compared with the dramatic spires of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s contemporaneous churches, such as St George’s Bloomsbury (1716–1731), James’s design is sober, ordered, and intentionally harmonious, well-suited to the newly developed elegance of Hanover Square.
The interior reflects the liturgical priorities of the early eighteenth-century Church of England. A broad rectangular nave is flanked by galleries on three sides, ensuring both visibility and audibility for the congregation, while the eastern focus is the reredos. This is enriched by William Kent’s (1685–1748) painted Last Supper, framed with carving from the workshop of Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721). Adding further distinction are stained-glass panels of early sixteenth-century Flemish origin, brought from Antwerp, which give the interior an unusual historical layering.
Placed alongside the other “Commissioners’ Churches” of the 1711 Act, St George’s Hanover Square demonstrates how varied the programme became. While James pursued classical proportion and restraint, St Mary-le-Strand by James Gibbs (1714–1723) embodied a more sculptural and Italianate baroque idiom, and Hawksmoor’s St George’s Bloomsbury presented a bold, idiosyncratic profile with its stepped tower surmounted by a statue of George I. In contrast, St George’s Hanover Square was intended to convey refinement and order, perfectly complementing the surrounding Georgian squares that defined Mayfair as a fashionable residential quarter.
The church soon became woven into the cultural life of London. George Frideric Handel (1685–1759), who lived only a short walk away in Brook Street, worshipped here regularly, and his connection is now celebrated through the annual London Handel Festival. A generation later, Johann Christian Bach (1735–1782), the eighteenth child of Johann Sebastian Bach, was also associated with the parish. After making London his home in the 1760s, he established himself as one of the city’s foremost composers and impresarios, co-founding the Hanover Square Rooms, which became the capital’s leading concert venue in the second half of the eighteenth century.
