I spent part of Christmas reading Owen Hopkins’s admirable short monograph From the Shadows:  The Architecture and Afterlife of Nicholas Hawksmoor, which made me look afresh at Christ Church, Spitalfields in the light of his very clear account of the way that Hawksmoor was influenced by the interest of his eccelesiastical contemporaries in the churches of the Primitive Christians, which may have given Hawksmoor some of his characteristics of bold, unornamented, structural clarity:-