I can hear the bell of St. Anne’s, Limehouse tolling as I write. The church is preparing to celebrate its 300th anniversary, and every time I walk past it, I imagine what the local people must have thought back in the 1720s when this monumental structure started to take shape around them. Even today, with Canary Wharf’s glass and steel towers looming in the distance, St. Anne’s holds its place proudly, but three centuries ago it must have been nothing short of astounding.

I was inside St. Anne’s recently to see an exhibition of photographs taken by Helene Binet and displayed to mark a project to restore all of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s extraordinary London churches. Hawksmoor was the great beneficiary of Queen Anne’s so-called Fifty Churches Act of 1711. The grandiose project envisioned originally never came to full fruition. Only twelve churches were completed. Nevertheless, the vision gave us what many today call the Hawksmoor Six: St. Anne’s, Limehouse, St. Alfege in Greenwich, St. George-in-the-East, Christ Church, Spitalfields, St. Mary Woolnoth, and St. George’s, Bloomsbury. We can add the decommissioned church of St. Luke’s, Old Street, and the now demolished St John Horsleydown, but it’s the Six that most people know and that are the subject of the conservation effort.

As I strolled around looking at the huge, imposing photographs, and reading about the restoration appeal, I got talking to a volunteer who alerted me to a wonderful book by Mohsen Mostafavi and Helene Binet, Nicholas Hawksmoor: London Churches. Binet’s sharp black-and-white photographs steal the show here, but the floor plans and stylized outlines of each church are also rendered beautifully, and are accompanied by short essays. No book can do justice to the splendors of these remarkable and precious churches, but when I’m away from London I like to dip in to London Churches to remember them.