Christ Church Spitalfields is an Anglican church built between 1714 and 1729 to a design by Nicholas Hawksmoor. On Commercial Street in the East End and in today's Central London it is in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, on its western border facing the City of London, it was one of the first (and arguably one of the finest) of the so-called "Commissioners' Churches" built for the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, which had been established by an Act of Parliament in 1711. The purpose of the Commission was to acquire sites and build fifty new churches to serve London's new settlements. This parish was carved out of the circa medieval Stepney parish for an area then dominated by Huguenots (French Protestants and other 'dissenters' who owed no allegiance to the Church of England and thus to the King) as a show of Anglican authority. Some Huguenots used it for baptisms, marriages and burials but not for everyday worship, preferring their own chapels (their chapels were severely plain compared with the bombastic English Baroque style of Christ Church) though increasingly they assimilated into English life and Anglican worship – which was in the eighteenth century relatively plain. The Commissioners for the new churches including Christopher Wren, Thomas Archer and John Vanbrugh appointed two surveyors, one of whom was Nicholas Hawksmoor. Only twelve of the planned fifty churches were built, of which six were designed by Hawksmoor. Architecture The architectural composition of Christ Church demonstrates Hawksmoor's usual abruptness: the very plain rectangular box of the nave is surmounted at its western end by a broad tower of three stages topped by a steeple more Gothic than classical. The magnificent porch with its semi-circular pediment and Tuscan columns is attached bluntly to the western end: it may indeed be a late addition to the design intended to add further support to the tower. Like those of Hawksmoor's other London churches and many of Wren's, the central space of the nave is organised around two axes, the shorter originally emphasised by two entrances of which only that to the south remains. It has a richly decorated flat ceiling and is lit by a clerestory. The aisles are roofed with elliptical barrel-vaults carried on raised Composite order columns (cf. Wren's St James's, Piccadilly), and the same order is used for the screens across the eastern and western ends. The Venetian window at