St George's, Bloomsbury, is a parish church in Bloomsbury, London Borough of Camden, United Kingdom. It was designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and consecrated in 1730. The church crypt houses the Museum of Comedy. History The Commissioners for the Fifty New Churches Act of 1711 realised that, due to rapid development in the Bloomsbury area during the latter part of the 17th and early part of the 18th centuries, the area (then part of the parish of St Giles in the Fields) needed to be split off and given a parish church of its own. They appointed Nicholas Hawksmoor, a pupil and former assistant of Sir Christopher Wren, to design and build this church, which he then did between 1716 and 1731. This was the sixth and last of his London churches. St George's was consecrated on 28 January 1730 by Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London. Its construction—which cost £31,000—was completed in 1731. The Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope was baptised at the church in 1824. The wedding of F. B. Chatterton, manager of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, took place in 1853. Richard Meux Benson, founder of the first Anglican religious order for men, the Society of St John the Evangelist (also known as the "Cowley Fathers"), was baptised in the church. A funeral service for Emily Davison, the suffragette who died when she was hit by the King's horse during the 1913 Derby, took place that same year. The funeral was officiated by Claude Hinscliff and C. Baumgarten, both part of the Church League for Women's Suffrage. Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia attended a controversial requiem for the dead of the Abyssinian War in 1937. Until 2006 the church was the subject of major conservation work led by the World Monuments Fund and closed to visitors, with the congregation continuing as normal in its parish life, holding services in a nearby chapel. The building reopened fully from October 2006, including a new exhibition on the church, Hawksmoor and Bloomsbury housed in its undercroft. Architecture The land on which the church is built ("Ploughyard") was bought for £1,000 from Lady Russell, widow of the Whig rebel Lord William Russell who had been executed in 1683. This was a substantial sum and its expenditure on a narrow and rectangular plot of land on a north–south axis, hemmed in by buildings on all sides, seemed to fly in the face of the commissioners'