The talk was advertised as being by a professor at the Tate, all about the stained glass window in the beautiful St Anne's church of Limehouse. An entire talk about a single window? There must be more to it, I thought. The church was built in the 1750s by the devil's architect himself, Hawksmoor. Probably it'll be full of fascinating historical nuggets about the history of enamelled glass windows and the church's sordid, violent (and maybe even occult) past. It'll probably turn out that St Anne's is built on a powerline leading directly to Hawksmoor's other London churches, corresponding to an Egyptian hieroglyph, and is the key to the secret underworld of Jack the Ripper.
Close, but no cigar. It consisted of an amateur historian/ vicar type talking us through slides of close-ups of the window, pointing out each biblical character in each pane of glass.
'And this is the good thief, he's looking at Jesus.' And so it went for 35 minutes.
During the interval, we took the opportunity to escape whilst the other 18 attendees (clearly all members of the St. Anne's congregation) tucked into the samosas and skewered chicken. Beautiful church though.
