Nicholas Hawksmoor: Architect of the Imagination, review Exhibitions on architecture are often unsatisfying, since the buildings they focus on are almost inevitably elsewhere. Most non-specialists can stomach only so many scale models, elevation drawings and stone merchant's contracts. On paper, it seemed shrewd for the Royal Academy to mark the 350th anniversary of Nicholas Hawksmoor's birth with a small exhibition exploring not the architect's working methods but his cultural legacy. Hawksmoor's rich appeal to writers and visual artists stems partly from our knowing so little about him. This biographical void has encouraged creative speculation about a shady, occult temperament, most notably in the East End noir of Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor. But it is the buildings themselves, and particularly the six great London churches, that have proved inexhaustible sources of imaginative salvage. Their restless facades and extraordinary disruptions of scale make their presence felt in the London visions of Hogarth and Dickens. It's a shame, then, that the RA has hustled such promising material into what it optimistically calls its "Architecture Space." This is a raked corridor leading to the gallery café, which means your attention is relentlessly interrupted by David Hockney fans in search of a Chelsea bun. Even more disappointingly, the displays here consist almost solely of reproductions. Some, including John Piper's wistful lithograph of St Anne's, Limehouse, are exhibited at knee-height. You can't get much sense of how Leon Kossoff reconstructs Christ Church, Spitalfields out of layers of paint by inspecting a laminated photograph. But the collage feel does make for provocative juxtapositions. A Bill Brandt photograph of the crypt of Christ Church, tenanted during the Blitz, is pressed close to a page from Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell (where the tower of the church is "about to topple forward like some monstrous corpse"). A film of Philip Pullman rhapsodising about Oxford chafes against Maxwell Fry's unrealised vision for a modernist intervention at All Souls College. Hawksmoor might have appreciated this. He was himself a master of medley, pressganging formal elements from Classical, native Gothic, Egyptian and even Mayan architecture into those distinctive sculptural structures that none of his predecessors would have dared build. It's no coincidence that TS Eliot's great arrangement of cultural fragments, The Waste Land, keeps time to the bells of Hawksmoor's St Mary Woolnoth ("With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine"). That said, there's clearly a tension between Hawksmoor's place in architectural history and the way his buildings have come to punctuate London's imaginative skyline. This was fascinatingly apparent at a panel event, Imagining Hawksmoor, held last week to accompany the exhibition. Each time the architectural historian Elizabeth McKellar detailed the urban imperatives behind Hawksmoor's church commissions, London writer and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair responded with his inimitable brand of associative cultural thinking (the churches, he claimed, are "not just metaphors, but the provocations of metaphors"). It seems fitting that the architect Ptolemy Dean, Surveyor of the Fabric at Westminster Abbey, gave the impression of being caught between these two positions. His articulate discussion of the Hawksmoor aesthetic sporadically gave way to more abstract appraisal of the buildings" quasi-mythical power, as if psychogeography were a bug he'd caught from the man sitting next to him. Sinclair is an instrumental figure in the literary afterlife of Hawksmoor. He told an amusing anecdote about how every Georgian house in Spitalfields has at least three or four copies of Hawksmoor, as though Ackroyd's shadowy fiction somehow enriched the heritage of the area for its gentrified residents. What he doesn't mention is the inspiration Ackroyd drew from his own poem, "Lud Heat," as he tinted the English baroque with Gothic enigma. "The buildings taken together, knotted across the city," Sinclair wrote in 1975, "yield a further world." The exhibition runs at the Royal Academy until June 17