We have seen how, in the novels so far discussed, Ackroyd invariably describes London as a visionary city, whose roots go back to the dawn of civilization. This vision of mythical London or of the mythical origins of the English race is further developed in his most magical and esoteric novels, Hawksmoor (1985), First Light (1989), The House of Doctor Dee (1993) and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994).

In the Acknowledgements to Hawksmoor, Ackroyd gives an important clue for the understanding of the novel when he expresses his ‘obligation to Iain Sinclair's poem, Lud Heat, which first directed my attention to the stranger characteristics of the London churches’. In the first section of Book One of Lud Heat, Sinclair explains how the historical architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, who had been commissioned to rebuild the churches in London and Westminster destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666, planned the churches according to a strict ‘geometry of oppositions’, capable of producing a ‘system of energies, or unit of connection, within the city’, similar to those formed by ‘the old hospitals, the Inns of Court, the markets, the prisons, the religious houses and the others’.Hawksmoor arranged Christ Church, St George's in-the-East and St Anne's, Limehouse, to form a power-concentrating triangle, while ‘St George's, Bloomsbury, and St Alfege's, Greenwich, make up the major pentacle star’, – the ‘pentangle’ Spenser Spender alludes to in The Great Fire of London (p. 16).

Sinclair's vision of London as an intricate net of emblematic buildings accumulating through time the occult power of its millenarian inhabitants is the basic idea around which the plot of Hawksmoor develops. The novel is an astonishing tour de force that attempts to recreate the confused and contradictory intellectual atmosphere of the period of the Enlightenment from the double perspective of both its emergent empiricism, embodied in the novel by Sir Christopher Wren and the members of the Royal Society, and its strong undercurrent of submerged and repressed occult practices, represented by Wren's assistant architect, called Nicholas Dyer (instead of Nicholas Hawksmoor).

The coexistence of official empiricism and these subterranean magical practices is expressed in the novel through its allencompassing duality.