Christ Church, Spitalfields is a topographical rendering of a significant London church. Piper depicted the church’s west front viewed from Brushfield Street in a frontal composition, with terraces on either side of the street used as a loose scenographic framework. Piper used a richly layered combination of media, which may suggest he finished the work in his studio with the aid of life studies and photographs. The church’s rough outlines were drawn in pencil, and pencil was used again later to define certain details—the cornice, for example. Informal washes of blue and grey watercolour describe atmospheric conditions: they seem to shimmer with the quality of air and light. Salient details of the architecture—arches, capitals, niches—are given local definition by shorthand strokes of pen and ink. The mass of the building is convincingly evoked by heavy-bodied white gouache, which is in striking contrast to solid zones of inky shadow around doorways, niches and beneath the portico.

This work relates to Piper’s series of twenty-four lithographs, A Retrospect of Churches, which was made between autumn 1963 and autumn 1964. From these dates, which were given in a booklet published in late 1964, Piper most likely made Christ Church, Spitalfields sometime during that period. In an introduction printed in the same booklet, the poet John Betjeman had this to say about Piper’s series:

"John Piper is the first English artist since Cotman to concentrate on churches and in particular those of England and Wales. His knowledge of them started as a boy when he was Honorary Local Secretary of the Surrey Archaeological Society. As a young man he made copies of medieval stained glass. He is a keen topographer and photographer and guidebook writer and for those reasons has been into thousands of churches sketching and taking photographs. […] He responds to Renaissance monuments and to the mighty bulk of Hawksmoor’s East London churches which were built for post-Reformation merchants and sea captains in days of growing commercial prosperity."

Along with Christ Church, Spitalfields, which was built to the designs of Nicholas Hawksmoor and completed in 1729, Piper’s series also included St Anne’s, Limehouse, which was designed by the same architect. Piper had previously shown an interest in London’s churches when he photographed several bomb-damaged ruins during the Second World War including St Bride’s, St James, Piccadilly, and Christchurch, Newgate, some of which photographs he used for paintings.

The quality of Piper’s works on paper such as Christ Church, Spitalfields partly arose from their relation to subsequent lithographs. In the decades after the Second World War, Piper was celebrated for the diversity of his creative activities and alongside his activities as a painter he worked on set designs for opera and ballet, fabric design and stained glass commissions. Speaking to Noel Barber in 1964, he explained how his autograph works in oil paint and watercolour were enriched by their intended translation into other media. Referring to lithography, etching, aquatint, costume design and silkscreen printing, Piper said:

"[…] if I read backwards to my ordinary oil, water-colours or inks from these techniques, I sometimes find myself saying, “How would I do this in lithography?” I know I would scratch it, or perhaps gum it out for printing—or something else. And this enriches one’s own technique in oil and water-colour."

This kind of cross-fertilisation is strongly apparent in Christ Church, Spitalfields, which conjures visual effects from a wide mixture of graphic media.