Identified by Uglow only as a ‘City Scape’, Uglow’s sister, Betty McCormican, to whom he gave the painting, believed that Church in the City had been painted from an apartment Uglow shared with Craigie Aitchison in London during the early-to-mid-1950s. A decade later, Uglow would paint the Imperial War Museum seen from the window of Craigie’s studio in Lambeth. Craigie and Uglow’s youthful exchange of ideas, as seen in Funeral Scene, c. 1953, was the product of a close friendship, where a personal connection engendered an artistic relationship. Although primarily associated with the studio, Uglow, like Coldstream, painted landscapes and cityscapes, particularly of London, throughout his career. During the 1950s, Uglow produced a number of city scenes in London – parks in South London were a recurring subject – and in Spain after winning a scholarship to travel whilst at the Slade. As Coldstream had also done whilst a young man as part of the Mass-Observation movement, Uglow painted industrial locations in Cheshire after being commissioned by Shell, on the recommendation of Coldstream, to paint the Stanlow Refinery. Whilst Coldstream, with his proclivity towards socialism, was interested in the city as the manifestation of the urban human existence, Uglow’s cityscapes and industrial scenes remained fundamentally about structure, form and composition.

In Church in the City, a Wren-esque church with drum, dome and elaborate cupola adorning the structure, possibly St Magnus-the-Martyr near Monument, soars above the skyline of the city; the thinly painted blue sky evokes a grey morning in the city. The atmosphere of the city, even the skyline itself, is incidental to Uglow’s primary occupation analysing the relationship between form and colour. Uglow layers planes of geometric shapes which are formed from colour itself rather than outline, blocks of paint that represent the flanks of buildings, receding flat roofs, windows, and chimneys. Black lines situate compositionally significant horizontal and vertical axes, foreshadowing his later use of thin black lines to disrupt perfectly smooth surfaces and confuse perspectival space. A city panorama painted on an intimate scale, Church in the City is both an homage to Uglow’s city and an exacting illustration of recession through planes of colour alone.