Sir Christopher Wren

Perhaps the most pregnant thing that Wren learnt in France was the value of planning on spacious lines. England was, in 1665, a country of mediæval cities. Such classical buildings as marked the change of taste were set down amidst surroundings of picturesque confusion. If Inigo Jones had been able to create the great Palace of Whitehall, of which the Banqueting Hall is but a symbolic fragment, the Grand Manner would have been established in the land, but when Wren returned from France early in March, 1666, there was nothing to stimulate him except the Piazza of Covent Garden and Lincoln’s Inn Fields laid out by Inigo Jones, and his memory of the Place des Vosges of Henri Quatre. Perhaps Bernini spoke of his great lay-out in front of St. Peter’s.

The Great Fire of 1666 gave him the opportunity. By command of the King, inspired doubtless by John Evelyn, who was himself an amateur town-planner of skill, Wren “took an Exact Survey of the whole Area and Confines of the Burning, having traced over with great Trouble and Hazard, the great Plain of Ashes and Ruins; and designed a Plan or Model of a new City, in which the Deformity and Inconveniences of the old Town were remedied....”

The outlines of his plan are seen in Plate III. They provided that the Royal Exchange should stand in a great piazza from which ten streets were to radiate; three were to run to the river, the midmost to London Bridge, and the river was to be embanked from Blackfriars to the Tower. Round the Exchange, on the islands formed by the radiating streets, were to be built the halls of the Goldsmiths’ Company (the Insurance Office), the Mint, and the Post and Excise Offices. From the Exchange and running westwards were to be two great streets, one passing the Guildhall, surrounded by the halls of the twelve great companies, and another leading to St. Paul’s. The Cathedral was to stand in a great triangular piazza at the junction of the street from the Royal Exchange and another running eastwards through two great octagonal or round piazzas to Tower Hill.

Westwards of the Cathedral Wren devised a circular piazza from which radiated eight streets.

It was a gallant scheme which avoided all acute angles, and set the parish churches on sites “conspicuous and insular.” The streets were to be of three magnitudes—the three greatest, which ran east and west, and the two chief cross streets 90 feet wide, secondary streets 60 feet, and no lanes less than 30 feet. A great canal was to run from the Thames up Bridewell northwards under Holborn Bridge, and all offensive trades and those that used great fires were to be banished out of the City.

The King approved the plan, as well he might, and then the trouble began. Wren worked out a scheme whereby the freeholders of the City were to surrender their properties temporarily to Commissioners. Their areas and frontages were to be noted, and new sites given to them on the new alinement of streets with equal advantages as to area and frontage, and, needless to say, vastly greater advantages in amenity and ultimate value. No proprietor would have been seated exactly on his own site, but none at any considerable distance from it, and the intelligent grouping of trades would have been of advantage to everyone. But the individualism of the Londoner overbore every advantage that Wren offered him. He was content to lose the chance of being citizen of the most convenient if not the most magnificent City the world had seen, and incidentally of benefiting his pocket enormously, if only he could build again on the odd-shaped sites that he had inherited from his forefathers. But we must not blame the seventeenth-century Londoner too much. Wren was an honest man, but the citizens might well be suspicious lest his town-planning schemes developed into a typical piece of Caroline jobbery. There was the little affair of a vast sum of money voted for a noble monument to Charles the First. Wren designed it, as bidden, and the money was forthcoming, but the monument remained on paper, to the benefit of Charles the Second’s pocket. Wren was an apostle of town-planning born out of due time, and his vision faded. We are constrained as the years go by to spend millions in re-creating small scraps of his scheme in the name of street improvements.

But the labour he gave to his great plan was not all wasted. He perceived that the Cathedral and the parish churches were architecturally the keys of the situation, and when he came to the rebuilding of both he saw London as a City marked by its churches. Foiled in his attempt to set them as elements in long vistas of noble streets of uniform houses, he at least could determine that they should give a beautiful skyline, and that the parish churches should be grouped justly in relation to the great bulk of the domed Cathedral.

The picture of London from the Thames which Canaletto drew in 1767 shows what we have lost with the destruction of so many of Wren’s towers and spires and the blotting out of many others by the hideous incubus of Cannon Street Station and rows of ten-storied warehouses.

Wren travelled much by the highway we neglect, in a boat on the Thames, and he must have thought much of the skyline as he passed from Hampton Court to St. Paul’s, and watched the City growing under his hand.

It seems clear that, defeated in his major design, Wren determined on the next best policy of renewing the skyline of the old City. Generally speaking, he rebuilt a tower where a tower only had stood and provided a spire where one had been before. It is only from the lantern of St. Paul’s or from the gallery of the Monument that we can now get an idea of how entrancing London’s skyline was when Wren died, but there is still enough to be seen to mark him as a great town-planner and to make the student breathe ineffectual sighs that the London of 1666 was not worthy of him.