Sir Christopher Wren

The parish churches of Sir Christopher Wren once numbered fifty-three. Of these, St. Andrew Holborn, St. Clement Danes, and St. James Piccadilly, cannot rightly be included amongst the City churches, as they are outside “the square mile.” Of the remaining fifty, St. Dunstan-in-the-East, St. Mary Aldermary, St. Sepulchre, and the destroyed St. Christopher, were only repaired by Wren. Fifteen have been wholly destroyed, and of St. Mary Somerset only the tower remains. Only thirty therefore remain in the City, and of these many have been so modernised that their value has in part disappeared.

Many devout admirers of Wren have done his memory a serious disservice by indiscriminate praise. It is no doubt an amiable fault, but it does much to confuse serious public issues, such as the question of “the nineteen doomed churches” which has lately agitated the public mind and will do so again. I will not discuss here whether it is ever permissible to remove any church, but if destruction can in any circumstances be allowed, discussion must revolve round the quality of what is doomed. It is common form for disputants to talk as though all city churches were Wren churches, and all Wren churches perfect churches. In point of fact thirteen of the nineteen were by Wren. Of the six that were not, St. Mary Woolnoth, by Hawksmoor, is of as great importance as a Wren church, and much more interesting than many. Of the “doomed” thirteen by Wren, St. Vedast Foster Lane, is said now to be out of danger: the steeple is superb, the nave merely a restoration with some good fittings left. The leaded lantern on the tower of St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, is exceedingly valuable, and its removal would be a crime, but it would be a waste of tears to shed them on the modernized nave. St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street, also has a pleasant little lantern, but if anyone supposes the interior is typical Wren he cannot detect the more glaring feats of the restorer.

In the case of St. Michael Paternoster Royal, St. Michael Cornhill, St. Mary Aldermanbury, St. Anne and St. Agnes, St. Alban Wood Street, and All Hallows Lombard Street, there is enough of characteristic Wren in tower or church, or both, to justify retention; but it is difficult to be enthusiastic about St. Clement Eastcheap, now, and it cannot have been easy before the church was modernized. If a hand were laid on a stone of St. Magnus London Bridge, it would be an abomination.

The tower of St. Dunstan-in-the-East is unique for its date, and of quite extraordinary interest: any idea of removing it should be resisted with vehemence. But why anyone should be the least concerned at the disappearance of the body of the church is known only to those who detect beauty in the Gothic adventures of Messrs. Laing and Tite in the year 1810. Of St. Mary-at-Hill the ugly 1780 tower replaced a mediæval tower which escaped the fire, and the interior has been somewhat havocked in latter days.

St. Clement Eastcheap has some good fittings, but, always small and unimportant, its quality has been greatly modified by the restorer.

These notes are set down in the hope that the case for the maintenance forever of the nobler works of Wren will not be vitiated, confused, and, in the minds of plain men, made ridiculous by hysterical praise of his meanest buildings from which such small quality as they once possessed has been removed by modern vandalisms.

The achievement of Sir Christopher Wren was vast, and for that very reason there must be discrimination between those buildings on which he lavished his utmost personal care and those which, in the press of a huge practice, were designed mainly by assistants and carried out probably with the slenderest supervision by the master.

A glance at the Chronology I print in an appendix will show the sort of pressure at which Wren worked during the ten years following the Fire. Examination of the Accounts of the City Churches reveals that payments began to be made in 1670 to the builders of seventeen churches, and six years later the number had grown to twenty-eight.

Actual work on practically the whole of the fifty-three had been completed by 1690. None was begun after 1686 and payments were made on eight only between 1690 and 1695.

Wren did comparatively little after 1700 except the completion of St. Paul’s and Greenwich. This means that the great majority of his vast bulk of achievement was done within about thirty years.

Is it any wonder that some of his churches show signs of haste and want of thought? Can we suppose anything but that some of them were left largely to assistants?

The year of his first marriage was his annus mirabilis, for during 1669 he must have been working on the plans for the seventeen churches which began to be built in 1670, and he was developing the design of St. Paul’s at the same time.

Evelyn’s word prodigious seems to meet the case.

I have already referred to the towers and spires as showing Wren’s sure touch as a tower-planner, but the amazing variety of their treatment is notable evidence of Wren being, par excellence, the architect of adventure. As I wrote many years ago in a detailed examination[A] of the leaded spires, “he created within the square mile of the city more forms of steeples than all the architects of the Middle Ages, and if, as was inevitable, some pay the penalty of rash experiment, others made an assured success.” Twenty-eight of the towers are crowned with either spire or lantern, nine of stone, and nineteen of leaded timber. Some are true spires, others spire-form steeples, and the rest lanterns: this classification is loose and arbitrary, but “Wren’s masterful way of playing with architectural elements and combining them in astonishing ways makes havoc of any orderly description.”

The preponderance of leaded spires may be attributed partly to his affection for the most characteristic English metal—he chose it for St. Paul’s dome after considering copper—and partly to their cheapness as compared with stone.

St. Swithin’s Cannon Street has a spire of Gothic type, and Wren stepped from the square of the tower to the octagon of the spire by trimming the tower angles to a splay, a short cut no mediæval builder would have employed. At St. Margaret’s Pattens Rood Lane, the tower finishes normally with pinnacles at the corners, and the spire, instead of being leaded with vertical rolls as at St. Swithin’s, is treated with a series of sunk panels, a beautiful and ingenious method: St. Margaret’s spire is indeed a faultless work. Wren did nothing in stone to match the form of these two. Exquisite in its delicacy is the leaded needle spire of St. Martin Ludgate, set on an arcaded lantern which grows in turn out of an ogee roof, and the latter break is marked by a railed balcony. Obelisks take the place of a spire at St. Margaret Lothbury, a steeple of miraculous simplicity, and at St. Mildred’s Bread Street. The tower of St. Lawrence Jewry is crowned by a more massive composition, and the outline of St. Augustine’s Watling Street is a little uncertain. At St. Benet Paul’s Wharf the combination of dome and lantern is perfect in its little way.

Amongst the stone steeples St. Mary-le-Bow and St. Bride’s Fleet Street will always have champions to argue which is the greater. Bow Tower has a romantic, almost Jacobean, quality which contrasts strongly with the austere outline of St. Bride’s. It may be significant of a special importance attached to it by Wren that it is the only tower which has a bill of account, separate from that of the church, in the full priced accounts which I have dealt with in detail elsewhere. It cost £7,388 and the church £8,071, whereas St. Bride’s altogether accounted only for £11,430.

The question of the money spent on the City churches is of considerable interest. The total paid out was £263,786 10s. 4½d., and the amounts entered up against each church were corrected to farthings. These figures exclude most of the internal fittings, which must have been the gift of pious parishioners. The MS. accounts in the Bodleian are abstracted in my Archæologia paper,[B] and give the names of every mason, bricklayer, plumber, painter, etc., employed, with the amounts he (or sometimes she) received. I transcribed the complete bills for St. Mary-le-Bow with Bow Tower and for St. Stephen’s Walbrook. The latter cost £7,652 13s. 8d., and only six churches exceeded that sum. In some ways it is the most notable of them all, for Wren contrived to give the effect of nave, aisles and crossing to a plain room by his ingenuity in carrying a circular dome on eight arches which rest on an entablature supported by twelve columns. East of the dome is one groined bay, and west of it two groined bays divided by four more columns: the side aisles have flat ceilings. The plan is thus an oblong room with sixteen free columns, but so cleverly disposed as to produce the variety of effect described above. Sir Reginald Blomfield justly says of the details that they are “coarse and irrelevant,” but the interior is a masterpiece of scenic planning, and the dome a not unworthy trial piece for what followed at St. Paul’s. A melancholy remodelling in 1847-8, the plans of which are preserved at the R.I.B.A., destroyed some of the character of the church, but the accompanying illustration shows it in the “unimproved” state as Wren left it.

St. Lawrence Jewry is another of the churches in which the architect was not pinched for funds. It cost £11,870, but is on a somewhat uninteresting plan—oblong, with an aisle on one side only. Here, as in almost every church he built, Wren was a determined economist of space, and with good reason. About eighty churches had been destroyed in the Fire, only fifty were rebuilt, and every sitting was of importance. So he did not square up his building if the site was irregular, but made the best, usually a very ingenious best, of whatever odd shape he had to cover in. And there was another consideration. It is obvious from the sums paid for many of the churches, as well as from the evidence of the fabrics, that Wren did not pull down an old wall if he could mend it and save it. There is, therefore, all the more reason to respect these City churches, which retain so much history in their walls, going back even to the earliest times. Always practical and always an opportunist of the right sort, he made the best job he could with the materials and money he had at disposal. A more general realisation of this would prevent criticism of details, which ought to be addressed rather to parsimonious clients than to the architect. Sometimes, however, he made a brilliant excursion to meet the needs of an odd-shaped site as at St. Benet Fink, which he planned as a decagon. This enchanting church stood behind the Royal Exchange and had a beautiful little dome and lantern on its tower: the late Mr. Peabody now sits in bronze on the site. At St. Antholin’s, a church in Watling Street, with a superb stone tower and spire, all swept away in circumstances of infamy, he got over a swerve in the street alinement by splaying the plan at the west end. At St. Mary Abchurch and St. Swithin’s, he had short, broad, and slightly irregular sites to deal with, and covered in a square with a dome and let the rest work out as it would. St. Mildred Bread Street is a longer oblong which Wren treated very delightfully by covering the middle with a dome and the ends with round arches. The need to house large congregations led him to provide galleries at Christ Church Newgate Street, St. James Piccadilly, St. Bride’s, St. Andrew-in-the-Wardrobe, and elsewhere.

Wren’s outlook on the whole problem of parish-church design was indicated with his usual clarity in a letter which he wrote to guide his fellow Commissioners in the task of building fifty new churches in Queen Anne’s reign. Written when he was nearing eighty, the letter sums up the experience of an amazing lifetime of church building.

He is strongly against burials in churches and commends the idea of cemeteries on the outskirts of the towns which will “bound the excessive growth of the City with a graceful border, which is now encircled with scavengers’ dung stalls.”

In the siting of churches, Wren is against too nice an observation of “east and west in the position, unless it falls out properly,” and wants to see them brought as forward as possible into the larger and more open streets. “Such fronts as shall happen to lie most open to view should be adorned with porticoes, both for beauty and convenience; which together with handsome spires or lanterns rising in good proportion above the neighbouring houses (of which I have given several examples in the City of different forms) may be of sufficient ornament to the town, without a great expense for enriching the outward walls of the churches, in which plainness and duration ought principally, if not wholly, to be studied....”

A long paragraph is devoted to the question of materials. He complains bitterly of the badness of the available bricks, despite the fact that London earth will yield a brick more durable than “any stone our island affords.”

Wren is all for Portland-stone for windows and doors, and likes oak for roofs “because it will bear some negligence. The churchwardens’ care may be defective in speedy mending drips: they usually whitewash the church, and set up their names, but neglect to preserve the roof over their heads.”

There is an oddly topical flavour in the note that “the wars in the North Sea make timber at present of excessive price,” and a prophecy of Imperial trading in: “I suppose, ere long, we must have recourse to the West Indies, where most excellent timber may be had for cutting and fetching.”

As to roof coverings, “our tiles are ill-made and our slates not good: lead is certainly the best and lightest covering, and being of our own growth and manufacture, and lasting, if properly made, for many hundred years, is, without question, the most preferable; though I will not deny but an excellent tile may be made to be very durable: our artisans are not yet instructed in it, and it is not soon done to inform them....” If the Gothic Revivalists had worked on Wren’s lines, the Church would not now be saddled with a legacy of badly built Kentish rag and rubble churches and spires, thinly roofed with Welsh slates, an endless anxiety to parishes unable to find money to remedy original defects of construction.

Wren’s next point is of the essence of the problem which he was facing, how to provide the accommodation required for the people.

Even if the new fifty churches were to hold 2,000 apiece, there would not be room enough. “The churches, therefore, must be large, but still, in our reformed religion, it should seem vain to make a parish church larger than that all who are present can both hear and see. The Romanists, indeed, may build larger churches; it is enough if they hear the murmur of the Mass, and see the elevation of the Host; but ours are to be fitted for auditories.” Wren then quotes his St. James’s Piccadilly as the most practicable model of “a single room so capacious, with pews and galleries, as to hold above 2,000 persons, and all to hear the service and both to hear distinctly and see the preacher.” He claims for St. James’s that it is a beautiful and convenient form, with “no walls of a second order, nor lanterns nor buttresses, but the whole roof rests upon the pillars, as do also the galleries ... the cheapest of any form I could invent.” St. James’s Piccadilly cost £8,500, so its accommodation for 2,000 persons worked out at £4 5s. a seat. This church is really in the line of development of the old English timber Hall so far as its constructive idea is concerned. It lent itself to the passing need of galleries, but they are not essential to the idea, as is sometimes supposed.

In discussing the place for the pulpit Wren has some shrewd things to say about the enunciation of English parsons, which hold good to-day: “A Frenchman is heard further than an English preacher because he raises his voice and sinks not his last words ... an insufferable fault in the pronunciation of some of our otherwise excellent preachers.” Wren would have appreciated the similar advice of a modern bishop to a class of candidates for ordination, that they should not drop their voices at the end of a sentence “lest the congregation might suppose, however erroneously, that they had lost something.” On the vexed question of seating the people, our architect has some shrewd words: “A church should not be so filled with pews, but that the poor may have room enough to stand and sit in the alleys: for to them equally is the Gospel preached.”

We may guess that Wren would have been all for the rush-bottomed chair if it had been invented in his day: “It were to be wished there were to be no pews, but benches: but there is no stemming the tide of profit, and the advantage of pew-keepers.”

I have quoted at length from this letter in order to mark the massive common sense which Wren brought to the solution of his problems. Mr. Arthur Bolton gives me the interesting parallel of 1818, when Sir John Soane reported to the Government on the national church building scheme. His recommendations show that he worked on his great predecessor’s report and he even sent to St. James’s and measured it as a typical instance. As, however, the year 1818 preferred numbers to quality, the results fell far below those of the earlier century.

It was Wren’s quality of common sense as much as the genius of the artist that made his City churches what they are, practical solutions of practical difficulties and instinct with the English spirit of compromise, but none the less the greatest group of churches created in any country by the genius and practical wisdom of one man.