I am pleased
to announce the launch of a new themed walk on “The Lost Wren Churches of
London”.
The walk will
be a circular one, beginning and ending at St Paul’s tube station, and taking in all 21 of the “lost” Wren churches on the
way, as well as passing a number of the surviving ones (see below).
It will be another of our specials, meaning that it can
be taken at any time.
To book,
please either e-mail (lostcityoflondon@sky.com)
or phone (020-8998-3051).
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| One of the Not-Quite-Lost Wren Churches, St Dunstan-in-the-East |
Background (an extract from my book, 'The Lost City of London', published in 2012 - see link for further details)
In the
aftermath of the Great Fire of London of 1666, the question was asked, would
the City ever be rebuilt, or be the same again?
Well, of
course it would, not least because the prosperity of the City was essential not
only to that of the country as a whole but also to that of powerful men with
vested interests, watching anxiously from the sidelines as “day by day the
City’s wealth flowed out of the gate” to other boroughs.
The Lord Mayor
initiated the process essentially straight away, within weeks commissioning a
detailed survey of the fire-damaged area of the City to assist with the assessment
of compensation claims, and to use as a
template for reconstruction plans.
The survey was undertaken by the Bohemian Wencesla(u)s Hollar, who had
travelled widely before eventually settling in London, and earned a reputation as an engraver and print-maker
of some skill, specialising in landscape scenes. Other surveys were undertaken, and maps made,
by Doornick, Leake, and Ogilby and Morgan.
A number of
revolutionary reconstruction plans for the City were submitted, by, among
others, Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and John Evelyn, any one of which, if
implemented, would have given it a
radically new look and feel, much more like that of the great European cities of the day, and indeed of today, with
their uniform architecture, broad boulevards and open piazzas. (Evelyn wrote that “In the disposure of the
streets, due consideration should be had, what are the competent breadths for
commerce and intercourse (!), cheerfulness and state”). But these
plans were over-ambitious, apart from anything else, and were abandoned
on the grounds of practicality in favour of
one requiring much less groundwork, and much more like the old one
(although allowing of at least one concession to modernity, in the widening, and
freeing from encumbrance to the flow of
traffic, of the streets). The City that
might have been never came to be, and
that that had been would come to
be again: for the most part neither particularly beautiful nor harmonious; but,
rather, “lived in” and fractious; and
yet, familiar and loved.
The man
selected to oversee and implement the chosen reconstruction plan was the
aforementioned Christopher Wren, an architect and a member of an aristocratic family who had
finally found favour in the Restoration, after years in the wilderness during
the Protectorate and Commonwealth: his assistants, the aforementioned brilliant
but curmudgeonly Robert Hooke, memorably described by Pepys as
“the most, and promises the
least, of any man in the world that I ever saw”; and the young and prodigiously
gifted Nicholas Hawksmoor. Incidentally,
Wren was an anatomist and astronomer as well as an architect (one wonders
whether he, like Sartre’s autodidact, acquired his learning by reading an
encyclopaedia, starting with the letter “A”); a follower of the “New
Philosophy” of Francis Bacon; and a founder member of the Royal Society. He was, in short, an archetypal
(English) Renaissance Man, and, most
definitely, the right man, in the right place, at the right time - an unusually
happy conjunction in the history of the City.
Wren and
his office set about their
reconstruction work as hastily, or rather speedily, as practicable, so as to provide the City with the opportunity of
re-establishing itself with the minimum of delay and loss. In all, they rebuilt 51 parish churches
within and immediately without the walls, that is, around half of those that had
been destroyed in the Great Fire (*), together with St Paul’s Cathedral, and also rebuilt numerous other public and
private buildings, many in the High (English) Renaissance or Early Baroque
style - the cost of the entire enterprise being covered by a tax on coal. The most glorious of Wren’s many glorious
achievements was undoubtedly St Paul’s
Cathedral. The cathedral is faced in
plain Portland Stone, wonderfully reflective of the City’s light and mood. It is crowned with a glorious and iconic
dome, making it unique among all the cathedrals of England. Wren’s simple epitaph inside the cathedral
reads “Lector, si monumentum requiris,
circumspice”, meaning “Reader, should you seek his memorial, look about
you”. On the pediment above the south
door is a stone bearing the image of a Phoenix rising from the ashes, and the
inscription of the single word “Resurgam”,
meaning “I shall rise again” (the inscription repeating that on another stone found by one of Wren’s
workmen among the debris of the old,
burnt-out cathedral - a positive portent if ever there was one).
And so, out of
the ashes arose a new London. And England was re-born.
(*) Of these 51 churches, 30 are still standing,
together with St Paul’s Cathedral,
and 21 are not. Of the 21 that are no longer standing, 17, far more than one might have hoped, were
demolished by our own over-zealous town planners and engineers in the pell-mell
expansion of London following the Industrial Revolution – in some cases, at
least marginally justifiably, to allow for development, but in many others
simply because they were deemed, under the incomprehensibly philistine Union of
Benifices Act of 1860, to be surplus to requirements! Only 4, far fewer than one might have feared,
were completely destroyed by German bombing during the Blitz of the Second
World War. However, a number of others were also damaged to
varying extents at this time, some of which were subsequently restored,
and some left as empty shells. Two were destroyed, and 8 damaged, on a single, fateful night, Sunday
29th December, 1940, when thousands of incendiaries were dropped on
an essentially unguarded City.
At least many of the original plans of these recently lost
churches still survive, as do some later paintings and photographs.
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