TOWN-PLANNING
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....”
[Illustration: PLATE III
WREN’S PLAN OF LONDON.]
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.
[Illustration: S^T AUGUSTIN’S]
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.
[Illustration: S^T MARTIN’S & S^T PAUL’S]
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.