THE CITY CHURCHES
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.
[Illustration: S^T VEDAST]
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.
[Illustration: S^T ALBAN]
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.
[Illustration: S^T DUNSTAN’S]
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.
[Illustration: S^T MAGNUS]
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.
[Illustration: S^T MARGARET’S PATTENS]
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.
[Illustration: S^T BRIDE’S]
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.
[Illustration: PLATE VIII
ST. STEPHEN’S, WALBROOK.]
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.
[Illustration: S^T MILDRED·BREAD S^T]
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.”
[Illustration: S^T BRIDE’S]
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.