https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1348-0595
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ABSTRACT
Immediately after the 1666 Great Fire, Christopher Wren sought to persuade King Charles II to rebuild London according to the best principles of baroque urbanism, with wide straight streets, axial symmetry, monumental endpoints, and a waterfront with open quays. The plan was quickly rejected as impracticable and Wren’s creative energy went into the design of St Paul’s Cathedral and more than fifty parish churches. But his scheme was memorialized by his son and grandson as a scandal of lost opportunity, a noble vision ‘unhappily defeated by faction’. Widely reproduced by print-makers, it gained iconic status, influencing street improvement in eighteenth-century London, nineteenth-century public health reform, late-Victorian advocacy of municipal autonomy, and twentieth-century planning controversies including the Paternoster Square redevelopments of 1955 and 2000. The paper shows how archival research disproving the received narrative of Wren’s plan opened the way for different understandings both of the planning legacy of reconstruction after the Great Fire, and of his own accomplishments as a Renaissance architect working within a mediaeval street plan.
Acknowledgements
The paper originated as the keynote lecture for the day conference The Great Fire Reconsidered held in the Wren Suite, St. Paul’s Cathedral, on the 350th anniversary of the disaster, 3 September 2016. With due thanks to Rebecca Rideal who provided the prompt to examine the planning history of Christopher Wren’s 1666 plan, and to its present guardian Gaye Morgan, Librarian in Charge and Conservator, Codrington Library, All Souls College.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Michael Hebbert graduated in Modern History at Merton College Oxford and pursued doctoral research under Peter Hall at the University of Reading. His academic career started at Oxford Polytechnic and the London School of Economics, and has ended as professor emeritus at UCL's Bartlett School of Planning. He is also emeritus at the University of Manchester, where he held the chair of town planning from 1994 to 2012. A founder-member of Gordon Cherry's Planning History Group and its successor IPHS, his research has ranged widely across the histories of cities, city planning and urban design, and at different times he has been editor of Planning History Bulletin, Progress in Planning and the present journal.
ORCID
Michael Hebbert http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1348-0595
Notes
1 Moore, “The Monument.”
2 Konvitz, Urban Millenium; Morris, History of Urban Form, chap. 6, Mumford, City in History, chap. 13.
3 Morris, History of Urban Form, 214.
4 Besant, London, 240.
5 Rosenau, Social Purpose, 38.
6 Upcott, Evelyn.
7 Uglow, Gambling Man, 234.
8 Evelyn, London Revived.
9 Wren Society, Vol XIII (1936), 40.
10 Jardine, Grander Scale, 246.
11 Stewart Prospect, 96.
12 Abercrombie, “Wren’s Plan,” 71.
13 Geraghty, Architectural Drawings, catalogue nos. 394–6.
14 Geraghty, Archtectural Drawings, 256.
15 Oldenburg to Boyle, Wren Society, XVIII (1941), 197.
16 Abercrombie, “Wren’s Plan.”
17 Oldenburg to Boyle, Wren Society, XVIII (1941), 198.
18 Summerson, Georgian London.
19 Oldenburg to Boyle, Wren Society, XVIII (1941), 198.
20 Hibbert, London, the Biography; Tinniswood, By Permission of Heaven.
21 Reddaway, The Rebuilding, 49.
22 Jardine, On a Grander Scale, 267.
23 Moore, “The Monument,” 509.
24 Morris, History of Urban Form, 221.
25 See Besant, London, app. V–VI.
26 Cooper, Robert Hooke, 123.
27 Hyde, A to Z
28 A point regrettably missed by Hebbert, “Figure-Ground,” 708.
29 See Peter Barber’s introduction to Saunders, A to Z, 1–4.
30 Summerson, Georgian London, 39.
31 Wren Society, Vol. XVIII (1941), plate XVI.
32 Cited by McKellar, The Birth, 90.
33 Defoe, A Tour; Konvitz, Cities & the Sea, 12.
34 Hawksmoor, Remarks, 11. See Hart, Nicholas Hawksmoor, chap. 9.
35 Wren Society, Vol. XIV (1937), x.
36 Wren, Parentalia, 269; Tinniswood, Permission of Heaven, 158.
37 Ogborn, “Designs on the City,” 26.
38 Reddaway, Rebuilding of London, 312–2.
39 Rocque, City After the Fire.
40 Ogborn, “Designs on the City,” 27–9.
41 Rosenau, Social Purpose, 38–41.
42 Morris, History of Urban Form, 220.
43 Jones, “James Elmes”; Konvitz, Cities and the Sea.
44 Hebbert, “City in Good Shape,” 434–7.
45 Inwood, History of London, 421–7.
46 Lewis, Edwin Chadwick, 52.
47 Richardson and Thorne, The Builder, 587.
48 Simon, Sanitary Institutions, 102.
49 Hollis, Health of the City, 276–7.
50 White, London in the Nineteenth Century.
51 Besant, London, 281.
52 Gomme, London, 257.
53 Ibid., 271.
54 Edwards, Street Improvements, 9.
55 Unwin, Town Planning in Practice, 77–80.
56 Aldridge, Case for Town Planning, 56–60.
57 Abercrombie, Town & Country Planning, 59.
58 Adams, Outline, 107–9.
59 Mumford, City in History, 442.
60 Gibbon, Reconstruction, 256–7.
61 Purdon, How Shall We Rebuild?, 148, 267.
62 Cherry and Penny, Holford, 136.
63 Corporation of London, Reconstruction, 2.
64 Hughes, Mumford & Osborn, 95.
65 Corporation of London, City of London, 153.
66 Bell, Great Fire, 232.
67 Rasmussen, London, 104.
68 Ibid., 112.
69 Ibid., 113.
70 Ibid., 116.
71 Reddaway, Rebuilding of London, 298.
72 Gibbon, Reconstruction, 253–4.
73 See note 16 above.
74 Morris, Urban Form, 220.
75 Tinniswood, His Invention so Fertile, 159.
76 Hebbert, More by Fortune.
77 Olsen, Town Planning, 2–3.
78 Cruikshank and Wyld, London, 21–32.
79 McKellar, The Birth; see also Mowl and Earnshaw, Architecture Without Kings.
80 Saint, “Grand Designs,” 49.
81 Young and Young, London’s Churches, 10.
82 SPAB, Save the City, 142.
83 Young, London’s Churches, 11.
84 Taylor, Awful Sublimity, 433.
85 Jones, London Triumphant, 94.
86 Amery, Wren’s London.
87 Cherry and Penny, Holford, 161–2.
88 Ibid., 164–74.
89 Stamp, “By a City churchyard,” 13.
90 Jackson, Story of Paternoster, 4.
91 Young and Young, London’s Churches, 10.