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....”
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.
ST AUGUSTIN’S