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.
ST MARTIN’S & ST 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.
CHAPTER VII
ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL
Turner said of Wren’s Cathedral that “the dome of St. Paul’s makes London,” but the same shrewd appreciation fell in better phrase from the lips of a friend of mine aged seven. He had been taken by his father to St. Paul’s, and on his return home was observed to be drawing industriously. When questioned as to his task, he held up a rudimentary sketch of the Cathedral, in which the crowning feature of Wren’s achievement loomed unduly large, and replied: “I’ve drawn the Dome of London.” I have met no better phrase of architectural criticism in more than thirty years of reading. The monument of Italian Unity has shifted the architectural command of Rome from the dome of St. Peter’s to the Capitoline Hill, but St. Paul’s still crowns London with Wren’s dome.
Sir Christopher’s connection with the Cathedral dates from 1663, when the derelict state of the old church drove the King to appoint a Commission to consider its restoration. It is not certain, though it is likely, that both Wren and Evelyn served as Commissioners; but little was done save casual repairs until about May, 1666, when Wren laid before the Commission a report descriptive of the state of the fabric with recommendations as to what should be done.