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.
ST 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.
ST 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.
ST BRIDE’S