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.
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.
ST MILDRED·BREAD ST
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.”
