London

There are people I know who refuse to consider Sir Christopher Wren a Londoner in light of the inescapable inconvenience that he was born in Wiltshire. These people are snits and churls. Not allowing Wren Londoner status on that basis is doing so on a technicality, and not at all in the spirit of the game. You could, if you wanted to be all grand and lah-di-dah about it, make a very strong case that Wren was not only a Londoner, but is to some extent still London. Feature continues

A good deal of what gives London its extraordinary flavour is down to Wren. Even if you’ve never been inside one of the 53 elegant, graceful churches built under his auspices after the Great Fire, they must surely have made some impact upon your sense of the city. There’s nothing quite like them anywhere else; they seem to be as much about this place as they are about the religion they house and honour. I suppose you could say that they celebrate two resurrections.

But there’s much, much else to like about Wren. Firstly, that he didn’t really know what he was about till he was almost 30. He spent years dallying with astronomy, mathematics, anatomy and whatever other subject he happened to decide on when he got up in the morning. He didn’t start with architecture until he was 29. There’s something very pleasing, looking at it from a world obsessed with roles and training and place, about someone who simply followed his interests until he bumped into his own destiny.

It’s not like he wasn’t good at them, either. He was a professor of astronomy at Oxford, suggested various notions that Isaac Newton would later go on to prove and was asked, despite having absolutely no track record, to work on the harbour fortifications at Tangiers. Extraordinary. And he helped found the Royal Society. As you flick through Wren’s CV, it gets to the point where you start hoping that at least he was rubbish with girls.

In turning his hand to architecture, Wren was taking on something that almost no one else in the country was doing at that time. People who know about these things say that English architecture was in a pretty stagnant state after Inigo Jones died ten years before Wren got himself a slanty desk. But instead of being a lazy monopolist and turning out a slapdash, only-game-in-town service, he used his astonishing mathematical and visual talents to create stylish buildings which otherwise would have been very difficult to build.