Christopher Wren

Architect, astronomer, anatomist, and genius who rebuilt London after the Great Fire —Christopher Wren. His life is nothing short of extraordinary. In this episode, Dan is joined by historian and conservationist Stephen Brindle to unravel the unexpected journey of the man best known for designing St Paul’s Cathedral, one of London's most iconic landmarks, but whose contributions spanned science and even medicine. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore. Join Dan and the team for a LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask! Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 1:43Dan Snow?

  Welcome everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. If you go to St Paul's Cathedral in London and you stand right underneath the centre of that magnificent dome, you'll find that you're standing on a circle of black marble and on it is an inscription. It ends, "Si monumentum requiris circumspeque."

• 2:08Dan Snow?

  The full translation is: “Here in the foundations lies the architect of this church and city, Christopher Wren, who lived beyond ninety years, not for his own profit, but for the public good. Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.”

• 2:35Dan Snow?

  As his epitaph suggests, Wren’s monument, Wren’s defining achievement was building St Paul’s Cathedral, and it certainly is one of the most magnificent buildings in English history. It is iconic, both for its innate beauty, the impact it had on that city at that time, but also in what it’s come to mean, what it’s come to represent. It became, in the 18th century, Britain’s imperial temple. It was the burial place of Wellington and Nelson. In the 20th century, it became a talismanic survivor of the Blitz, standing there amidst the ruins, an emblem of London’s and Britain’s resilience. But, as I learn in this podcast,

• 3:18Dan Snow?

  St Paul’s represents only a fraction of what this self-taught architectural genius produced. Kensington Palace, Whitehall Palace, Hampton Court, the Naval College Greenwich, Chelsea Hospital, alongside innumerable churches. The monument to the Great Fire in London, all of these buildings he conceived or closely collaborated in their construction. The monument to the Great Fire of London, monument today, which, by the way, was always intended to double, both as a monument to the Great Fire and as a telescope. And that, for me, brings us to the true wonder of the man. He was not just an architect, albeit he was the greatest architect in British history.

• 4:01Dan Snow?

  He was an astronomer, he was an engineer, he was a scientist. Wren is Britain’s Michelangelo. He’s our Leonardo. One of his friends, Robert Hooke himself, a scientist of genius, he was a close collaborator, he worked on architectural projects together, including, in fact, the monument. He wrote of Wren: “Since the time of Archimedes, there scarce ever met in one man, in so great perfection such a mechanical hand, and so philosophical a mind.”

• 4:34Dan Snow?

  Wren was a prodigy. Having survived war and becoming a refugee as a child, he went to Oxford while still a boy. He thrived. He observed the moon, which helped to lead the invention of micrometers for the telescope. He experimented on terrestrial magnetism. He became the first person ever to successfully inject substance into the bloodstream of an animal. It was a dog on that occasion. He did experiments like everyone else in that period that eventually helped to determine longitude. He was an architectural genius, but he was much, much more besides. And so, please listen to this podcast and you may end up wondering, as I did, what on earth you're doing with your life. It's quite intimidating. On the podcast, Tell Me All About It, it's Stephen Brindley. He's been on the podcast

• 5:18Dan Snow?

  for he's a wonderful historian whose love and knowledge about architecture, as you'll hear, knows no bounds. This is Christopher Wren. Enjoy.

• 5:45Dan Snow?

  Stephen, great to have you back on the podcast.

• 5:47Speaker 05

  Dan, thank you very much.

• 5:49Dan Snow?

  Christopher Wren, actually, we don't associate him with this, but had a deeply traumatic and conflict-strewn childhood. Tell me a little bit about that and then perhaps we can talk about how you think it shaped him.

• 6:00Speaker 05

  He was a child of the turbulent 17th century, Dan. He came from a very conservative church, high Anglican, royalist background. His father was a clergyman, Dr. Christopher Wren. At the time, he was the rector of East Noyl in Wiltshire, which is about as rural as you could get. But he was a supporter of Archbishop Lord, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the man who was trying to make the Church of England a more sacramental establishment for Charles I. And he became Dean of Windsor, his father did. So Christopher moved to Windsor, to the deanery, actually, he was growing up in, in the castle when the civil war broke out. His uncle, Matthew Wren, was the more senior churchman. He was the Bishop of Ely.

• 6:43Speaker 05

  So Wren grew up in this atmosphere of high Anglican churchmanship. But just as England was becoming more polarised and sliding into civil war, and he was ten when the civil war broke out, and parliamentarian forces occupied Windsor Castle and they sacked the deanery and they ejected the dean, Christopher's family and all the cannons, and they had to leave with only their suitcases, so to speak, and they fled to Bletchingham and later back to East Noyl. So that must have been pretty traumatic.

• 7:13Dan Snow?

  So that's fascinating. So his family are close allies. Well, they couldn't have been closer in some ways to that high Anglican tradition. They were really persona non grata with the the low church parliamentarian forces.

• 7:26Speaker 05

  They really were. So much so that Uncle Matthew was imprisoned in the Tower of London 17 years.

• 7:32Dan Snow?

  Wow.

• 7:32Speaker 05

  Of course, his friend William Lord, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was actually executed.

• 7:36Dan Snow?

  Yes.

• 7:37Speaker 05

  So I think Uncle Matthew, in a way, had a lucky escape, as did Father Dean Christopher.

• 7:42Dan Snow?

  And so you've got young Christopher, he's a refugee, he's lost his home. Do we know how that affected him? Did it interrupt his education?

• 7:50Speaker 05

  One thing it didn't interrupt is his education, because he was a child prodigy. He was schooled at home by his father and by tutors, and he's thought to have gone briefly to attend Westminster School under a famous headmaster called Dr Richard Busby. I mean, this is during the Commonwealth period. And when he was 16 years old, he went up to Oxford, so that would have been 1658. So Oliver Cromwell is still just about in charge then. And he went to Waddam to study the classics, but also mathematics and astronomy and anatomy. He was a young prodigy, and at Oxford he met other natural philosophers or scientists who later became the nucleus of the world's asperity. And as a teenager, for an example,

• 8:32Speaker 05

  he'd have been attending anatomical dissections. He was assisting a famous surgeon called Dr Charles Scarborough. He made drawings of the human brain. He made a model of the human eye. He translated a tract on the use of sundials from Latin. He made a model showing the relationship between the earth, moon and the sun. And he made a sort of beehive with glass sides. So those are the sort of things that young Wren was doing as a teenager. So he's not an ordinary teenager.

• 9:02Dan Snow?

  What's happening in this period? It's so exciting. Wren is part of a revolution sweeping across much of Europe, the development of the modern scientific method, things like that. Why? What's what's happening here?

• 9:13Speaker 05

  Well Dan, the Church's monopoly on learning, on education, had been broken by a number of seismic events, by the Renaissance in Italy, by the study of classical antiquity, by the Reformation, which had removed Britain from the authority of the Catholic Church, and then by the division of religious culture and the Commonwealth, which had completely dethroned bishops. So there was no more idea that the Church was in control of education, more ironically for someone like Ren, who's from such a high church background. And so the idea that the natural world could and should be studied for itself, and that the understanding of

• 9:55Speaker 05

  it wasn't determined by religious texts, was fairly well established by the mid 17th century. And characters like Nicholas Copernic, Copernicus, the famous Polish astronomer, and Galileo in Italy, now they'd had a much harder time because they still lived under the authority of the Catholic Church. And in England, there wasn't the hand of the Church hanging over you in the same kind of way, which is slightly ironic when you think that Ren was himself from a high and from a background. And I don't think we have any sort of answer to that apparent paradox. But certainly Ren responded instinctively to the sort of mathematical and scientific culture which was developing. And certainly the 17th century was the age

• 10:37Speaker 05

  when science and mathematics overthrew, defeated superstition, and what you might call the relics of paganism. James I, for example, had believed implicitly in witchcraft. His grandson Charles II founded the Royal Society. So that's a measure of the generational change.

• 10:57Dan Snow?

  It sounds to me like Ren's on course to be an astronomer, like sort of his contemporary Newton. What changes? What happens?

• 11:03Speaker 05

  That is exactly what he was on course to be. Christopher took an MA degree at Oxford in 1653, and he went straight away to a fellowship at All Souls College, given his obvious intellectual power, aged 19. And he was already leaning towards astronomy as his main study, particularly study of the planet Saturn apparently, but he was also interested in- Physics and meteorology, and he had a continued interest in anatomy, dissecting animals. And sometimes I think even people or being present at dissections at any rate. In sixteen fifty seven, he was appointed the professor of astronomy at Gresham College in London, this remarkable institution which still exists and still held public lectures. And then sixteen sixty one, he was appointed the civilian professor of astronomy at Oxford.

• 11:49Speaker 05

  Now, Gresham College held weekly lectures, sometimes with scientific demonstrations, and the Royal Society grew out of the group of friends who met after Ren's lectures on astronomy at Gresham College. So he's right at the heart of Bitten's very small scientific establishment, which was a group of friends, people right around him, like John Flamsteed, the first astronomer of oil, and Robert Hooke, the man who really invented the microscope.

• 12:18Dan Snow?

  How interesting. I didn't know Ren was the dynamo of that group.

• 12:22Speaker 05

  Well, certainly one of them, yes, right at the heart of it.

• 12:25Dan Snow?

  How on earth does he end up becoming an architect?

• 12:27Speaker 05

  Well, there wasn't really an architectural profession then. It was a matter of being interested in architecture as something which an educated gentleman might well be interested in. Most building was undertaken and managed by cross people, by carpenters and masons and bricklayers and surveyors, who provided the designs as well. But increasingly, the designs were influenced by books about classical architecture, which had been produced in Italy. Now, in Italy, of course, an architectural profession had emerged in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a result of rise of Renaissance culture and architects like Bromante and Palladio. And Michelangelo indeed had emerged and it had become a profession, but not in England.

• 13:11Speaker 05

  In England, Ren was one of the the first people who we could say became a professional architect. And there were only a couple of precedents for for that in English history. Inigo Jones, for example, who was really an artist, who'd come to Charles the First's court as a designer of masks and that kind of thing, became the king's surveyor, and so he designed classical. Buildings alongside maintaining the palaces and decorating them and doing designs for court masks and things. And his nephew, John Webb, who was his assistant, was given a sort of architectural education by Jones. But their careers had been cut short by the Civil War. So that was really the only precedent there was in English history for an architectural profession. Otherwise, they were the craftspeople.

• 13:56Dan Snow?

  Oh, I see. So Wren, I use this expression incorrectly, but as a sort of Renaissance man, as a brilliant all-rounder, he might make models of planets, he might also turn his hand to designing buildings as well.

• 14:08Speaker 05

  Yes, he's the sort of person who's versed in mathematics and had books and knew about ideas. So if you wanted a building designer, you might turn to him, which is what Uncle Matthew did. Uncle Matthew Wren was released from prison in sixteen sixty.

• 14:21Dan Snow?

  So at the Restoration. So King Charles the Second comes to the throne, Cromwell's dead, his son's useless, and King Charles the Second comes back. So good old Matthew Wren's out of prison.

• 14:30Speaker 05

  Yes, in sixteen sixty, Charles the Second was restored to the throne. Uncle Matthew Wren was released from prison. He was reinstated as Bishop of Ely. His old college, Pembroke College, Cambridge, was in need of a new chapel and Matthew asked his nephew Christopher to design it for him in the way that educated people might design buildings. There were a number of gentleman architects who'd travelled on the continent during the Commonwealth years, and Wren is being seen in that kind of light. And so he produced a very beautiful, very accomplished design for a chapel, which still stands, an elegant, single-cell buildings. And it went so well that it was followed up quite quickly with two more buildings.

• 15:15Speaker 05

  There's a design for a chapel screen at All Cells College, Oxford in sixteen sixty-four, and for a new theatre. That is a theatre for ceremonies and lectures called the Sheldonian Theatre. Uncle Gilbert Sheldon, Bishop of London, for Oxford University, and that was also started in sixteen sixty-four.

• 15:33Dan Snow?

  Is there something radically exciting, different about these buildings? Or are they just a job well done?

• 15:37Speaker 05

  They were essentially a job well done. The Sheldonian Theatre is certainly remarkable in at least one respect, in that it's about ninety feet across. So Wren had deliberately designed a D-shaped interior, which at its widest point is, I think, getting on for ninety feet. And so he had to design a roof truss, which was capable of spanning this without being supported from below. So he had, in a way, set himself this problem, which he then had to solve, and he designed a roof truss, which has stood ever since. So the Sheldonian is remarkable more as a piece of structural engineering than this piece of architecture. As a piece of classical design, it's what you might call, um, clunky. Um,

• 16:22Speaker 05

  this piece of structural engineering, it's superb.

• 16:25Dan Snow?

  Is he taking his lead from Europe?

• 16:27Speaker 05

  Wren was really operating within a building world and a building culture in England that was already changing a lot, through lots of factors to do with climate change and England's timber famine and changes in society and developments in building technology. And so he operated within a building environment, which at the start of the seventeenth century, people were still building timber-framed houses. By the end of the century, they were building brick houses, where the chimneys were all on internal walls, not on external walls, and where they all have upright-shaped windows and sash windows. And the houses and the buildings were all a completely different shape. And all of these changes,

• 17:09Speaker 05

  what you might call the seventeenth-century building revolution, that was the world Wren operated in, and it was now becoming a given, that buildings were going to have upright-shaped windows, that they were going to be heated by coal, that they were going mostly to be brick, that timber framing in the old way was dying out, although carpenters were still very important in the building process. And so he's very much working within a building culture, which is managed by craftsmen and which is undergoing fundamental changes. And these changes made it easier to conceive Buildings in line with the classical rules of design and those did come from Europe.

• 17:48Speaker 05

  Yes, from Italy and France and Ren would have read architectural books like Palladio's Four Books of Architecture. And he had one long visit to France in sixteen sixty five for about nine months. And that was certainly a crucial and formative experience for him. It was the only time he's ever known to have left England. And he went to Paris and he'd have seen domed churches like the Church of the Sorbonne and the Church of the Val de Grasse. And he saw the Louvre, the great city centre palace being rebuilt on a huge scale. And he met Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the great Baroque architect, who had come to supply Louis XIV with designs for the Louvre.

• 18:30Speaker 05

  And all of this was a tremendous formative experience for Ren. He'd have seen building projects going on up on a scale which he would never have seen in England.

• 18:40Dan Snow?

  What a wonderful time, the Baroque building style, the mix of classical architecture. But with the the advances of this modern technology that you've referred to, creating these unbelievable wedding cake like buildings. Sixteen sixty five is an important date, I suppose, because he gets back the following year and inconveniently, London burns down the Great Fire of London. So.

• 19:01Speaker 05

  This is, as they say, an ill wind that blows nobody any good. And it has to be admitted that the Great Fire was Sir Christopher's big professional break. And after this, in September sixteen sixty six, four or five days, the whole city burnt down. London, population of half a million, chief economic driver of the whole south of England. Huge losses in revenues for the Crown. And so it was an enormous crisis for the Crown and for the government.

• 19:29Dan Snow?

  And a spiritual crisis because there's nowhere to worship, presumably in a world where they thought that communion was extremely important.

• 19:35Speaker 05

  Well, indeed, indeed. St. Paul's Cathedral gone and eighty parish churches within the city of London destroyed and the whole city in ashes. And the government and the Corporation of London reacted really with remarkable speed and within about a week of the fire. Commissioners had been appointed to advise on rebuilding the city. The Corporation of London appointed two of their best builder craftsmen, Edward German and Peter Mills, and a scientist who was one of Wren's close friends, Robert Hook, and Charles II appointed the three leading gentlemen architects, Roger Proust, Hugh May and Wren. And they advised on and they set the parameters for the rebuilding of the city, which then went ahead at breakneck speed.

• 20:20Speaker 05

  Now, Wren was appointed sovereign of works to the king in 1669, and in July of the same year, he was appointed sovereign of the fabric of St Paul's. And Charles II's favour was crucial in both respects. So Charles II must have become aware of Wren as one of the leading natural scientists, natural philosophers, and leading light in the Royal Society, and also someone who had successfully designed two of the finest new buildings in England, but only two. Wren only had about two finished buildings to his credit at this time, and he's entrusted with these awesome responsibilities. And after 1669, no one else was consulted in relation to the rebuilding of St Paul's.

• 21:04Dan Snow?

  Before we come on to St Paul's, which is obviously his most famous building, he did come up with plans for Charles II for a sort of radical redesign, a glow up for the whole of London.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  Yes, he did. Several people did. It seemed obvious that there was an opportunity to re-plan London, because the pre-fire city, which was essentially the medieval city, had had really no large public spaces at all. It had moderately wide streets, narrow streets and very narrow streets, the streets that you couldn't even drive a cart down, which were really alleys. And it was an absolute labyrinth, and that's partly why the whole thing had burnt, because there were no natural fire breaks anywhere in the city. There was nowhere they could readily stop it. And they thought, what a warrington when English people, the few English people who'd been to Rome, for example, and seen the great new roads laid out under Pope Sixtus the Fifth, Paris still looked largely the same, actually.

• 22:00Speaker 05

  Amsterdam would have looked very much more modern, as Amsterdam was still in the process of the great expansion of the outer canals, which we see today. But there seemed to be an opportunity to replan it. And John, Evelyn and Robert Hook and Wren all produced plans, which Wren's is the most interesting and the most sophisticated with a riverside quay and with great wide avenues, avenues which are focused on two great focal points, on the rebuilt Royal Exchange and on the rebuilt cathedral. But this never happened and in reality it was never going to happen because the chaos that that would have caused in terms of expropriating property, redrawing property boundaries,

• 22:45Speaker 05

  compensating people and reallocating property would have delayed the start of rebuilding by a year, two, three years. People among them were camping out in the fields. London needed to rebuild and return to business and the thought of them negotiating this minefield, I mean it was clear it was going to be bad enough as it was. So actually the commission and the king and the corporation accepted that these plans were really utopian and that something much more pragmatic would have to be done. And it seems that they'd accept this quite quickly, within a month or two. And it would seem that Wren himself, who was always a supremely pragmatic man and

• 23:26Speaker 05

  who's a scientist, realised that actually it was unachievable, generally with the English law. If you lived in an absolute monarchy, if you didn't care about where people lived, you could do it. But England was a parliamentary monarchy and the corporation of London had to represent its ratepayers and voters. So it was really never going to happen. But they did achieve a lot actually and what was rebuilt was really nothing like old London. Lots and lots of little alleys were closed, streets were widened, plots were rationalised. So it was a very much rationalised version of the old city which went up. But I think Wren himself realised that his plan, beautiful plan, which would have made London one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, was actually unachievable in the

• 24:11Speaker 05

  circumstances of England in the 1660s.

• 24:16Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History of Dwight Christopher Wren. More coming up, once more.

• 24:26Dan Snow?

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• 25:08Dan Snow?

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• 27:31Dan Snow?

  He still had plenty to get his teeth into. He built churches across London, but most famously St Paul's. Let's come on to the cathedral. No one had actually built a church, a cathedral on that scale for hundreds of years in England.

• 27:41Speaker 05

  That's quite true. A cathedral-sized church in Britain. Well, the last one, I suppose you could say, was Bath Abbey, although as cathedrals go, that's actually quite small. And the last really big one, which had been built from scratch, would have been Salisbury Cathedral, and that was done in 1220. So what should a classical cathedral look like, too? Well, there were models. There were a few. There was most obviously St Peter's in Rome, which would have been regarded by some as little suspect as the seat of the Pope. But there were very few other cathedral-sized classical churches. There were some in Spain, which was the great national enemy, of course, but really Wren had to devise his own solution.

• 28:22Speaker 05

  And he came up with a series of designs, and the first few were rejected. The Greek cross, one, a Greek cross is a cross that has all arms of equal length. Then after this, he produced what was called the Great Model Design, because an enormous model was built, which is still exists and is still in St Paul's Cathedral, and the model was made, a model so large a man might walk within it. It was built at the king's request by a carpenter called William Clear. And this really was the Greek cross design, a sort of a centralized plan with a huge dome, and with an extension at the west with a smaller dome and a big portico. It's a marvellous design, highly original, very coherent too, but it was rejected by the clergy because it

• 29:07Speaker 05

  didn't have a long processional nave. They said it was unsuitable for Anglican liturgy, and it couldn't be finished in stages. So with this rejected, and that was in 1672, Wren went back to the drawing board and he produced something called the Warrant Design. And this is really one of the most mysterious episodes in English architectural history. It's called the Warrant Design because the royal warrant was attached to it, the king's permission to build it, and the clergy accepted it. And it's a Latin cross, that is, so it has a long nave and shorter tronets and east end. So it looked in plan more like traditional English

• 29:47Speaker 05

  cathedral. In fact, it looked a lot like old St Paul's as it had been recased, the nave had been recased by Inigo Jones for Charles I and Archbishop Lord in the 1630s. And what Wren did really was to replicate the very simplified architectural language and the big western portico that Jones had applied for medieval cathedrals' nave and wrapped that around the rest of his design. So this is a sort of lowest common denominator design, which gives them the appearance that Jones had grafted onto the nave and the shape for Latin cross. And he crucially had the king's authority to vary the design in ornamental

• 30:31Speaker 05

  details as he saw fit. And that was the key get out.

• 30:36Dan Snow?

  It's so interesting that these designs are being selected and argued about and rejected, not just for money and aesthetics, but also because of the nature of Anglican worship. Things are either too Catholic or not, or native. So it's three-dimensional chess here. There's a lot of stakeholders.

• 30:54Speaker 05

  Yes, there are. The Great Model certainly represents what Ren would have liked to have built. And it seems surprising if Ren, with his family background and his evident skill in managing relationships, had not foreseen the objections. And probably he had, but clearly Ren thought that he could manage this politically with the king's support. But the opposition from the clergy was too strong, and in the event, he couldn't. And I suspect that it was opposition motivated partly by a feeling that it looked too Catholic, it looked too much like St Peter's, and they wanted something which looked more English.

• 31:34Dan Snow?

  Give me two or three reasons why St Paul's Cathedral is one of the great wonders of early modern architecture and engineering.

• 31:40Speaker 05

  Oh, gosh, Dan. Well, because it ticked all the boxes. And as a work of engineering, it's just extraordinary. The dome, which is 360 feet high to the top, is a masterpiece of structural engineering. No one had ever built anything like this anywhere, except for Brunelleschi in Florence and Michelangelo in Rome. Now, Ren would have seen engravings of how they built their domes, but he'd never actually seen either of them. He had to devise his solution and be sure that it would work with his good friend Robert Hooke, purely on paper and out of his own head. He couldn't have a test run at it, although he probably

• 32:21Speaker 05

  did make models. The dome of St Paul's is an extraordinary achievement. To make it work visually, he had to have the stone thing on top that's called the lantern. But the lantern weighs over 300 tonnes of masonry, so how is he going to support that? And it had to look right in proportion to the body of the building. And it couldn't look too high from inside, because that would make it look like looking up a telescope. So Wren's solution devised with his good friend Robert Hook was to build a sort of a cone shaped structure. If you think about a cone, upturning a cone on a table and you put a weight on top of it, and a cone is a naturally very strong form, it's a much stronger form than a half globe shape.

• 33:05Speaker 05

  A half globe shape, if you sit something on top of it, the weight will all be going on the flat of the top of it. A cone translates all the load directly down. And so Wren built a brick cone, which you can't see from the outside, which takes the weight of the lantern, translates it, transfers it right down to the base of the drum, actually, and the drum conceals the lower part of the cone. And from the inside, there's an inner dome, which is what you see from the inside, which looks correct in proportion. And on the outside, there's an outer dome of lead and timber. So the thing appears in proportion from inside and outside, and it stood for, what, 350 years and it survived the blitz.

• 33:48Speaker 05

  And it's visible for miles and miles away, and it's a landmark which works both from close quarters and from the far distance. And it has been acknowledged ever since as a masterpiece of structural engineering, as well as of architectural design.

• 34:01Dan Snow?

  And until the mid 20th century, it was the tallest building in London.

• 34:04Speaker 05

  Extraordinarily, yes. And bear in mind that Wren, when he was appointed a surveyor for St Paul's, he had only three finished buildings to his credit. There was no architectural education. And Wren was, when he took on this and the city churches and the Royal Surveyorship, he was having to educate himself in building management, sourcing building materials, architectural design and structural engineering and project management, all on the largest possible scale as he went along. Even though there's quite a lot of documentary evidence, it is difficult to grasp the scale of Sir Christopher's achievement. He was having to educate himself this as he was going along.

• 34:47Dan Snow?

  Unimaginable. St Paul's is rumbling on, so from the 1670s it would eventually be completed in?

• 34:53Speaker 05

  About 1712, I think.

• 34:56Dan Snow?

  So apart from anything else, more revolutions, more upheavals, more foreign invasions that he would experience, and yet the building went up. And as well as doing all that, as you say, he's surveyor of the king's works, that means work on palaces, places like Hampton Court and Kensington. But he's also building all these famous Wren churches around the city. What's going on here? Is he doing this work? Is it his staff? Is it like one of these Renaissance artists who has a studio where underlings are pumping out all these designs? Are we able to see his fingerprints?

• 35:24Speaker 05

  We can see his fingerprints, but it's a very messy, pragmatic English situation. And although they're often called the Wren City Churches, he certainly didn't have complete creative responsibility for all of them. He really wouldn't have had time. There were commissioners responsible for supervising them. There was him and Robert Hook, really, on behalf of the Corporation of London and the Diocese of London. In the Middle Ages, the city of London, rather unimaginably, had about 100 tiny parishes. And some of these were merged and closed. And before the Great Fire, it was down to about 80. And after the Great Fire, they were reduced further to 52. And the parishes, of course, even as merged, were autonomous organisations. And some of them had money and some of them

• 36:09Speaker 05

  had rich donors. So some of them got going under their own steam. And there were other cases where Wren probably do a general plan and let the mason or the bricklayer responsible get on with it.

• 36:24Dan Snow?

  More on Christopher Wren coming up.

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• 37:47Dan Snow?

  Let's come back to his job as the sort of royal surveyor because he modernizes Whitehall Palace, which people will know Banqueting House is the only bit that's left today. It was much, it was destroyed in a great fire of 1698, which also destroyed many vital historic archives and documents. Well, the great tragedy of 1698 fire, we'll do another podcast on that sometime. So Whitehall, Royal Hospital, Chelsea, people will be familiar with, Hampton Court. I mean, just as the English monarchy, the British monarchy is being transformed, he is rendering that transformation in bricks and mortar, isn't he?

• 38:19Speaker 05

  Yes, he is. Ren, he creates a new image for the monarchy, for the restored monarchy. But the monarchy itself changed very considerably over his time in office. He was appointed to surveyor by Charles II in 1669, and royal success was really crucial to Ren's success. And Charles II commissioned quite a lot of alterations at once. Whitehall Palace, which all went in the fall of sixteen ninety eight. And Charles the Second commissioned a palace at Winchester, you're right, at the end of his life, which was gone, which was behind the Winchester Great Hall, where the peninsula barracks are now, and that's gone too. The Royal Hospital at Chelsea, a major new building, still in its original use, with its plain brick façade and white porticoes, very

• 39:04Speaker 05

  sober, very English, very dignified, and that's all of classic Wren. And Charles the Second's brother, James the Second, who succeeded in sixteen eighty five, he commissioned Wren to design chapels at Whitehall Palace and Somerset House for his Catholic Queen, Mary of Moderna, but of course, he's then ejected from the throne in sixteen eighty eight nine and the Glorious Revolution. And Wren survives this great political sea change. I mean, Wren's an old Tory, a loyal servant of the Stuart dynasty, and you really might have expected him to lose his job in sixteen eighty eight nine. It says a lot for William and Mary's judgment, and also for Wren's pragmatic flexibility,

• 39:48Speaker 05

  that he didn't resign and they didn't sack it. They knew a really good servant when they saw one.

• 39:53Dan Snow?

  As well as the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, there's Greenwich, which is, well, equally if not more spectacular.

• 39:58Speaker 05

  Yes, much more spectacular. Wren began three great schemes for William and Mary, well, two great and one major. Very soon after they came to the throne in sixteen eighty nine, William the Third was asthmatic and he hated Whitehall Palace, which he said was too dammed. So they needed a residence near the centre of power and they bought an existing suburban house called Nottingham House, which was renamed Kensington. That became Kensington Palace and Wren did a very swift extension conversion job and created Kensington Palace for them. Those sober brick façades, those are mostly, though not entirely, by him. Hampton Court was the grand out of town residence and that was always going to on a much bigger scale.

• 40:42Speaker 05

  And there were initial designs for really spectacular Versailles style transformation. But Britain was at war now with France and so the money just wasn't available. And so what Wren had to carry out instead was a more restricted rebuilding of the Royal Apartments at Hampton Court. And that's now one of the great set pieces of English Baroque architecture, but it's Wren responding to tight budgets, actually, and it's a superb piece of adaptation. And then Greenwich, that was William and Mary's repost to the Royal Hospital at Chelsea, this time as an arms house for disabled and wounded sailors. And it was conjured out of an incomplete royal palace.

• 41:26Speaker 05

  Charles the second had been building a new palace there. One wing had been built. There was the one wing of Charles the second's palace and there was the Queen's House, which had been built by Inigo Jones between sixteen seventeen and sixteen thirty five. And out of those two things, Wren conjured that magnificent vista between two buildings. He had two buildings start with and he made that marvellous composition out of them. And so it's his most Baroque composition, but it's also a pragmatic response to quite a tricky brief. And it's another example of Wren's compositional brilliance. But the thing he never got to build was a really large and really spectacular palace.

• 42:07Speaker 05

  After the Whitehall Palace fire, he did produce designs for something of sort of Louvre-like or Versailles-like splendor on the side of Whitehall, which were never built. And actually, there were much more ambitious designs for Greenwich and for Hampton Court and for Whitehall. And although those were never built, great drawings were produced. And they really underlay the careers, the architectural achievements of Nicholas Hawkesmore and John Van Buren. So those unbuilt designs were an important stage in English Baroque architecture.

• 42:42Dan Snow?

  And then Stephen, one of my favourite spaces in the world, the painted hall in that Greenwich Hospital, which if people don't know, they must Google immediately with the most spectacular ceiling painting in Britain. That's one of his, isn't it?

• 42:55Speaker 05

  Yes, it is. Wren designed a painted hall as the dining hall or the factory for the New Royal Hospital at Greenwich, and in the building over the way, that was the chapel. And Wren would certainly have been involved in appointing Sir James Thornhill, England's one great sort of native mural painter in that kind of Baroque tradition, to decorate the interior. And the ceiling of the main space represents William and Mary, but because it took so long to do, the mural at the far end represents the New Hanoverian Dynasty, because it wasn't finished until, oh, well after 1714. But Wren would have been involved

• 43:38Speaker 05

  in setting out the outlines of Thornhill's design, or at any rate have approved it, I would think.

• 43:42Dan Snow?

  Yeah, you can see the ebb and flow of politics in that ceiling, because you've got William and Mary, and then suddenly they go, oh no, sorry, it's actually all about George the First. So it's, you can see the royal sponsors changing. Speaking of 1714, we've got Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch, dying. Wren's 82. He's been in office since the 1660s.

• 44:02Speaker 05

  Yes, in 1669, about 45 years. There were rumblings of discontent, which was happening in the 1710s, then coincided with the change in the dynasty, and Wren was very much associated with the Tory party and the House of Stuart, and in came the House of Hanover. And the new Whig administration eventually sacked him in 1718, and he was replaced with a sort of a political appointee, a man called William Benson, who was another architectural amateur, but who was the sort of polar opposite to Wren, being corrupt and incompetent and lazy. Benson was used to offer works to Kelso in about a year and got sacked himself. So Sir Christopher retired to his house at Hampton Court with his drawings.

• 44:47Dan Snow?

  And he made old bones, didn't he? I mean, he died in 1723, so he was...

• 44:52Speaker 05

  He was 90, yeah.

• 44:53Dan Snow?

  He was 90, extraordinary. And I was brought up to sort of revere Christopher Wren. My dad's obsessed with dragging me around Christopher Wren church tours. Is that just our parochial little Englander point of view, or is he really our greatest architect and indeed globally significant?

• 45:11Speaker 05

  He's certainly our greatest architect. Globally significant, his signature within the Anglosphere, I'd say, not within a European context. Wren took inspiration from Europe. There's only been a very few periods when English architecture has influenced European. The influence has usually flowed in the other direction. But within the Anglosphere and North America and in Australia and New Zealand, Wren's whole approach to classical design has been enormously influential. And there are whole categories of loosely classical design which owe a great deal to Sir Christopher, his sort of reasonable, pragmatic, moderate Englishness expressed in terms of classical design. So he's had global influence, I'd say, within English-speaking countries.

• 45:56Speaker 05

  And I'd say he's probably our greatest architect, yes. I mean, there are designers who are as original and as brilliant as Wren, and arguably more so, Nicholas Hawkesmore, his own assistant, and John Van Brae, and John Seun, and Edwin Luttians, and a few Victorian architects, you could say. But, and this is a big but, they're not that much more brilliant than Wren's designers, however you try to cut this. And all of them had, to some degree, the benefit of training and education. And all the later ones grew up in an environment where there was vast architectural literature

• 46:39Speaker 05

  available, and where building construction and management had already been thoroughly committed to paper. And Wren had very little of that. Wren had to invent much of what we now think of as architectural method, and the use of architectural drawings in controlling construction, for example, for himself. And he had to learn the whole business on the job, and hardly anyone else had to do that. Van Brae and Hawkesmore were very much standing on his shoulders. So if we take all that together and look at them as a whole, I'd say, yes, yes, he's our greatest architect.

• 47:12Dan Snow?

  I suppose my last question is, why do we regard all these buildings as of canonical? Why are some of them still here? Is that just historical accident? Is it something to do with the materials, the engineering, the durability of those buildings? I mean, many of the things we've talked about, they are still the spine of people's tourist experience of England.

• 47:30Speaker 05

  Yes, they are. I suppose part of the answer is that they were just very well constructed. Wren lived at a time when the building arts were already in a highly developed state in England. He had excellent class people to work with, who understood their materials very well indeed. And Wren, who was clearly a wonderful manager and leader, lifted the level of architectural craftsmanship all around him by his sort of sympathetic, encouraging leadership and his very high standards. So that's one thing. They were very well built in the first place. And another is that in many of these cases, once you've built something like St Paul's Cathedral or Trinity College Library, or even Penbrook College Chapel, you're unlikely

• 48:14Speaker 05

  to want to do it again. I mean, many of them were sort of long term and monumental in form anyway. But after, there was a generational reaction against Wren in the 40 or 50 years after his death. But thereafter, really from the late 8th and early 9th century, he was respected and revered as a superb designer. And I think his buildings were already acknowledged as being of very high quality and something special by, for example, John Soane and Charles Robert Cockerell, who were two of the leading early 19th century architects. So Wren already had a special reputation and his buildings would have had that sort

• 48:55Speaker 05

  of air as being something special that shouldn't be destroyed lightly by the early 19th century. And I think that would be a fact too. But in a way, he was a brilliant man in the right place at the right time. Every now and then, cultures do just throw up a supremely gifted, talented individual who actually then has the opportunities to express their talents. And in music, it might be Mozart and Haydn, and in the arts, it might be Michelangelo. And in our case, it's Shakespeare and the dramatic culture of the Elizabethan Age and Rennes in architecture in the late 17th century. And this way in which the right person sometimes comes along at just the right moment in history, it does lead one to reflect on all the people who were born at the wrong

• 49:40Speaker 05

  time too. But Sir Christopher, I think was definitely born at the right moment.

• 49:45Dan Snow?

  Yes, Stephen, I now believe that I too could have reshaped this sceptered aisle if I'd only been born at a different time. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate that, Stephen.

• 49:56Speaker 05

  Great pleasure as always. Thank you very much.

• 50:02Dan Snow?

  Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Before we go, I'll tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch it on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube and you can see me, you can see what we're talking about. I'd love it if you could subscribe to that channel over there. Just click the link in the show notes below and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet or even a TV or even a giant cinema movie screen if you have one in your underground lair. See you next time, folks.

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