Dan Snow's History Hit - Christopher Wren

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

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/

Hi folks, Dan here. I have some very, very exciting news for you. To celebrate our 10th anniversary with you, we are doing a live show of Dan Snow's history, the first for a very, very long time. So please join me on Friday the 12th of September in London town. By popular demand, I'll be retelling the story of the legend Thomas Cochran, the Goat, greatest of all time, the man who inspired the movie Master and Commander, and looking back over 10 years of making this podcast, Prime Ministers, Oscar winners, World War II veterans, Holocaust survivors, and some of the greatest historians in the world.

It's a time for me to hang out with you guys and answer any burning questions you may have. So don't miss it, it's going to be an epic party and there is no one I'd rather spend it with. All of you dedicated listeners. You can get tickets at the link in the show notes, but hurry because they are selling fast. See you there. 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 circums picæ.

The full translation is, here in the foundations lies the architect of this church and city, Christopher Wren who lived beyond 90 years, not for his own profit, but for the public good. Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you. 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 learned in this podcast, 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 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. 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, though 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, Their scarce ever met in one man, In so great perfection, Such a mechanical hand, And so philosophical a mind. 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. He 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 is Stephen Brindle. He's been on the podcast before. He's a wonderful historian whose love and knowledge about architecture, as you'll hear, knows no bounds. This is Christopher Wren. Enjoy. T minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God saved the king.

No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Stephen, great to have you back on the podcast. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Stephen, great to have you back on the podcast. Dan, thank you very much. 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. 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 Noil in Wiltshire, which is about as royal as you could get. But he was a supporter of Archbishop Lord, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the man who was trying to make Church of England a more sacramental establishment for Charles I, and he became

Dean of Windsor, as his father did. So Christopher moved to Windsor, to the deanery that he was growing up in in the castle. When the Civil War broke out, his uncle, Matthew Wren, was more senior church when he was the bishop of Ely. So, Wren grew up in this atmosphere of Heimlich and churchmanship, but just as England was becoming more polarised and sliding into civil war. He was 10 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. They had to leave with only their suitcases, so to speak. They fled to Bletchingdon and later back to Eastern Oil. That must have been pretty traumatic. That's fascinating. 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 low church parliamentarian forces. They really were. So much so that Uncle Matthew was imprisoned in the Tower of London 17 years. Wow.

Of course his friend William Lord, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was actually executed. Yes. So I think Uncle Matthew, in a way, had a lucky escape, as did Father Dean Christopher. 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? 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 in 1658, so all of the commonwealth is still just about in charge then. And he went to Wadham 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 nucleus of the world's astrocyte. And as a teenager, for example, he'd have been attending anatomical dissections. He was assisting a famous surgeon called Dr Charles Scarborough. He made wings

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, move and 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. 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 happening here? 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 Christian 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 or less, someone like Wren, who was from such a high church background. The idea that the natural world could and should be studied for itself and that the understanding of it wasn't determined by religious texts was fairly well established

by the mid-17th century. Characters like Nicholas Copernicus, the famous Polish astronomer, and Galileo in Italy, now they'd had a much harder time because they still have been under the authority of the Catholic Church. In England, there wasn't the hand of the Church handing over you in the same kind of way, which is slightly ironic when you think that Graham was himself from behind, from background. I don't think we have any sort of answer to that apparent paradox. But certainly Wren responded instinctively to the sort of mathematical and scientific culture which was developing. Certainly the 17th century was the age when science and mathematics overthrew defeated superstition and what you might call the relics

of paganism. James I, for example, believed implicitly in witchcraft. His grandson Charles II founded the Royal Society. So that's a measure of the generational change. It sounds to me like Wren's on course to be an astronomer, like sort of his contemporary Newton. What changes? What happens? 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, particular 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 even people, or being present at dissections at any rate. In 1657, he was appointed the Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College in London, this remarkable institution which still exists and still holds public lectures. And then in 1661, he was appointed the civilian professor of astronomy at Oxford. Now Gresham College held weekly lectures, sometimes with scientific demonstrations, and the Royal Society grew out of the group of friends who met after Wren's lectures on astronomy at Gresham College. So he's right at the heart of Bitton's very small scientific establishment, which was a group of friends, people right around him, like John Flansteed, the first astronomer of oil, and Robert Hooke, the man who really invented

the microscope. How interesting. I didn't know Rennes was the dynamo of that group. Well, certainly one of them. Yes, right at the heart of it. How on earth does he end up becoming an architect? 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 15th and 16th centuries as a result of rise of Renaissance culture and architects like Bramante and Palladio and Michelangelo indeed had emerged and it had become a profession, but not in England. In England, Wren was one of the first people who we could say became a professional architect and there were only a couple of precedents for that in English history. Inigo Jones, for example, who was really an artist who'd come to Charles I 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, there were the class people. 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. Yes. He's the sort of person who's versed in mathematics and had books and knew about ideas. So if you wanted to building design here, you might turn to him, which is what Uncle Matthew did. Uncle Matthew Wren was released from prison in 1660. So the restoration. So King Charles II comes to the throne, Cromwell's dead, his son's useless and King Charles II comes back, so good old Matthew Wren's out of prison. Yes, in 1660 Charles II was stored 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 gentlemen architects who'd traveled 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 in elegant single cell buildings. And it went so well that it was followed up quite quickly with two more buildings, designed for a chapel screen at All Cells College Oxford in 1664 and for a new theatre. That is a theatre for ceremonies and lectures called the Sheldonian Theatre, after Gilbert Sheldon, Bishop of London, for Oxford University, and that was also started in 1664. Is there something radically exciting, different about these buildings, or were they

just a job well done? They were essentially a job well done. The Sheldonian Theatre is certainly remarkable in at least one respect, in that it's about 90 feet across. So Wren had deliberately designed a de-shaped interior, which at its widest point is, I think, getting on for 90 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 them clunky. This piece of structural engineering, it's superb.

Is he taking his lead from Europe? 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. He operated within a building environment, which at the start of the 17th 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 up-right shaped windows and their sash windows. The houses and the buildings are all a completely different shape.

All of these changes, what you might call the 17th century building revolution, that was the world we're in 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 made of brick, that timber framing in the old way was dying out, although carpenter's was still very important in the building process. So he's very much working within a building culture, which is managed by craftsmen and which is undergoing fundamental changes. These changes made it easier to conceive buildings in line with the classical rules of design.

Those did come from Europe, yes, from Italy and France. Wren would have read architectural books like Palladio's Four Books of Architecture. He had one long visit to France in 1665 for about nine months. That was certainly a crucial and formative experience for him. It was the only time he was ever known to have left England. 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. 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. And all of this was a tremendous formative experience for him. He'd have seen building projects going on up on a scale which he would never have seen in England. What a wonderful time, The Baroque building style, the mix of classical architecture, but with the advances of this modern technology that you've referred to creating these unbelievable wedding cake-like buildings. 1665 is an important date, I suppose, because he gets back the following year and, inconveniently, London burns down, the Great Fire of London. This is, as they say, an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

It has to be admitted that the Great Fire was Sir Christopher's big professional break. After this, in September 1666, 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. And a spiritual crisis because there's nowhere to worship, presumably, in a world where they thought that communion was extremely important. Well, indeed, indeed. St Paul's Cathedral gone and 80 parish churches within the city of London destroyed and the whole city in ashes.

The government and the Corporation of London reacted really with remarkable speed. 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 was one of Wren's close friends, Robert Hooke, and Charles II appointed the three leading gentlemen architects, Roger Prout, Hugh May, and Wren. They advised on and they set the parameters for the rebuilding of the city, which then went ahead at breakneck speed. Now, Wren was appointed severe of work to the king in 1669, and in July of

the same year he was appointed severe 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. Ren only had about two finished buildings to his credit at this time, and he's entrusted with these awesome responsibilities. After 1669, no one else was consulted in relation to the rebuilding of St Paul's. Before we come on 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. Yes, he did. Several people did. It seemed obvious that there was an opportunity to replan 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, streets that you couldn't even drive a cart down, which were really alleys. It was an absolute labyrinth, and that's partly why the whole thing had burned because there were no natural fire breaks anywhere in the city.

There was nowhere they could readily stop it. They thought, what a warren 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 V. Paris still looked largely the same actually. 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 seems to be an opportunity to replan it and John Evelyn and Robert Hooke and Wren all produced plans which Wren's is the most interesting and the most sophisticated with a riverside key and with great wide avenues,

avenues which are focused on two focal points, on a rebuilt royal exchange and on a 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, compensating people and reallocating property would have delayed the start of rebuilding by a year, two, three years. People who were on 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. It seems that they'd accept this quite quickly within a month or two. It would seem that Wren himself, who was always a supremely pragmatic man and he was a scientist, realized that actually it was unachievable to narrate with the English law. If you lived in 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, his beautiful plan, which would have made London one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, was actually unachievable in the circumstances of England in the 1660s. You listen to Dan Snow's history, it would do it Christopher Wren. More

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subscribe to Gone Medieval from History, hit wherever you get your podcasts. 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. That's quite true. A cathedral-sized church in Bisham. 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 a 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. He came up with a series of designs, and the first few were rejected. The Greek Cross, one of Greek crosses, 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 still exists and is still in St Paul's Cathedral. 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. This really was the Greek cross design, 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 marvelous design, highly original, very coherent too, but it was rejected by the clergy because it didn't have a long processional nave. They said it was unseatable 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 to say it has a long nave and shorter transepts and east end. So it looked in clan more like traditional English 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 Lorde 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 the sort of lowest common denominator design which gives them the appearance that Jones had grafted onto the nave and the shape of the Latin cross. And he crucially had the king's authority to vary the design in ornamental details as he saw fit. And that was the key get out. 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 all native. So it's three-dimensional chess here. There's a lot of stakeholders. Yes, there are. The great model certainly represents what Wren would have liked to have

built. It seems surprising if Wren, with his family background and his evident skill in managing relationships had not foreseen the objections. 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. Give me two or three reasons why St Paul's Cathedral is one of the great wonders of early modern architecture and engineering. 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, Wren 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

like have a test run at it, although he probably did to 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? It had to look right in proportion to the body of the building. He 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 Hooke was to build a sort of a cone-shaped structure. If you think about a cone up turning a cone on a table and you put a weight on top of it and the cone is a naturally very strong form, it's a much stronger form than a half globe shape.

A half globe shape, 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 and 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 and it's visible from 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. And until the mid-20th century it was the tallest building in London? Extraordinarily, yes. Bear in mind that Wren, when he was appointed as surveyor for St Paul's, he had only three

finished buildings to his credit. There was no architectural education. Wren was, when he took on this and the city churches and the Royal Surveyship, 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.

Unimaginable. St Paul's is rumbling on. So from the 1670s it would eventually be completed in? About 1712 I think. 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?

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 Hooke, 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. The parishes, of course, even as merged, were autonomous organizations. And some of them had money and some of them 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. More on Christopher Wren coming up.

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Let's come back to his job as a sort of royal surveyor because he modernises Whitehall Palace, which people will know Banketing House is the only bit that's left today. It was much destroyed in a great fire of 1698, which also destroyed many vital historic archives and documents. A great tragedy, the 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? Yes, he is. Wren, 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 Wren's success. And Charles II commissioned quite a lot of alterations at Whitehall Palace, which all went in the form of 1698.

And Charles II commissioned a palace at Winchester, near 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 sober, very English, very dignified, and that sort of classic Wren. Charles II's brother James II, who succeeded in 1685, commissioned Wren to design chapels at Whitehall Palace and Somerset House for his Catholic Queen, Mary of Modena. But of course, he's then ejected from the throne in 1688-9 and the Glorious Revolution. Wren survives this great political sea change. Wren's an old Tory, a loyal

servant of the Stuart dynasty, and you really might have expected him to lose his job in 1688-89. It says a lot for William and Mary's judgment and also for Wren's pragmatic flexibility that he didn't resign and they didn't sack it. They knew a really good servant when they saw one. As well as the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, there's Greenwich, which is equally, if not more spectacular. Yes, much more spectacular. Wren began three great schemes for William and Mary, two great and one major, very soon after they came to the throne in 1689. William III was asthmatic and he hated Whitehall Palace,

which he said was too damper. 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. Wren did a very swift extension conversion job and created Kensington Palace for them. Those sober brick facades, those are mostly, though not entirely, by him. Hampton Court was the grand out-of-town residence and that was always going to be on a much bigger scale. There were initial designs for a really spectacular, versatile transformation, but Britain was at war now with France and so the money just wasn't available. 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 rock 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. It was conjured out of an incomplete royal palace. Charles II had been building a new palace there.

One wing had been built. There was the one wing of Charles II's palace and there was the Queen's house, which had been built by Inigo Jones between 1617 and 1635. And out of those two things, Wren conjured that magnificent vista between two buildings. He had two buildings start with, and he made that marvelous 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.

After the Whitehall Palace Fire, he did produce designs for something of sort of Louvre-like or Versailles-like splendour on the site of Whitehall, which were never built. Actually, there were much more ambitious designs for Greenwich and for Hampton Court and for Whitehall. Although those were never built, great drawings were produced. They really underlay the careers, the architectural achievements of Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh. So those unbuilt designs were an important stage in English block architecture.

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? Yes, it is. Wren designed a painted hall as the dining hall or the factory for the New Royal Hospital, 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 well after 1714. But Wren would have been involved in setting out the outlines of Thornhill's design, or at any rate have approved it, I would think. 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 I. So you can see the royal sponsors changing. Speaking of 1714, we've got Queen Anne, the last true monarch, dying. Wren's 82. He's been in office since the 1660s.

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. The new Whig administration eventually sacked him in 1718 and he was replaced with 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 his works to Kelceman in about a year and got sacked himself. So, Christopher retired to his house at Hampden Court with his drawings. And he made old bones, didn't he? I mean, he died in 1723, so he was... He was 90, yeah. 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?

He certainly our greatest architect. Globally significant, he's significant within the Anglosphere, I'd say, not within the 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. 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 Hawksmore, his own assistant, and John Vanbrough and John Soane and Edwin Lutyens and a few Victorian architects, you could say. But, and this is a big but, they're not that much more brilliant than Renner'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 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 Baer and Hawksmoor were very much standing on his shoulders. So if we take all that together and look at him as a whole, I'd say yes, yes, he's our greatest architect. I suppose my last question is why do we regard all these buildings as 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.

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 craftspeople 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 sympathetic, encouraging leadership and his very high standards. That's one thing.

They were very well built in the first place. Another is that in many of these cases, once you've built something like St. Paul's Cathedral or Trinity College Library or even Pembroke College Chapel, you're unlikely to want to do it again. Many of them were long-term and monumental in form anyway. There was a generational reaction against Wren in the 40 or 50 years after his death, but thereafter, really from the late 18th and early 19th century, he was respected and revered as a superb designer. I think his buildings were already acknowledged as being of very high quality and something special by, for example, John Soane and

Charles Robert Cockerill, who were two of the leading early 19th century architects. Wren already had a special reputation and his buildings would have had that air as being something special that shouldn't be destroyed lightly by the early 19th century. I think that would be a fact too. 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.

In music, it might be Mozart and Haydn, their talents. In music it might be Mozart and Haydn and in the arts it might be Michelangelo and Bernini and in our case it's Shakespeare in the dramatic culture of the Elizabethan age and Wren in architecture in the late 17th century. 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 time too. But Sir Christopher, I think, was definitely born at the right moment. Yes, Stephen. I now believe that I too could have reshaped this sceptred 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. Great pleasure as always. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate that Stephen. Great pleasure as always. Thank you very much. Thanks very much for listening everyone. Before you 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 on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here folks. Our Friday episodes each week

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