The Great Fire of London started in a bakery on Pudding Lane on September 2, 1666, and burned for four days. When it stopped, 13,200 houses and eighty-seven churches were gone. The medieval cathedral of St. Paul's, which had stood in some form for 600 years, was a scorched shell. Roughly 373 acres were ash, and about 100,000 people had no homes.
Within days, Christopher Wren submitted a plan for a new city. He was a thirty-four-year-old professor of astronomy who had built nothing of real scale. The Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford was his main work, and it was still under construction. His credential was mathematics. He was a founding member of the Royal Society, he had measured the rings of Saturn, and he designed instruments.
His plan showed wide streets radiating from civic buildings, open piazzas, stone construction throughout, and the river brought closer to the life of the city. He drew it on ground that was still cooling, to keep a single bakery fire from ever again consuming six centuries of packed timber. Parliament rejected it. Property owners held legal claim to their old plots, and his geometry could not fit the medieval map of ownership. The Rebuilding Act of 1667 gave London back to its owners.
The Rebuilding Acts of 1667 and 1670 did require stone and brick where London had been timber, widened the streets, and fixed building heights, standards Parliament had refused before the fire. Wren was appointed Surveyor of the King's Works and spent the next 35 years building. He was given the churches, more than fifty of them, each a separate problem in light and proportion and in the acoustics of Protestant worship, which brought the congregation close to the minister. He fit each one into the irregular footprint medieval London had left behind.
Work on St. Paul's began in 1675. Wren had assessed the old cathedral before 1666 and recommended demolition, and the fire ended that discussion. Nothing on the scale of his dome had been attempted on English soil. He built it in three layers: an inner dome visitors see from the floor, an outer dome of lead over timber visible from the Thames, and between them, unseen by anyone who has stood in the building in three centuries, a brick cone carrying the weight of the lantern above.
In 1710 his son climbed the scaffolding and placed the final stone on the lantern while Wren, seventy-eight, watched from below. He lived thirteen more years and died in 1723. He is buried in the crypt of St. Paul's, and the epitaph on the floor above him reads, Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.
Read the full essay on Substack: https://heroespath.substack.com/p/the-architect-who-rebuilt-a-city