Sir Christopher Wren
b. East Knoyle, Wilts., 1632;
d. London, 1723.

Sir Christopher Wren - The best-known and probably the greatest of English famous architects. This reputation is earned for his brilliant design of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, and the ingenuity of his City churches. Wren was born into a clerical household in Wiltshire. His father was appointed Dean of Windsor in 1634. From Westminster School the young boy spent some three years in London before going as a Gentleman Commoner to Wadham College, Oxford (1649). At Oxford he was soon involved with a group of brilliant scholars, who later formed the nucleus of the Royal Society. Serving as assistant to an eminent anatomist, Wren was at once immersed in new and experimental scientific learning. Astronomy seemed a logical progression for his active mind, and an early interest in working models, diagrams and charts were useful to an eventual architect. Wren’s advancement was ever rapid: Gresham Professor of Astronomy in London in 1657, at the age of twenty-five, Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford four years later. In 1663, Wren’s uncle, the elderly Bishop of Ely, asked him to design a new chapel for Pembroke College, Cambridge. Architecture was an easy accomplishment to a brilliant scientist. The important Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, with its great painted ceiling, unsupported by columns, followed; then a new building for Trinity College, Oxford (1668), a visit to Paris in 1665 to survey its “most esteemed fabrics” - always there was more work, with its attendant problems. In London the Great Fire of 1666 gave chance for Wren to present a scheme to rebuild the City. Utopian in concept, it was only partly realized. But there was also need for the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral and the replacement of so many damaged churches. Here lay Wren’s major work for the rest of the c17 and beyond. In March 1669 Charles II had appointed Wren Surveyor-General of the King’s Works (a post held in earlier years by Inigo Jones). This meant the supervision of all work on the royal palaces; because of this increasing commitment to architecture Wren resigned his Oxford professorship in 1673, when he was knighted. St Paul’s was also now involving continual time and thought, with the final “Warrant Design” not being approved by the King until 1675. Furthermore, with only two surveyors to help, there were fifty-two churches in the City of London to design or supervise in some way. Most were on awkward, constricting sites. Each demanded an original spatial solution. All of them were given a fine tower and a soaring thin spire, but each had subtle, and often distinct, differences. Wren died, in his own words, having “worn out (by God’s Mercy) a long life in the Royal Service, and having made some Figure in the world”. He was buried in February 1723 in the crypt of his greatest work, St Paul’s Cathedral, where a monument was later erected to his memory.

Major buildings / works:
Supervision, and sometimes design, of 52 London City churches, c.1670-90.
St Paul’s Cathedral, London, 1675-1710.
Royal Hospital, Chelsea, 1682-92.
Royal Hospital, Greenwich, 1696 onwards.

Bibliography:
Stephen Wren, Parentalia, or Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens, 1750.
The Wren Society, 20 vols., 1924-43.
Kerry Downes, Christopher Wren, London, 1971.
Geoffrey Beard, The Work of Christopher Wren, London, 1982.