The City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren (review)

This is a paperback reprint of a book first published in 1996; its author died within a year of its original publication. It is a meticulous account of the subject, with 188 well-chosen illustrations in the form of plans, engravings, and photographs. Particularly valuable for the church historian are those illustrations that show the interiors of some churches before Victorian restoration.

The book is divided into two roughly equal parts. The first part provides a general introduction to Wren’s city churches, the second a detailed account of the fifty-eight churches plus St. Paul’s Cathedral (the cathedral and fifty-one of the churches were rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666), including those that are no longer standing. For the historian of London or architecture, this is an exceptionally useful and detailed book. A major problem with these churches is distinguishing those designed by Wren from those designed by his assistants, notably Nicholas Hawksmoor and Robert Hooke. Paul Jeffery unravels this problem with great skill. Where he is less comprehensive is in his discussion of the buildings’ original furnishings and the alteration of these in nineteenth-century restorations. Unusually, most of the churches were designed without thought to the furnishings, which were then commissioned from local craftsmen. It is therefore impossible to say much about the original liturgical focus of the buildings. Jeffery assumes that most pulpits and reading desks were placed in the traditional early-seventeenth-century position, more or less adjacent to the altar, and that they were only moved into the middle of churches in the mid-eighteenth century (pp. 156–57), but cites no evidence to support this assumption. The likelihood is that pulpit and reading desk were placed in different locations in different buildings, according to the wishes of those commissioning the furnishings; for those churches in which the pulpit and reading desk are known to have been in a central position by the mid-eighteenth century this may have been their position from the start.

Inevitably, there is some discussion of the long-term future of Wren’s surviving city churches, with only twenty-three of the fifty-one rebuildings still surviving as complete entities. The various attempted solutions, such as the creation of guild churches in 1952 and the recommendations of commissions under Sir Denys Buckley in 1970 and Lord Templeman in 1994, are carefully evaluated, and Jeffery’s conclusion is that no hasty or ill-considered actions should be taken in the future. Within the text there are a small number of omissions or curious comments. The one on page 158 that “services of holy communion (not then referred to as ‘mass’ due to association with Catholicism) were less frequent than nowadays” seems out of place in a work of this scholarship. The comment on the sale of fittings from St. Antholin’s in 1874 (p. 208) might have been expanded to list their new owners; some are still in the parish church of King Charles the Martyr, Tunbridge Wells. The early-twentieth-century Anglo-Catholic embellishment of the parish and pilgrimage church of St. Magnus the Martyr, London Bridge, is not noted (p. 259), although the late-twentieth-century reordering of the parish church of St. Stephen Walbrook is (p. 342).These minor inconsistencies and infelicities do not, however, detract from the overall value of this first-class work of reference, and the publishers are to be congratulated for reprinting this book.