The Phoenix: St Paul’s Cathedral and the Men who Made Modern London by Leo Hollis (review)

253 Plot forced the court into even greater strictness about access and security. The king showed his colors during this period through ceremony, for example by the warm or cold reception of addresses. This period also saw a planned withdrawal from unruly central London: the Oxford Parliament, renovations at Windsor, and the erection of the English Versailles at Winchester. The book relies on a wide range of primary sources, including guidebooks, household ordinances, establishments and accounts, diaries and letters, and palace art and architecture. The result provides a useful counterpoint to Brian Weiser’s account of access at the court of Charles II. Still, one might ask for more. Although Ms. Keay asserts in the Introduction that gesture symbolized human relationships, there is relatively little semiotic interpretation of the various ceremonies she describes. Nor does she address court entertainments, the royal patronage of the theater, or the king’s frequent alfresco appearances in St. James’s Park. Given the success of the Restoration and Coronation entries, one wonders why a monarch so concerned with image and fine-tuning his relations with his subjects did not go on more progresses or processions through London. While Ms. Keay quotes eyewitness accounts, there is too little on the audience’s pushback: how did Charles II’s subjects attempt to manipulate him through ceremony or their responses to it? Finally, there is only a brief discussion of the king’s loose morality and its effect on his image. The Charles II that emerges from this book is always certain, always in control, and always concerned with what his subjects would think. But that does not quite square with the monarch who chose indiscreet drinking companions or inflicted his mistress on his consort as a lady in waiting. Still, Ms. Keay has given us a magnificent book on Charles II’s ceremonial life. Robert Bucholz Loyola University, Chicago LEO HOLLIS. The Phoenix: St Paul’s Cathedral and the Men who Made Modern London. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008. Pp. x ⫹ 390. £20. These days you have to look hard to find the tallest freestanding stone column in the world. The Monument, which once soared high above London’s skyline, is now rather hidden from view among the much taller skyscrapers of the modern city. Christopher Wren, who designed it, first planned for the column to be surmounted by a phoenix, an apt symbol with which to commemorate the devastating fire that destroyed much of the City in September 1666. However, concerned that the wings of the bird might act dangerously as a sail, such was the column’s exposure, he opted finally for a flaming urn, a solution that may have been suggested to him by Robert Hooke, with whom Wren worked closely on the project. In the last few years, the Monument has itself been revitalized, undergoing significant restoration , and it has a new ‘virtual’ prominence . From its top a camera takes panoramic images of the city, which are available, constantly updated, in real time on the Internet [http://www. themonument.info/views/]. It is the work of the video artist Chris MeighAndrews . We can imagine that Wren and Hooke, great technological innovators both, would have approved, for the Monument was designed by them to have a double purpose: to be a place 254 of experiment (its primary scientific purpose was to act as a zenith telescope ) as well as a memorial. Wren and Hooke were both significant figures in London’s rebuilding. Hooke, with apparently unflagging energy , worked as one of the City’s Surveyors , designing a number of buildings in addition, and Wren led a large number of projects, not least the rebuilding of the City’s churches. His most important building was of course St Paul’s, which became perhaps the more prominent symbol of the City’s renaissance after the Fire. Like the Monument, the Cathedral no longer dominates the cityscape as it did, although for the past 80 years a handful of long views of it have been protected in recognition of the building’s historical importance in the urban landscape and its wider national significance. In 1709, the poet James Wright recorded in Phoenix Paulina a rebuilt cathedral and...