Open Veils · Answer
What was Christopher’s teen plan for London rebuild?
Wren was 33 years old when he scrambled over still-smouldering ruins and produced a complete metropolitan vision within a single week of the 1666 fire. His plan was not a modest patch job but a wholesale Continental reimagining — ronds-points, converging grand boulevards, open public squares and long axial vistas in the Roman and Parisian mode. The property rights obstacle killed it, not any failure of ambition.
Evidence
- According to the Library of Congress's documented urban planning record, King Charles II had appointed Wren as the architect of record for London's reconstruction following the Great Fire of September 1666.
- Wren's plan, verified in multiple architectural histories, was modelled explicitly on Pope Sixtus V's radial replanning of Rome: converging boulevards, circus roundabouts, long vistas, and large public squares — what contemporaries called a city of 'pomp and regularity.'
- John Evelyn, the diarist and fellow scheme-proposer, complained bitterly that 'Dr Wren got the start of me,' arriving at court three days after Wren.
- Wren was nonetheless commissioned to redesign 52 churches destroyed in the fire, and his third iteration of St. Paul's Cathedral — begun under Royal Warrant in 1673 and completed over 35 years — stands as the executed masterpiece of what the broader plan promised.
- The Rebuilding Act, passed by Parliament in February 1667, mandated stone and brick construction and widened streets — but stopped well short of Wren's grander vision.