ancient cities

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Ch r i s t o p h E r wr E n,
pl a n o f lo n d o n
Sir Christopher Wren’s plan for London after the
Great Fire of 1666 (Figure 1), preserved in two
drawings (All Souls I. 7 and 101), constitutes his
only, and never implemented, work of urban
design. Presented to the king just five days after
the fire had ended, Wren’s design was to solve the
deplorable problems, recognized for decades, that
had developed within the medieval city as the
result of drastic social changes. Furthermore, he
proposed to do so in a new way. Disasters had
occurred in cities before, wiping clean large
areas—in the case of the Great Fire, it destroyed
two thirds of the city’s rundown, crowded, and
unsanitary fabric. But instead of rebuilding the
city as it had been before, Wren presented a new
idea—to create a completely new design of streets
and buildings on the original site.
At least six new plans for London were produced
during the weeks following the fire: first by
Wren, then by his close friends John Evelyn and
Christopher Wren, Plan of London
135
Robert Hooke, followed by the city surveyor
Robert Mills (now lost), the surveyor and mapmaker
Richard Newcourt, and Captain Valentine
Knight. Hooke’s and Newcourt’s proposals for a
grid of straight streets creating uniform blocks
over the destroyed area, with no regard to what
had been lost or what had survived, were derived
from ideal city designs found in Italian architectural
treatises and from new towns recently constructed
on the continent. Wren’s and Evelyn’s
proposals for wide diagonal and radiating avenues
coming together as triviums or rond-points, where
major urban spaces or buildings are placed, were
inspired by the Rome of Sixtus V (1580s), by the
new places of Paris created under Henry IV (1605–
1610), and the gardens of André Le Nôtre (1650s–
1660s). Rather than ideal, as shown by the
discourse titled Londinium Redivivum attached by
Evelyn to his plan, he and Wren were very much
concerned about the earlier conditions. Using the
available but inaccurate maps of the city as base
plans—Newcourt’s of 1658 (Wren) and Hollar’s
of 1666 (Evelyn)—they generally maintained the
location of major streets, joining them into surviving
streets and gates. Major monuments, including
St. Paul’s, the Exchange, the Custom House, as
well as many of the churches remained in their
original locations.
Wren’s plan, a sensitive adaptation of continental
ideas to the original pattern of the destroyed
city, was seriously considered at the House of
Commons soon after the fire and as late as February
1667. To make the plan feasible, it proposed that
all the ground be purchased by the city and placed
in trust while the new streets were laid out. Then
individual sites would be sold, giving preference to
former owners. In the end, however, many factors
stood in the way—lack of money, the cumbersome
legislative process, and suspicious property owners.
The lack of an accurate and detailed survey and
map meant that Wren’s design could not be finalized
and implemented immediately—haste was
essential to prevent the migration of inhabitants
and their business. In fact, it took more than five
years after the Rebuilding Act was passed in late
March 1667 for Hooke to complete the survey of
the ruins and properties, as well as the negotiations
with owners over “lost ground.” This slow and difficult
process made reconstructing the original
fabric the only option. There were, however, a few