An interview with Lisa Jardine
This interview with Lisa Jardine (LJ) was carried out by Oxford Film & Television (OFT) for the Channel 4 programme The Great Fire of London. Lisa Jardine is professor of English and dean of the Faculty of Arts at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, and an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge.
Contents
• Portents in the sky
• Christopher Wren and St Paul's
• The rebuilding of London
• Re-creating London's churches
• Designing St Paul's
• St Paul's: an experimental laboratory
• Collaboration with Robert Hooke
OFT: Lisa, 1666 – tell me about the mood of the times.
LJ: Even before any calamity in 1666, the London community – and, indeed, England as a whole – was in a state of high tension about possible invasion by the Dutch or the French. Plague had been endemic the year before and was bound to be again in that year. There were endless rumours of papist plots to supplant the returned Protestant monarch, so it was a nervy, tense, difficult time in England.
OFT: What was the significance of what was happening in the sky?
LJ: There was an unusual amount of eventful activity in the skies over London in the several years preceding the Fire of London. Remember those were plague years also. So the sense of portent, of some kind of impending disaster, was extremely strong. And telescopes, particularly precision telescopes, were a new phenomenon. To be able to look at a comet that has appeared bright in the night sky, to be able to track the progress of that celestial body across the sky, was in itself a new and exciting and unfamiliar thing to be able to do.
Couple that with the long historical tradition of unfamiliar events in the sky portending some kind of danger, adversity, disaster on earth, and you have a very, very nervous atmosphere in the months preceding the great Fire.
OFT: Wren, for example, was tracking these all the time?
LJ: Christopher Wren [1632-1723] belonged to a rather select group of gentlemen who – before the Restoration and then, more energetically, after it – were looking through telescopes that had been provided by great benefactors like Sir Charles Scarborough, who became the king's physician. They were observing natural phenomena; they tracked each comet as it appeared. They discussed what the orbit of a comet might be.
So science and natural observation interlocked in the lives of the men who would subsequently be involved in rebuilding London.
OFT: People were confused by the sky during the Fire?
LJ: Today we have no understanding of the impact of the night sky on people before electric street lighting. We don't see the sky. The sky at night then was an all-encompassing blanket, studded with familiar objects – the stars and the planets – which, on occasion, showed some extraordinary fiery manifestation of good or bad for the nation beneath it. That would have been seen by everybody with the naked eye. The sky was dark, the comet was dazzlingly bright, in terms of a 1660s sky.
OFT: And by the time the Fire begins, people start noticing the strange coloration of the sky ...
LJ: Even before those beyond the reach of the Fire, living within London, were made aware of it, they noted changes in the sky outside their windows.
Samuel Van Hoogstraten [1627-78], the artist, writes in his primer for artists about how he was sitting on a Sunday in London in September 1666, and he began to notice that the sky outside his window was curiously pink and the clouds became increasingly tinged with a red glow. Only later did he discover that what he was witnessing was the effect of sun shining on to the smoke billowing from the Fire itself.
LJ: When you have a fire of the intensity of the Great Fire of London, the effects on the environment are felt way beyond the confines of the city itself. Three days after the outbreak of the Fire, 60 miles away in Oxford, an astronomer, Mr Locke, became aware that the sunbeams shining through the clouds were tinged with a curious pink or red because of the smoke and ash that had drifted all the way from the seat of the fire.
Christopher Wren and St Paul's
OFT: What was Old St Paul's like?
LJ: Old St Paul's was a magnificent, huge medieval church. It had had the highest spire in England, but it had been hit by lightning in the 1560s, a century before the Restoration, and had crumbled, as had the top of the tower. So, in the 1660s, Old St Paul's was, in fact, a rather magnificent damaged building. When Charles II returned in 1660, one of the first things that he had his team of surveyors in London do was a complete survey of Old St Paul's.
OFT: What was Wren's involvement?
LJ: Christopher Wren was one of the three king's surveyors who were put on to the job of structurally analysing Old St Paul's to see whether it would stand refurbishment, or whether something more dramatic might be needed, like complete rebuilding. This they undertook in 1663.
OFT: What was Wren's attitude to Old St Paul's?
LJ: Christopher Wren's attitude was very much that of the king, Charles II, himself. Charles' grandfather, James I, had undertaken a refurbishment of the exterior of Old St Paul's using the great architect Inigo Jones, who had hung a magnificent marble façade from the front of the building. When Charles II came into power, Wren was with him all the way in wanting to extend that somewhat Roman Catholic modification of the old church to the interior. Charles II and Wren together believed that you could turn the inside of the old church into some kind of simulation of the great churches of Italy and France.
The king personally sent Wren to France in 1665, to take a look at the grand rebuilding that was being done for Louis XIV by Italian and French architects after the grand European style. Wren spent nine months there. Most importantly, he watched the way in which something like the Louvre was being constructed – how huge teams of workmen, who were semi-skilled themselves, were put together and harnessed by very able overseers, to put up these extraordinarily dramatic buildings that looked much more skilled than the personnel building them might have been capable of.
Christopher Wren had never even thought about building a building until 1663. He was not an architect, he wasn't trained as an architect, he had no background in building. What he was was an outstanding astronomer and a pure geometrical mathematician. He understood spaces and the relationship between spaces, but he also understood structures, the way to hang heavy rows of supporting pillars to create large spans using the internal structure of the materials themselves. He was an engineer, a mathematician, but he was not a builder or architect.
OFT: So how did he come to be involved in this?
LJ: The relationship between Christopher Wren and Charles II was very, very close. Wren's father had been a favoured employee of Charles I as dean of Windsor – a very special, close and intimate post. So his son actually had a position of some prominence with the king within months of the latter's return in 1660. His involvement with building, I think, was purely the opportunism that came of that relationship and the fact that the king's builders, people like Pratt and May, really were not up to the kind of grand European buildings that the king now wanted.
So the king turned to a man he could trust to understand the structural problems, and who also had been abroad and seen the buildings that the king himself had grown to love in exile. Wren had the most extraordinary, independent, ingenious mind that could rise to that kind of challenge.
The rebuilding of London
OFT: What was Wren's attitude to the rebuilding of London?
LJ: Within days of the extinguishing of the Fire, a number of plans were brought forward, some to the Corporation of London, at least one to the Royal Society and Christopher Wren's to the king. Wren had 'favoured son' status with the king – he actually presented his design to the king himself.
All of those plans proposed razing the old city and replacing it with some grandiose new scheme. Wren's was very European, on the model of Louis XIV's Paris.
It had landmark monuments and radial broad streets, as there are now from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and a grand quay down by the river. It was absolutely compatible with the Stuart idea of a brilliant revival of London in glory, and of course, it also could be seen as a phoenix rising glorious in Stuart majesty from the ruins of the Fire.
But in a very careful democracy such as we had in England in 1666, it was out of the question to evict all the residents and replace them with these grand boulevards and monuments. A decision was taken by the Corporation of London that householders could get back their plots of land. That is the outcome of democracy rather than the absolutist outcome that Charles II might have favoured.
Re-creating London's churches
OFT: How was Wren able to do such an amazing amount?
LJ: In the period of architectural rebuilding after the Fire, Wren was, in fact, part of a very modern type of architectural team, one that could be matched by Richard Rogers or Norman Foster today. He had a stake in vast numbers of buildings and I have no doubt that every drawing crossed his desk. But we now know that very many of those drawings were made by juniors, like [Nicholas] Hawksmoor [1661-1736] and [Robert] Hooke [1635-1703], and that Wren very rarely went on site.
The project to rebuild London's burned churches was the major one that Wren wrestled with throughout the 1670s and '80s. It was arrived at late in the day in terms of rebuilding the city, so that the householders had got their houses back up on the plots they had occupied. Roads had also been widened. So the sites for the churches were highly constrained.
Wren found himself with very curious sites for rebuilding, not at all the kind of site that a 'classicising' architect would wish for. A 'classicising' architect would want nice, neatly laid-out, rectilinear sites. A lot of these sites are curiously wedge-shaped, cut off at one side, angled, too small, hemmed in by houses. That was the problem that, in architectural terms, Wren then had to solve.
OFT: What did he do?
LJ: His solution is one that I think is quintessentially Wren,
quintessentially the geometer, the mathematician. He, above all, wanted the internal space to look like a pure space with right angles, cubes, hemispherical arches, and he achieved that by a kind of optical illusion. His plans look very curious when viewed as architectural plans. It's only in the three dimensions, when you actually stand in a Wren church, that you feel the sense of a perfect space.
When you then go outside the church, you find that the interior and its symmetry are not at all what the exterior prepares you for. The exterior, with the constraints of the ground plot, has odd angles, it isn't rectilinear, it may have a tower at the edge of the site. In other words, outside, Wren wants it to look robust; inside, he wants it to look perfectly, classically symmetrical.
OFT: So how does it work at, say, St Stephen Walbrook?
LJ: St Stephen Walbrook is a perfect example of the Wren illusion of interior space. It's actually a longtitudinal space inside – that is, it's a rectangle – but as you step into it, you are sure – because of the dome and the way the pillars are arranged and the way the light enters – that you are in a virtual cube. It feels symmetrical around the central space. It feels as if you are in a Byzantine church, rather than in a church laid out on a Greek cross plan.
OFT: Is there any way that it might be a rehearsal for St Paul's?
LJ: If you look at a three-dimensional model of St Stephen Walbrook, it is remarkably similar to the great model for St Paul's, and indeed, they were produced in the same period, the early 1670s.
So I think that St Stephen Walbrook feels like a kind of rehearsal for St Paul's and the important point about that is the dome. St Stephen Walbrook's is a self- supporting dome with an oculus, or a central hole, recalling the Pantheon in Rome, which supports a lantern through which the light falls into the centre of the church. That is the effect you have at St Paul's, but at St Paul's, Wren's ambition was to have a much higher building, and that problem had to be solved by much more complicated structural techniques.
Designing St Paul's
OFT: The early stages of Wren's design for St Paul's – he had this ambition and then it seemed to be thwarted.
LJ: Wren came back from his trip to France – where he had seen great classical buildings and spaces going up under Louis XIV – fired up with the desire to build that kind of building himself, and indeed he wrote to friends saying as much. What he got with the commission for St Paul's cathedral was, to begin with, a poisoned chalice. It was a commission whose agenda was so over- determined by the clergy and the Corporation of London, in conflict with the king who would vastly have preferred a basilica in the European manner, that it was impossible to fulfil. The variety and range of the early drawings that Wren did are testimony to that – they're 'botch' drawings, they have silly little curlicues on the top. You can't imagine how these buildings would have been built. They are evidence that a great architect is struggling with a brief he can't possibly fulfil.
OFT: So how does he get round it?
LJ: What Wren does, and I'm sure he did it at least emotionally in collusion with the king, was to propose a design – the 'warrant design' – get the seal of approval from the Corporation and the king, and then pay no attention to it whatsoever. And that, after all, architects had done before and probably will do again.
The point is that neither he nor the king liked that design. The only people who liked it were the clergy and the Corporation of London. And they, at the end of the day, were not the people who would determine what the final basilica looked like.
OFT: Did Wren and Charles II have a special relationship?
LJ: If there was collusion between Wren and the king over the design of St Paul's, it was the collusion of a shared commitment to a very 'high church' tradition and to the memory of Charles I. I doubt that Wren and the king discussed it, but I'm sure that the king hated the warrant design as much as Wren did.
The problem was the Corporation of London. The problem was the citizens who were, after all, 'low church', post-Commonwealth. They did not want the grandiosity, the European papistry of the kind of monumental church that the king and Wren wanted.
OFT: So how did they achieve it?
LJ: After the warrant design, the king paid no attention whatsoever to what was actually going up. And Wren, in the way that all architects are able to do, modified the design as he went along, over a period that was, after all, long enough for most of the people who'd been around when the warrant design was passed to be dead and gone. Lucky Wren to have lived into his 90s! So a certain adjustment went on, which meant that the final cathedral is, wondrously, the cathedral that Charles II would have wanted and, what's more wondrously, the cathedral that his father Charles I would have wanted, too.
OFT: So, in a sense, the clergy was outwitted?
LJ: In the sense that both Wren and the king had an agenda for a grand church, which was not that of the aldermen of London, the king and his architect outwitted the City and put up the church they wanted, the grand absolute monarchy church, the almost Roman Catholic church. And the aldermen had to love it once it was up.
St Paul's: an experimental laboratory
OFT: Tell me about Wren and Hooke experimenting at Old St Paul's and then seeing the new St Paul's as a combination of opportunities.
LJ: In the 1660s, Wren and Hooke, who were both members of the new Royal Society, were doing experiments that involved long vertical drops. Experiments with pendulums, experiments about variation of gravity with height, experiments with thermometers, experiments with barometers, all from the biggest heights you could find in a city – namely, the towers of cathedrals. So they used Westminster Cathedral and they used the tower of Old St Paul's where Hooke measured the drop and found that it was 202 feet [61.6 metres]. They, therefore, had a sense that great heights had a particular part to play in early science.
When Wren was given the task of redesigning St Paul's from the ground up, it was an irresistible opportunity to build a dual-purpose building – a large astronomical instrument, and a house of God. It was irresistible because it would provide the kind of height and the kind of aperture on the sky that would enable an astronomer like Wren to conduct experiments that hitherto he could only dream of.
The building took 40 years to put up, so he had a long time in which the shafts of the building have no roofs on and were available for mounting lenses vertically to look at the heavens. The south-west tower of St Paul's was used in that way – a tower with a stone staircase carefully built around the outside so you have the vertical void. In one of Wren's drawings, you have the shaft and then a little paper fold-out that shows you what it will look like with its lid on. Before the lid is on, that shaft can house a telescope. In fact, it was designed to house a telescope using two magnificent lenses that had been donated to the Royal Society by one of the Huygens brothers.
The second manifestation of Wren's preoccupation with space, light, vertical drop was in St Paul's central void, under the dome.
He created an optical illusion there that depended on an understanding of telescopes. As you look up from the floor of St Paul's, you appear to be looking into a dome that has an occulus – an aperture, a light-giving central space. In fact, you're looking up into another space, a vertical shaft, at the top of which is a second aperture indirectly lit, which then supports the lantern, which you see when you look at St Paul's on the sky line.
That illusion of looking through two lenses, lit from the side, is one that was used in 17th-century telescopes but was never, as far as I know, used anywhere else in building. On the floor of St Paul's, you believe you're seeing the sky. In fact, you're seeing a series of lens-like apertures, and you're not seeing the con trick, which is the second dome outside.
OFT: So only somebody understanding telescopes could understand the dome?
LJ: Only someone who had scrutinised early telescopes, who had seen the elegance of the way you got light into a vertical shaft without blocking the direct line of sight, could have produced that solution for the dome of St Paul's.
Collaboration with Robert Hooke
OFT: Of course, Wren was also helped by Hooke.
LJ: Wren and Hooke worked together on St Paul's. We know that from many entries in Hooke's diary for the period. Wren is, of course, the great designer, but some of the engineering solutions to the specific problems of St Paul's we can directly trace to Hooke's superlative understanding of the applied mathematics, specifically of the supporting ability of arches.
And the outer dome of St Paul's, with its 850-ton lantern, is supported on a cone shape that bends inwards into a kind of arch. That arch was designed by Robert Hooke.
OFT: Who was Hooke?
LJ: Robert Hooke is one of the great under-estimated figures of the 17th century, as a thinker, as a scientist and as a creative architect. He came from the Isle of Wight, a clergy man's son of modest status. He went to Westminster School where Wren went, and he then went on to Oxford where the two met and became close colleagues. I think this was because they had so many shared interests – mathematics, astronomy – and ultimately they both became committed architects.
OFT: What did Hooke give Wren?
LJ: Wren was the gentleman, he was the pure mathematician, he was the speculative designer. Hooke was an engineer through and through. He was one of the surveyors who laid out 3,000 of the 8,000 plots after the Fire of London, measuring every plot himself, and he used his mathematics to design scientific instruments. But he ultimately used his mathematics for Wren, to provide the gritty structural solutions to the spatial problems that Wren was so interested in.
So, if you like, they were interlocked, the designer and the engineer, in a way that seems to me extremely modern, and which I think we have very much under-rated as being a kind of partnership that sets a model for building right down to the 20th century.
OFT: At that time, of course, the strands of culture weren't so separated off, were they?
LJ: No. There's something interesting about both Wren and Hooke being artists of some distinction – both could paint like angels – and mathematicians of distinction. Because it's the visual and the mathematical – the artistic and the scientific yoked together in their particular conceptions of beauty that we still see all around us in London – that makes their partnership special but, at the same time, so typical of the 17th century.
OFT: One of the closest ways they worked together was on the construction of the Monument.
LJ: The Monument is really our lasting tribute to the sort of synergy between art and science that Wren and Hooke had a lifetime investment in. It is, in fact, Hooke's building – that tallest and slenderest of columns, topped by a golden urn whose fire is now the Fire of Restoration rising from the ashes of the Fire of London. Its artistic merit is coupled with a stringent design to serve scientific purposes: little niches where the scientist will sit and take his measurements; a stair that runs up the vertical shaft, and where we know Wren and Hooke took measurements at every level to check barometer readings; its access to the sky; its basement laboratory.
It is what I think St Paul's would have been if those two men could have had overall control of the design. The Monument is the closest we get to that dual function – art/science, astronomical instrument/grand London monument.
