London’s great fire made a scientist its chief architect
Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723) was astronomer, mathematician, and physicist before he became England’s most celebrated Baroque builder. After the 1666 Great Fire he was tasked with rebuilding fifty-two City churches, crowned by St Paul’s Cathedral on Ludgate Hill, finished in 1710.
Born at East Knoyle in Wiltshire to rector Christopher Wren the Elder and Mary Cox, he was a frail child who nonetheless reached vigorous old age. Home tutoring and years around Windsor after his father became Dean in 1635 shaped him; by 1650 he entered Wadham College, Oxford, studying Latin and Aristotle while joining the experimental circle around John Wilkins that later seeded the Royal Society.
An M.A. and All Souls fellowship in 1653 led to astronomy chairs at Gresham College (1657) and Oxford’s Savilian post (1661). Weekly Gresham talks in 1660 helped crystallize the group that received a royal charter as the Royal Society; Wren later served as its president from 1680 to 1682. Isaac Newton and Blaise Pascal admired his science, which ranged from optics and longitude to microscopy and meteorology.
Appointed Surveyor of Works to Charles II in 1669 and knighted in 1673, he also sat in Parliament and designed beyond churches—the Royal Hospital Chelsea, Greenwich’s Old Royal Naval College, and Hampton Court’s south front. Historians now credit colleagues such as Nicholas Hawksmoor with much creative work on several City churches. A 1665 Paris study trip, including Bernini’s drawings, informed his first St Paul’s scheme just before the fire remade the capital.
Marriage to Faith Coghill in 1669 produced two sons; after her 1675 smallpox death he wed Jane Fitzwilliam. The younger Christopher supervised St Paul’s topping-out in 1710 and compiled the family memoir Parentalia. Wren’s career fused laboratory curiosity with brick-and-stone power, turning experimental London into a rebuilt skyline.
Source: Christopher Wren
