Creating creative people 

AFRICAN MIRROR 12

“Sir Christopher Wren,” runs a famous quatrain, “went out to dine with some men. He said: ‘If anyone calls, tell them I am designing St Paul’s.’ ” The light quotation is not inapt: our subject is Wren, and surely Wren’s preoccupation was St Paul’s? But, in fact, it was not. The greatness of his masterpiece has almost buried the greatness that came before it. By St Paul’s he proclaimed himself a genius, but he was already a genius: his feats in astronomy, mathematics, medicine, were overshadowed by his skill as a builder and his magnificent conception as an architect, and it is well to remember that almost in the shadow of St Paul’s lie sixty other churches that are monuments to the genius of Wren.

To talk of young Christopher Wren as having talents is to call Everest a steep hill, to class leviathan as a big fish.

From Westminster young Wren went to Oxford, where he made a brilliant reputation for himself as a mathematician and astronomer. In 1653, at the age of twenty-one, he became a fellow of All Souls, at twenty-four he was professor of astronomy at Gresham College, and five years later was appointed Savillian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. The value of his geographical work was acknowledged by Newton in his Principia, while his research work in connection with the barometer and in the fields of anatomy and medicine was equally remarkable. Then, at the age of thirty, this genius turned his attention to architecture and became the greatest practical builder we have ever known.

The success of Wren’s early career - or rather the success of his several early careers - is made all the more marked by the fact recorded of him that he was unusually modest, with nothing of the opportunist in his nature.

The chance that the Great Fire of London gave to Wren was no less magnificent because it was tragic. It remains that the new surveyor was asked to plan a new capital of England - a new London.

Wren’s plans for the city can still be seen, but they were never carried out. We can see the glory that might have been, the London that would have been the eighth wonder of the world.