Of the many lectures, guided walks, church services, concerts and exhibitions that are planned, probably of most interest to readers of this Magazine are two conferences. The first, organised by the Georgian Group on 15th April at Trinity College, Oxford – just across the road from the Sheldonian Theatre – will focus on Wren’s late work, between 1690 and 1723, and his posthumous reputation and influence. The Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture at the University of Cambridge has organised ‘The Professional World of Sir Christopher Wren’ at Downing College, Cambridge, on 29th September, at which speakers will discuss Wren’s work in his official positions, most notably as head of the Office of Works. Of all the events, the one that Wren would probably most have enjoyed is ‘Building a Dome in a Day’, at St Sepulchre, Holborn, on 14th March, in which sixth-form pupils from schools in the diocese of London, supervised by engineers and architects, will attempt to build a four-and-a half-metre-high dome that will recreate the tripleskin construction of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. 

As is well known, Wren turned to architecture in the early 1660s only after he had established a considerable reputation across a range of other fields, including mechanics, applied mathematics, astronomy, anatomy and natural sciences. In 1657, aged only twenty-four, he was appointed Professor of Astronomy at Gresham’s College in the City of London. As its contribution to Wren 300, the college is staging a series of lectures that address Wren’s many interests, beginning on 22nd February with ‘Christopher Wren’s Cosmos’, delivered by its Professor of Astronomy, Katherine Blundell, who is also Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford. The Gresham lectures reflect the lively current academic interest in Wren’s place in European intellectual and social life, as demonstrated, for example, by Matthew Walker’s book Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England (2017).[1] There is also great interest in the way he collaborated with other architects and designers, most notably his assistant in the Office of Works, Nicholas Hawksmoor, a subject on which much illumination was cast by Anthony Geraghty’s catalogue of the collection of the Wren office drawings at All Souls College, Oxford, published in 2007.[2] 

It is possible that the contemporary emphasis on Wren as networker and collaborator is a response to the long period, culminating in the bicentenary celebrations of 1923, in which he was seen as an isolated genius who embodied a distinctively English and Protestant sensibility. Although his fame did not fade after his death, largely thanks to the prominence of St Paul’s Cathedral in national life, it was not until the 1870s that his works began to be a source of inspiration for contemporary architects. The undemonstrative brick Classicism of such works as Chelsea Hospital was a key source for the Queen Anne Movement, but, more significantly, Wren’s monumental works – notably Greenwich Hospital as well as St Paul’s – helped shape the English Baroque revival that Edwin Lutyens famously dubbed the ‘Wrenaissance’. This quickly became the preferred style for public buildings throughout Britain, Ireland and the British Empire, from A. Brumwell Thomas’s Belfast City Hall (1898–1906) to Herbert Baker’s Union Buildings, Pretoria (1910–13), to name two designs inconceivable without Wren’s example. Understanding of his relationship to this ‘Imperial Baroque’ style is greatly enhanced by G.A. Bremner’s book Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edwardian Baroque Revival c.1885–1920, published last year by the Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press, which will be reviewed in a future issue of this Magazine. 

The polarisation between on the one hand Wren the individual genius, whose achievement is freighted with nationalist and religious significance, and on the other a Wren deeply embedded in European architectural practice and intellectual life is of course a radical simplification. Waterhouse acknowledged Wren’s ‘excellence in universal knowledge’ (‘praestantia eius in scientia universali’) and in his catalogue Geraghty emphasised that despite Wren’s skill in delegation he always remained in charge of a design. Even the idea that he embodied Englishness to a unique degree is not easily dismissed, while allowing for the fact that Englishness is an elusive concept. It is hard to think of an architect who occupies an equivalent place in the cultural identity of a nation. Wren is the one English architect who most people can instantly name, largely thanks to St Paul’s, although the best-known clerihew in the language may help. He is famous not solely because of the quality of his buildings but because they still appear to be a summation of English public life as traditionally understood – in its religion (the cathedral and the City churches), constitutional monarchy (Hampton Court), armed forces (Greenwich and Chelsea hospitals) and educational system (the Sheldonian Theatre and the library of Trinity College, Cambridge). 

To take only such contemporaries of Wren as Gianlorenzo Bernini, François Mansart or Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, all were the most prominent architects of the age in their own countries but none would now be held to embody Italian, French or Swedish identity. Global fame is not enough – even Frank Lloyd Wright personifies only aspects of the culture of the United States. Of the great architects who have played a significant role in shaping the national image of their countries or regions, such as Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Prussia or Jože Plečnik in Slovenia, perhaps only Antoni Gaudí in Catalonia possesses the instant recognisability of Wren. It is neither a good nor a bad thing that Wren occupies such an apparently unique place in a country’s understanding of itself, but it suggests that his reputation may be shaped in the future even more than it has been already by challenges to that understanding.