After the Great Fire: 'London Rising'
When rebuilding finally began on St. Paul's Cathedral, nine years after the Great Fire of 1666, Christopher Wren and his masons found an auspicious item amid the rubble of the site. It was a fragment of a gravestone which bore the Latin word Resurgam: "I will rise again." The reconstruction of the church would take 33 years and consume most of Wren's prodigious energies. But when the new St. Paul's was inaugurated, on October 26, 1708, that stone, surmounted by the image of a phoenix surging from the fire, stood proudly in the south transept. A conventional epitaph from a forgotten grave had become a triumphal proclamation.
Museum of London / Bridgeman Art Library
ABLAZE A view of the Great Fire from across the Thames.
The phoenix was perhaps not the most accurate emblem of that long resurrection. As Leo Hollis shows in "London Rising: The Men Who Made Modern London" (Walker & Company, 400 pages, $27.99), the cathedral — and the city of London itself — didn't spring from the ashes: They had to be slowly and stubbornly dragged toward rebirth. This isn't surprising; the real wonder is that London rose again at all. The Great Fire was but the last and the most spectacular of the catastrophes and upheavals which beset Britain for much of the 17th century. The civil war of the 1640s, culminating in the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, was followed by the grim Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell; and on the heels of the Restoration, a horrific outbreak of plague devastated London, claiming 100,000 victims in a single year. By the time it ended, as Mr. Hollis notes, there was "no one left to toll the dead." After the plague came drought and the wooden buildings of London turned dry as tinder, as though primed for the flames.
The Great Fire that razed London razed old assumptions, too. So fierce was the heat of the flames that, according to one contemporary account, "the beer boiled in the barrels" at docksides, but new ideas, new ways of seeing, were kindled as well. These ranged from simple expedients, such as building with brick and stone instead of wood, to rational methods of urban planning and street design, pioneered by the great scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703) and by John Evelyn (1620-1706), a polymath of astonishing versatility. It was a time of unparalleled opportunity for architects, of course, foremost among them Christopher Wren, and later, his brilliant disciple Nicholas Hawksmoor. Hooke, an early wizard of the microscope (and a rival of Isaac Newton in the effort to understand gravitation), proved equally innovative and influential as an architect. In most fields of endeavor, the fire had left London something of a "blank slate" — the phrase is John Locke's (1632-1704). Locke used it to describe the human mind, formed not by "innate ideas," but by reason and experience, and the rebuilding of London was a rebuilding of a city of the mind as well. As Mr. Hollis shows, Locke was its most determined architect.
These four men of genius — Wren, Locke, Evelyn, and Hooke — played decisive roles in shaping the new London. Mr. Hollis is quite nimble in following their parallel careers, at once contrasting and intertwined. His account of Locke's philosophical achievement is superficial, but he's very good on the philosopher's radical, and often seditious, political thought (Locke was more than once forced into hiding in Holland to escape the king's agents). Mr. Hollis has a special affection for the great Hooke, so often typecast as the scientific Salieri to Isaac Newton's Mozart, and he takes pains to show how fundamental were Hooke's many contributions, both to physics and astronomy, as well as to London's startling urban transformation. At the same time, it's a bit surprising that Newton himself, the most remarkable intellect of the age, hardly figures in Mr. Hollis's narrative apart from a passing mention of his quite ignoble treatment of Hooke.
Wren dominates "London Rising," and rightly so. Wren began his career as professor of astronomy at Oxford; he was entranced by the purity of geometrical figures which he had observed in the heavens and later tried to replicate in the structures he designed. He possessed what might be called a crystalline mind, open to what Locke described as "the irresistible light of self-evidence." From the glass beehive which he constructed at Oxford in his youth (and which later came into Evelyn's proud possession) to the great transparent dome which crowns St. Paul's and seems to float upon it, Wren built as much with light itself as with stone. "Reader, if you seek his monument, look about you," ran the epitaph which his son composed. That monument lay not only in the buildings which Wren and his contemporaries brought out of the ashes. The true monument lay in unencumbered vision.
eormsby@nysun.com
