When London Rose from the Ashes
In the summer of 1666, the Great Fire of London raged for three days and burnt down the homes of nearly 90% of the city’s half million residents. No one knows how many people perished in the inferno.
The astronomer Christopher Wren helped survey the wreckage. He and his colleagues mapped 13,200 destroyed houses, the loss of most municipal buildings and the gutting of St. Paul’s Cathedral and 73 parish churches.
Wren, who had previously dabbled in architecture, devoted the rest of his life to redesigning and directing the rebuilding of the cathedral and 52 of the razed churches. Ultimately, he won acclaim as one of England’s greatest and most prolific architects.
Born today in 1632, Wren was a sickly child. Several of his siblings died in infancy, but he survived. At age 10, the English Civil War broke out, forcing his family to lay low due to their unfashionable political and religious loyalties. During Cromwell’s reign of terror, Wren quietly applied himself to his studies and eventually became a professor of astronomy.
After the Restoration, Wren reaped the rewards of his family’s Royalist and Anglican allegiances. He and his colleagues…
