London churches
Sir Christopher Wren was responsible for most of them. Because these were parish churches for lay worship, and therefore had a practical use, he was able to use some of the more radical ideas that had been rejected for his design of St Paul's Cathedral.
'The exteriors were kept quite plain, except for their famous spires.'
Almost all the new churches had an auditory plan with a tiny chancel, or indeed none at all. There was no screen, and galleries on three sides. The ceilings were flat to improve the acoustics during the sermon. The exteriors were kept quite plain, except for their famous spires. These clearly marked them as Anglican churches, not Nonconformist chapels.
Wren's London churches are often compared to Roman basilicas, but there is another parallel closer to home - English Perpendicular glass-box churches. St Bride's Fleet Street is a good example of this. By the 15th century, St Bride's had developed into a fully aisled rectangle with a west tower.
Wren's rebuild incorporated a virtually identical ground plan. Inside, though, the space for the laity in the nave was extended eastwards into the space once occupied by the long chancel. The barrier between nave and chancel, people and priest had gone.
At St Martin-in-the-Fields (rebuilt between 1722 and 1726), James Gibbs took a slightly different approach to the same problem. Inside the effect was much the same as in Wren's churches, with aisles, galleries, a large pulpit and a shallow niche for the altar. But instead of a gigantic nave, Gibbs designed a huge choir. The tall portico with the royal coat of arms in its pediment can be read as a choir screen separating the nave/world from the choir/interior.
The steeple above the west end of the nave represents the central tower over the crossing. The impact of the building is diminished now that it has been encroached upon by Trafalgar Square, but it still makes a very strong statement about the 18th-century ties between Church and state.
Published: 2005-02-07
