London, 1710.
The city is reaching for the heavens.
More than fifty steeples point towards the sky, raised arms above the dark, narrow streets whose dwellings are so low they appear to be at prayer. From the Thames-side terrace at Somerset House, there is a breath-taking sight – the architectural clutter of later centuries is not yet upon us. Lead and stone, cupolas and towers, crosses and columns stand exuberant against the sky. There is, perhaps, a gentle breeze, carrying with it the smell of sea-coal from the north of England which the bargemen are unloading on the river.
Downriver lie the two domes of Greenwich Hospital, identical twins along the water’s edge, each with a supporting army of columns. To the east, in Cheapside, more than two hundred and twenty feet up, a bronze weathervane in the form of a dragon swings gently in the wind. Below it stands the pencil-slim elegance of St Mary-le-Bow. As the church rises beyond its square tower it narrows sharply: a temple of simple columns yields to a balustrade, above which, tapering together like fingers, a dozen stone bows are gathered. The church soars skyward, ever slimmer, until the steeple touches the dragon’s feet. For the elegance of its buildings, and above all for this, the most beautiful of his creations, the city gives thanks to the genius of Christopher Wren, whose brilliance has led him down a path of magnificent architectural variety in the rebuilding programme he has inspired since the Great Fire. He is a mathematician first and foremost, but over the years he has trained himself as an architect, absorbing style and simplicity from France, Italy and Holland, but showing a uniform adherence to the influence of no one but himself.
No sooner has he completed St Bride’s in Fleet Street with an octagonal stairway, four steps high, than he tops Christ Church in Newgate with a square one; to St Magnus Martyr he gives an octagonal tower, and to St Vedast in Foster Lane a concave crown; most dramatically, he allows St Martin to rise above Ludgate with an octagonal tower topped by the longest, slimmest steeple of them all: a black lance to pierce the sky.
But its sharpness on the eye is blunted by the great grey shield of St Paul’s Cathedral which curves towards the clouds. As yet unfinished, its incompleteness serves only to emphasise human frailty and humility which its eventual perfection will deny, sealing off the worshippers, separating them from direct contact with God. The church roof is open to the elements and inside workmen are still perched on scaffolding in the chancel, making mouldings above the vaulting. In a large hut, sculptors are at work on statues which will stand in the space before the church – Queen Anne in white marble on a black pedestal, and round her the kingdoms of her domain. Sir Christopher himself can be seen, clambering into a basket to be hauled skywards to inspect the progress of this monument to his brilliance, an ascent he makes three or four times a week. It is his lifetime’s work. From start to finish, he has overseen his cathedral’s rise from the ashes of the city.
The dome to which he is travelling has an inner and an outer part, constructed like two layers of an onion skin so that if Wren was somehow able to peel away the outer covering, a cupola would still remain, resting on eight piers whose arches form the Whispering Gallery where the dropping of the lightest coin of the realm can be heard more than a hundred feet away. And it might be appropriate on this day, as Big Tom strikes the hour in the cathedral tower, if a coin was dropped in this temple, if the outer skin of the roof was peeled away, to reveal the true object of England’s worship. Not St Paul, carved above the central pediment and the great oak doors, nor God himself, but money.
For below Wren’s feet, among the busy maze of streets where some of the capital’s thousand hackney carriages and chairs jolt past, the early signs of financial madness can be detected. This is the kingdom of the ‘moneyed-men’, the stockjobbers who buy and sell their shares in the coffee houses, which are the heart of London’s new financial district, where not just coffee but tea, chocolate, sherbert, sherry and pale ale are consumed and where news spreads as quickly as the Great Fire itself.
Coffee houses are the most popular public places in London: there are more than two thousand of them, the preserve of men who wish to while away the hours free of the opposite sex. Inside, there are long tables and benches, a roaring fire in the hearth, lines of clay pipes and newspapers spread out to read. There is a warm, secure fug of smoke, and drink, and chatter. It is a male club, where the species can protect its own and ignore the world outside, especially the despairing women who once campaigned ‘against coffee and The Grand Inconveniences to their Sex from the Excessive Use of that enfeebling Liquor’.
The terrain of the moneyed-men, marked out by the coffee houses, is small but profitable, a series of narrow passageways called Exchange Alley, which lie within the maze of narrow streets captured at the intersection of Cornhill and Lombard Street. A minute and a half is all it takes to walk through this lively, noisy financial centre, hemmed in on each side by tradesmen and barbers, lawyers and insurance clerks. On the second floor of Wren’s favourite coffee house, Gangway’s, there is a sale room where the jobbers ply their trade from a rostrum between the hours of eleven and three. Nearby, just down the street, is an upstart bank, grown lean and sharp from the days when it was an import company bringing in the Huguenot steel, which was favoured by swordsmen over its English rival. The bank has expanded through land speculation in Ireland and stands on the brink of power, aiming now to cut down its two rivals, the young Bank of England and the East India Company. In this respect, its name does not disguise its intentions. It is the Sword Blade Bank.
The buying of stocks and shares in Exchange Alley is, as yet, in its infancy. The trade was carried out previously in the Royal Exchange, a stockjobber’s shout away on the other side of Cornhill, but this discomfited the traders in the country’s more conventional merchandise, such as their largest export, wool. So the broken moved to ’Change Alley, as it is known, taking with them their ceaseless noise. Here, the practitioners are already versed in the notion of buying and selling more than they can afford. It is the fashionable new form of gambling. There is a growing sense that shares will go ever upward, like one of Wren’s perfectly balanced spires.
The dealers are raucous and seedy, unscrupulous and rough. Their aim, in the saying of the day, is ‘to sell the bear’s skin before they have caught the bear’: they are selling stock before they have paid for it in the hope that they will be able to meet the cost from the profit – or ‘bubble’ – on the deal. One anonymous observer on a journey through England in the year 1710 watches the moneyed-men of’ Change Alley at work, and reports on the scene to a friend abroad in a series of letters; in one, he comments: ‘You will see fellows, in shabby clothes, selling ten or twelve thousand pounds in stock, though perhaps he mayn’t be worth at the same time ten shillings, and with as much zeal as if he were a director, which they call selling a Bear’s-Skin; and these men find Bubble enough to get bread by it, as the others do by gaming; and some few of them manage it so as to get pretty large estates.’
So the city-dwellers go about their money-making schemes, heads down and voices loud, and ignore Wren’s masterpiece as if it has no connection with their lives. And the truth is that it has little: the cathedral belongs to a world which they do not inhabit; it is a beautiful object of refinement and contemplation in the midst of the daily dirty struggle to survive: to earn enough to eat, drink and keep clean. As they walk, London’s citizens keep close to the walls of buildings, fearful of the water which cascades out of crude spouts from each roof; more fearful still of the sewage pumped into the gutters of the street when the houses’ wells are full.
The pavements are crammed with stalls, sheds and signposts; where they end and the road begins is hard to tell: there are no kerbstones to separate the path from the carriageway, although on the wider streets there is a line of posts and chains or wooden palings. The wide expanse of Tottenham Court Road, stretching north, has been paved for only a few years. London is not all that Wren would wish. ‘Natural beauty is from geometry,’ he has declared, ‘consisting in Uniformity and Proportion. Always the true Test is natural