From Wren’s wide boulevards to Newcourt’s uniform grids, a new exhibition reveals the alternative plans to rebuild London after it was destroyed

‘Wide boulevards and grand civic spaces’: Christopher Wren’s plan to rebuild London... “I think Wren’s is the most practical and interesting of all the plans,” says Charles Hind, Riba’s chief curator. “But personally I’m glad his scheme didn’t get built"
‘Wide boulevards and grand civic spaces’: Christopher Wren’s plan to rebuild London... “I think Wren’s is the most practical and interesting of all the plans,” says Charles Hind, Riba’s chief curator. “But personally I’m glad his scheme didn’t get built" - Charles II admired Wren’s design, and made him one of six commissioners appointed to oversee rebuilding work. But unlike in Lisbon, where the Portuguese king ordered a completely new city after the earthquake of 1755, Charles would not get the chance to give Wren a blank canvas. Property owners soon asserted their rights and began building again on plots along the lines of the previous medieval street pattern. There was no appetite (and because of war with the Dutch, no money) to get involved in legal battles with London’s wealthy merchants and aldermen. The king insisted only that the old roads be slightly widened and building standards improved. In February 1667, a Fire Court began sorting out remaining disputes, and the Rebuilding Act was passed to regulate the heights of new buildings (no more than four storeys) and the kinds of materials used (timber exteriors were banned, for obvious reasons). “I think Wren’s is the most practical and interesting of all the plans,” says Charles Hind, Riba’s chief curator. “But personally I’m glad his scheme didn’t get built. I think it would have still been essentially un-English to masterplan on that scale. I rather like the higgledy-piggledy, piecemeal nature of London’s development over the centuries.” © RIBA

The great architect Sir Christopher Wren imagined a reconstructed capital full of wide boulevards and grand civic spaces, a city that would rival Paris for Baroque magnificence. Others dreamed of a rational, navigable city – London nailed down to a precise, uniform grid. And some conjured up a city of church bells, chiming in tower after tower, square after square.

This series of forgotten visions, masterplans for London produced in the aftermath of the great fire, form part of a new a new exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects: Creation from Catastrophe – How Architecture Rebuilds Communities. Although none of the designs came to pass in the last decades of the 17th century, the five original post-fire plans offer fascinating glimpses of what might have been if London had been set free of its medieval street pattern.

‘Well-respected in royal circles’: scientist Robert Hooke’s plan.
‘Well-respected in royal circles’: scientist Robert Hooke’s plan. - Other intriguing masterplans came from draughtsman Richard Newcourt, scientist Robert Hooke, and Valentine Knight, an army officer who reputedly fought for the royalists in the English civil war. The king hadn’t actually asked for more ideas, but they submitted them anyway. These designs were all variations on a grid system that later became prevalent in the development of cities in the United States. Newcourt’s eerily repetitive plan featured rigid rows of church squares within rectangular plots – a scheme that would influence the lay-out of Philadelphia in the 1680s. “What’s so strange and lovely about that particular plan is that it’s so anti-capitalist, in a way,” says Fernie. “All of the others recognise London as a trading entity, based around trading centres. But this plan only outlines for churches, as if to say, ‘all we need is God’.” Hooke was a polymath and well-respected figure in royal circles, and although his plan was put to one side, he was given a role surveying London’s streets as they were widened. He later worked with Wren designing the Monument to the Great Fire of London (finished in 1677), which stands near London Bridge. © London Metropolitan Archives, City of London