The Wren Office drawings

Written by the architectural historian Dr Gordon Higgott, this online catalogue of 226 drawings by Sir Christopher Wren and his office in the Cathedral’s collections, held at London Metropolitan Archives and at St Paul’s, has been generously sponsored by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Friends of St Paul's Cathedral, the Pilgrim Trust, the Delmas Foundation, the Headley Trust, the Marc Fitch Fund and the D’Oyly Carte Charitable Trust.

The St Paul’s Collection of Wren Office drawings is unrivalled as a record of the design and construction of a single great building by one architect in the early modern era. Consisting of 217 drawings for St Paul’s dating between 1673 and 1752 (nine others, catalogued in the final section, are unconnected with the building), the Collection was originally part of a much larger corpus. This included 67 drawings now in the Wren Collection at All Souls College, Oxford, and a single plan at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. The whole corpus is only a fraction of what must originally have existed, for it contains very few executed designs and just one full-sized profile for construction, although hundreds – if not thousands – of such drawings must have been made.

It used to be thought that Wren finalised the whole design up to the roofline of the Cathedral before work began on the foundations in June 1675, but recent research on the activities of Wren’s draughtsmen in relation to the main phases of construction has established that he revised the design stage by stage as work moved from one part of the building to the next.

In the first phase, up to 1685, Wren planned the Cathedral with equal-length nave and choir arms and single-storey aisle walls. Soon after the accession of James II in 1685, when the Cathedral’s funding was increased, he enlarged the west end and added upper aisle walls (known as ‘screen walls’) to create an all-round two-storey elevation beneath a more richly modelled dome, wider and higher than the one he had designed at the start of work. The ‘Revised design’ of c.1685–87 (as it is now known) was partly inspired by what Wren then knew, from drawings and engravings, of Jules Hardouin-Mansart’s domed church of Les Invalides in Paris, begun in 1677.