Join us for another seminar in our series co-supported by the Institute of Historical Research and organised in collaboration with the Oxford Architectural History Seminar. For more information on the series click here. Mark Kirby discusses Wren's furnishings in the City Churches.
Sir Christopher Wren’s office built fifty-one new churches in London and Westminster in the late-seventeenth century. Most of these were then furnished by the parishes themselves, using craftsmen of their own choosing, and their interiors range from the modest to the grandiose. Five parishes managed to secure Wren’s services to design their furnishings as well as their church buildings. Three of these were among the most affluent and well-connected parishes in London, and ironically the other two were the very poorest. Wren created an elite group of churches where building and furnishings were created together and were complementary to each other. This paper looks at these examples and asks what they can tell us about Wren’s own churchmanship and about the emergence of the modern architect’s practice. The son of the Dean of Windsor and nephew of a Laudian bishop, Wren is frequently asserted to be a High Churchman himself. Do these five churches bear that out? How, in the late-seventeenth century, did architects and their clients engage with each other in producing buildings? This paper will address those questions.
Dr Mark Kirby is Child Shuffrey Fellow in Architectural History at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is currently researching the architectural history of the College’s Chapel (1629-31), for publication in 2023 as part of the College’s sexcentenary celebrations. His PhD thesis at the University of York examined the furnishings of Sir Christopher Wren’s London churches and the way in which the recently re-established Church of England used them to assert its ecclesial identity.
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