INTRODUCTION The Fire and the Coal Tax
THIS book is about the London Baroque churches built in the sixty years after the Great Fire of 1666, when the City of London was almost totally destroyed. The losses included St Paul’s Cathedral and eighty- seven parish churches, as well as many important secular buildings. The catastrophe provided an opportunity for Christopher Wren and his colleagues, notably Robert Hooke, to create a new style of church architecture inspired by the Baroque churches of Rome, Paris and the Netherlands. Most books on Wren’s City churches are just that – they deal with those built by Wren within the City of London,1
often
leaving out St Paul’s Cathedral, his masterpiece. This approach also ignores the continuity between Wren’s churches and those built in the second wave of Baroque church construction during the reign of Queen Anne, the so-called Fifty New Churches (of which only twelve were built). Although Wren did not design any of these, he was one of the Commissioners responsible for the programme, and six were built by his brilliant pupil Nicholas Hawksmoor in his own highly individual Baroque style.
Besides the stylistic continuity, another reason for considering these churches together is the fact that they were all funded by the Coal Tax. In 1667, within months of the Fire, Parliament passed the Rebuilding Act, which authorized a tax to be levied on all coal arriving in the City of London1
. The coal
unloaded here was not only for Londoners, it also provided much of the fuel used in the Thames estuary; which meant there was a large tax base. In 1670, three-quarters of the Coal
The window dedicated to St Paul, the City’s patron saint, shows him leaning on a sword, symbol of the City of London. To disguise the irregularity of the site, Wren has placed the window off-centre within the opening, which has the optical effect of making the end wall seem much thicker than it really is.
Tax revenue was allocated to rebuilding the parish churches and St Paul’s. It also provided money for the Monument to the Fire of London. In 1711 another Act of Parliament extended the tax to pay for the Fifty New Churches. Three years later the Hanoverians succeeded to the throne; George I and his Whig supporters were less enthusiastic about church building, so the Coal Tax was not extended beyond the 1720s. This coincided with a change in taste which saw Wren and
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Hawksmoor’s Baroque replaced by the new Palladianism of Lord Burlington and William Kent, and such churches as were built were in a more restrained and sober style. But before the Coal Tax money came to an end it had provided most of the funding for London’s Baroque churches. 1
The City of London refers to the historic area, occupying about a square mile, based on the old Roman city of Londinium, most of which was destroyed in the Great Fire. The City of London is only a small part of the much larger area referred to as London.
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