St Clement Danes Church, The Strand, London
No one knows for certain whether the Danes buried in this parish were warriors, settlers, or something in between. The name itself, St Clement Danes, carries a story that resists easy verification: that ninth-century Danish converts, newly Christian and perhaps still close to the river trades that had brought them to London, chose to dedicate their church to St Clement, a saint long claimed by seafarers. It is a plausible tradition, but tradition is all it is. Later centuries attributed a rebuilding to William the Conqueror, though almost nothing of that fabric survived into the modern period. By the 1680s the medieval church was failing, and in 1682 the commission passed to Christopher Wren.
What Wren built here belongs to a type he had been refining since the Great Fire of 1666. The rectangular nave, geometrically plain, dispensed with the extended chancels and subdivided spaces of the medieval plan. Tall, round-headed windows filled the interior with daylight. The classical vocabulary was restrained, even understated. Wren used the same essential model at St James’s Piccadilly and St Mary-le-Bow, and the logic behind it was as much theological as architectural: after the Reformation, the Anglican service demanded visibility, audibility, and equal weight given to sermon and sacrament. The building had to serve the ear as much as the eye.
Where St Clement Danes departs from the type is in what came after Wren. In 1719 James Gibbs added a west tower that gave the church a vertical emphasis few of Wren’s parish buildings possess. The effect is closer to the steepled skyline of medieval London than to the horizontal calm Wren generally preferred, yet Gibbs worked entirely within classical forms. Whether this was deference to Wren or simply the discipline of the site is worth asking.
References
Historic England (n.d.) ‘Church of St Clement Danes’, list entry no. 1237099, Grade I. Available at: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1237099 (Accessed: 18 June 2023).
Jeffery, P. (1996) The City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren. London: Hambledon Press
Weinreb, B. and Hibbert, C. (eds.) (2008) The London Encyclopaedia. 3rd edn. London: Macmillan