Most of Wren’s City churches rose from the ashes of 1666 as exercises in the English Baroque, their steeples and Portland stone façades declaring a clean break with the medieval past. St Mary Aldermary, on Watling Street, did not follow that pattern. Its chief benefactor, Henry Rogers, attached a condition to his gift that must have given Wren pause: the rebuilt church was to follow the Gothic form of its predecessor. For an architect then engaged in reshaping the City’s skyline along quite different lines, this was an awkward brief. What emerged is one of the stranger episodes in London church architecture, a neo-Gothic church raised during the dominant Baroque era.
The plaster fan vault over the nave is the element that draws the eye and raises the most questions. It borrows openly from the late Perpendicular tradition seen at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, or the Divinity School at Oxford, yet it is executed in plaster on a timber frame rather than in stone. Whether Wren regarded this as a pragmatic shortcut or a deliberate reinterpretation is difficult to say. Kerry Downes has noted the ambiguity of Wren’s relationship to Gothic forms, suggesting that Wren understood the structural logic of medieval vaulting well enough to translate it into cheaper materials without losing its visual coherence (Downes, 1988, pp. 58–59). The vault is not, then, a copy. It is something closer to a paraphrase, and a rather confident one. Does it succeed as Gothic architecture, or does it succeed precisely because it does not try too hard?
The interior holds further interest beyond the ceiling. The pulpit, dated 1682 and attributed to Grinling Gibbons, is densely carved with naturalistic fruit and foliage in the manner associated with Gibbons’s documented work, though firm documentary proof of his hand here has been questioned (Esterly, 1998, p. 178). Other fittings arrived from demolished City churches, a common pattern of liturgical salvage in the post-Fire decades. The west doorcase came from St Antholin, Watling Street, pulled down in 1875, and the organ, built by George England in 1781, was installed from elsewhere at a later date. The cumulative effect is of a church assembled over time from multiple sources, each addition carrying its own history into the building.
By the nineteenth century, when the Gothic Revival had become an ideological cause under figures such as Augustus Welby Pugin and George Gilbert Scott, St Mary Aldermary attracted fresh attention as an anomaly within Wren’s output. For those seeking to argue that Gothic taste had never been fully abandoned in England, even during the decades of Baroque dominance, this church offered useful evidence. John Summerson placed it within a broader pattern of what he termed ‘Gothic survival,’ distinguishing it from later, more self-conscious 19th century Victorian revivalism (Summerson, 1993, p. 197).
References
Downes, K. (1988) The Architecture of Wren. 2nd edn. Reading: Redhedge
Esterly, D. (1998) Grinling Gibbons and the Art of Carving. London: V&A Publications
Jeffery, P. (1996) The City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren. London: Hambledon Press
Summerson, J. (1993) Architecture in Britain 1530–1830. 9th edn. New Haven and London: Yale University Press