53 years ago, a Wren masterpiece was replaced with a glorified roundabout. We must not make the same mistake again

Listeners to radio stations in the 1980s will remember the endless reports of traffic delays at various city-centre ‘gyratories’. These were the post-war one-way inner ring-roads and roundabouts that were carved out of old towns, supposedly to ease traffic flow, but which often caused even greater congestion.

One such roundabout ‘gyratory’ was created immediately to the north of St Paul’s Cathedral by the Corporation of the City of London in 1973. To streamline the road alignments, the corporation brazenly pulled down the eastern end of Wren’s great church of Christ Church Newgate Street; a masterpiece of Portland stone completed in 1704 on the site of the Greyfriars monastery lost in the Fire of London of 1666. Wren’s church had been left as a burnt-out shell following Second World War fire-bombing.

The four thick walls of the ruined building enclosed a space that could have been made into a garden. It would have offered a sense of tranquillity that might have partly compensated for the loss of the Wren interior. Although the site beyond the church was awaiting redevelopment and could have accommodated the gyratory road, Wren’s eastern and southern walls were pulled down, leaving yet another formless wasted space.

The corporation quite properly became ashamed of its actions and, in 2001, persuaded the owners of the neighbouring banks to pay for a new garden to be made. The plan was for this to be contained by the surviving old church walls and a new low wall made out of substantial Portland Stone blocks, which marked the line of the lost church east and south walls. This made better sense of the ruined church, although many would have preferred to have seen Wren’s walls remade fully to their original heights. However, as the road ‘gyratory’ remained in use, the street pavement needed to pass through the former ruins.

Now, the City Corporation has decided to fully pedestrianise King Edward Street, removing the gyratory road once and for all.

This should be a matter of jubilation, of common sense prevailing in the end. Yet, rather than rebuilding the Wren walls to their full height, to restore the lost form of the building, the scheme proposes to remove the restored walls of 2001, so the church can be returned to its mutilated and incomplete 1970s form.

The old walls will be outlined in paving in a new garden plan that otherwise ignores historic boundaries and enclosures. The justification is the belief that ‘greening the City’, laudable as it is, must have priority over all other concerns.

Although grass is certainly kinder than cars, the corporation is showing the same insensitivity that it has long shown towards its remarkable legacy of Wren churches, the fate of which is always considered a secondary consideration to whatever is the fashionable concern of the day.