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The church that never was: Wren’s St Mary, and other projects for Lincoln’s Inn Fields

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Paul Jeffery
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Extract

Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Lincoln’s Inn Fields remained one of the largest open sites in central London. It was rectangular, approximately 650 by 450 ft, although sometimes referred to as ‘The Great Square’. To church architects of those years it seemingly offered the opportunity of designing a truly impressive building, one that could be seen with advantage from all sides. Few such sites were available. It is therefore not surprising that there were many proposals to use the site for this purpose.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 31 , 1988 , pp. 136 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1988

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References

1 Cup field, Purse field and Ficketts field, although most of the latter lay to the south of what is now known as Lincoln’s Inn Fields. For a short history of the Fields see Survey of London, III, St Giles-in-the-Fields, part I (1912), 19-21. For an outline of how the Society came to control building in the Fields, see Park, J. A. in St Giles-in-the-Fields Vestry Minutes, 1770-1840, pp. 320-21, Holborn Public Library.Google Scholar

2 Records of Lincoln’s Inn, Admissions I, 1420-1799, p. 321.Google Scholar

3 Black Books of Lincoln’s Inn, 1660-1775, 3 (l899). p. xxi.Google Scholar

4 House, Powis, later Newcastle House, was built on the site of Carlisle House, destroyed by fire in October 1684. Calendar of Treasury Books, x, p. 220.Google Scholar

5 S. Serlio, The Five Books of Architecture, book 2, fols. 5, 6; book 4, fol. 55 (English edition 1611).

6 SirJohn Soane’s, Museum, ‘Brettingham Volume’, 9. 37. p. 46.Google Scholar

7 Matthew Brettingham was one of four architects (with Adam, Paine and Taylor) who, in 1771, were invited to submit plans for rebuilding old Lincoln’s Inn (Black Books of Lincoln’s Inn, 1660–1775, 3, 407). The submitted plans, originally in the library of the Inn, are now lost ( Colvin, H., Dictionary, p. 138 Google Scholar), but a group of five drawings in the Brettingham volume may be preliminary drawings for it. The five-bay building illustrated, here as Fig. 4, would have been the centre block of a larger building.

This general design, seen as deriving, in facade at least, directly from Wren’s St Mary, is a recurrent theme in the architecture of Lincoln’s Inn. The drawings of Robert Adam, also in the Sir John Soane’s Museum, show it as a west-facing central feature of his projected plans ( Bolton, A. T., Arch. Review, June 1917, pp. 111–15Google Scholar), Sir Robert Taylor’s construction of the Stone Buildings of 1774–89 show it without the dome as a pavilion on the north-west corner, whilst Philip Hardwick’s additions of 1842–45 extends the Stone Buildings with a similar pavilion to the south.

8 All Souls, IV. 84; Wren Society, XII, pl. XVII.

9 Whinney, Margaret, ‘Some Church Designs by John Webb’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 6 (1943), 142-50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Harris, J. and Tait, A. A., Catalogue of the drawing by Inigo Jones, John Webb and Isaac de Caus at Worcester College, Oxford (1979), p. 1.Google Scholar

11 Commons Journal, 1708-11, 16, 580-83.

12 Lambeth Palace Library, MS 2693, 11 July 1712.

13 For design requirements see also Port, M. H., The Commissions for Building Fifty New Churches, London Record Society (1986), p. xx.Google Scholar

14 Lambeth Palace Library, MS 2724, fol. 120v.

15 Ibid., MS 2690, p. 429, 13 November 1711.

16 Commons Journal, 1711-14, 17, p. 133, 13 March 1712.

17 Donaldson, T. L., Surveyor, Engineer and Architect (1843), p. 351 Google Scholar. With the exception of that for St Mary-Le-Strand, now in the RIBA and in poor condition, the present whereabouts of the models is unknown and they may not have survived. See Colvin, H. in Bill, E. G. W., The Queen Anne Churches (London, 1979).Google Scholar

18 Lambeth Palace Library, MS 2690, p. 179, 21 July 1714.

19 Friedman, , in James Gibbs (1984), p. 320 Google Scholar, suggests that it is a 1734 design for the Radcliffe Library, for which Gibbs was paid 40 guineas by the Trustees. Colvin, in Unbuilt Oxford (1983), p. 71 Google Scholar, does not support this. The building may conceivably date from 1720, when the Trustees resolved to obtain designs from the ‘ablest architects’, of which Wren, Vanbrugh, Thornhill, Archer, James and Gibbs were named. But no such approach has been identified to any of these and, as pointed out by Colvin, no designs for this building are known that can be attributed to Wren, Vanbrugh, Thornhill, Archer or James. It is possible that Gibbs alone was approached, but there is no record of it. Nor is there any suggestion that Gibbs was involved in 1712-13, when Hawksmoor produced at least five separate designs.

20 This portrait was listed in the Mantua inventory of 1627 ( Spearman, J., Burl. Mag., April 1965, pp. 172-77.Google Scholar). Spearman has suggested that it was for a Chiesa del Crocifisio, with a sanctuary for a relic of the true cross and possibly for the Gonzaga tombs. There is no indication of scale of the plan in the Titian portrait.

21 W. W. Crandall, MS Catalogue of Gibbs Collection, Ashmolean Museum, 1933.

22 Campbell, C., Vitruvius Britannicus, 1 (1715), pls. 8 and 9.Google Scholar

23 Toesca, Ilaria, English Miscellany, 3-4 (1952-53), 212.Google Scholar

24 About the year 1800 Sir John Soane produced drawings for development on the east side of the Fields, including a chapel with hexastyle Ionic porticoes on both east and west fronts, flanked by five houses to both north and south (Sir John Soane’s Museum, 14, Set 5, No. 2-3).

In 1818, with the passage of the Million Pound Church Act, the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields proposed a chapel-of-ease for the east side of the Fields. The Benchers of the Inn declined to lift the covenant restricting building (St Giles-in-the-Fields Vestry Minutes 1770-1840, pp. 311-21, Holborn Public Library).

In 1824 the Church Building Commissioners approached the Benchers of the Inn, equally unsuccessfully, the Benchers indicating that they ‘now are, as they were upon a former application from another quarter to the like effect, unanimously of the opinion that they cannot with propriety comply with the request’ (Black Books of Lincoln’s Inn, 1776-1845, Vol. 4, p. 167, 1902).

In 1826 the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields secured a free grant of Crown Land for a new church on the west side of Little Queen Street, close to the north-west corner of the Fields, on which one of the Commissioners’ churches was erected to the design of Francis Bedford. It was known as Holy Trinity, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and was demolished in 1910 to be replaced by Holy Trinity, Kingsway. (Church Commissioners, F36566, 1/5).

25 ‘Lincoln’s Inn Chapel’ was at the rear of No. 53/54 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, attached to the Portuguese Embassy. The property passed to the Duke of Savoy who acquired the Kingdom of Sicily and the chapel became the Sicilian Chapel (in which Alessandro Galilei was married on 9 September 1718 (see note 23). In 1720 the Duke exchanged his Kingdom of Sicily for that of Sardinia, and the chapel became the Sardinia Chapel. It later became the church of St Anselm, then St Anselm and St Cecilia, moving to its present site in Kingsway in 1909.