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Where there are purposeful thoroughfares, roads that lead somewhere? there is the axis of the Strand, Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill with its culmination at St. Paul's for example. Hardly processional routes suited to a fleet of Staff Cars bearing a dictator to his palace. Almost certainly this is right, I tell myself, (stifling Speerian tendencies) for what could be more delightful than bumbling up Fleet street and just sort of pitching up at St. Paul's? If Wren had managed to realise his almost Cartesian project we would no longer have this feeling of discovery; perhaps we should be glad that London remained a cryptic city, did not become a rational one, even when it had its great post-Fire opportunity. Typically, in terms of city planning, not much happened; what happened was mainly in the way of practical measures; house sizes, materials (brick and stone rather than wood) forms of industrial zoning, width of street housing regulations, banning of overhanging eaves; brisk, practical, mercantile decisions reached typically, in the English way, by modifying and compromising more ambitious legislation.

The grand thoroughfares conceived by Wren or Evelyn just didn't materialise. This is usually seen as a pity. Others are glad. Rasmussen, for example, in London the unique City, says "the rejection of Wren's plan is not a fault but rather a new triumph for what might be called the idea of London".

OK. I quite like the idea of this anarchic spirit; but stronger, perhaps, is my exasperation at the inevitability of our failure to plan; we will never get it right. I half agree with Giedion; in Space Time and Architecture; he writes:

"The coordinated plan of Christopher Wren for the general rebuilding of London following the great fire of 1666 was rejected by Charles ll after only three days consideration…And this just at the time (Giedion continues) when Bernini was laying out the Piazza in front of St Peter's, and Le Notre the gardens of Versailles!"

I share Giedion's exasperation.

It is, again, absolutely typical, absolutely bloody typical, that nothing got done; but at the same time gratifying, in fact, that the Crown did not have influence enough on the City to be able to force through the grand vision of some mere planners. That, for Rasmussen, is presumably the "idea of London", mercantile, anarchic, independent.

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