Happy Birthday, Christopher Wren

St. Clement Danes, Strand, London, 1680

Today is the birthday of that greatest of English architects, Sir Christopher Wren, born in 1632 in Wiltshire.

Most people these days associate him primarily with St. Paul's Cathedral. While this is indeed a beautiful building, I rather prefer the more intimate churches Wren constructed, many of which replaced or modified buildings burned down in the Great Fire of 1666. London was (and still is) an extremely crowded place, yet Wren devised a style that managed to look graceful, lofty and dignified even when squashed into narrow spaces.