Christopher Wren

Abstract There is always something more to be said. In five years Wren’s masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral, has changed dramatically. Exterior recleaning, still in progress, has restored the way in which the mouldings and relief details ‘read’, how each piece fits into a visual structure partly representing, partly expressing, the material structure of mass and support. It restores clarity and balance, like removing scratch from old records, or brown varnish from a painting. The interior cleaning, finished first, is even more dramatic, taking away the deepest traces of the soot that was already eating into the stonework before the cathedral was finished, and the last remnants of the three coats of oil paint Wren had ordered at the eleventh hour in an attempt to hide the dirt and the many surface patches that it affected unevenly. Now the patches are hardly noticeable, and the whole interior has the luminosity—from direct daylight combined with reflected light from one bright stone to another—that Wren envisaged but, after thirty-five years in building, never saw. The soul has come back to St Paul’s.