Compounding errors

The partial demolition of the shell of a Wren church in the 1970s is not an excuse for further mistreatment by the City of London authorities

- Ptolemy Dean

LISTENERS to radio stations in the 1980s will remember the endless reports of traffic delays at various city-centre ‘gyratories’. These were the postwar 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 firebombing.