I don’t entirely concur with the happy notion that every cloud has a silver lining. But the Great Fire of London was certainly a case in point. Would Sir Christopher Wren have had the chance to erect a single one of his 53 churches in the capital, had a careless baker not allowed his oven to overheat in Pudding Lane on September 2, 1666? Almost certainly not. And as a result Britain would never have acquired its greatest collection of Baroque buildings.

The sadness is that millions of City workers trudge past these architectural masterpieces twice a day without registering what they are, let alone being tempted to look inside. I know, because I was one of them – until (in a lamentable fit of middle-aged nerdishness) I went through a phase of “collecting” interesting churches with a zeal that would have put Sir John Betjeman to shame. So it’s only in recent years that I’ve come to appreciate what an extraordinarily resourceful and inventive architectural imagination Wren had.

Of course, everyone knows St Paul’s Cathedral. Indeed, it’s hard to ignore, now that it gleams like a star-burst after its somewhat garish £40 million, 300th-birthday wash-and-brush-up. But how many Londoners have clocked the gloriously proportioned interiors of such exotically named Wren churches as St Vedast-alias-Foster, St Andrew-by-the-Ward-robe (so called because it stood near the warehouse where the Royal Family stored its lavish accessories) and St James Garlickhythe, which takes its name from the wharf where garlic was unloaded from France?

How many have seen Grinling Gibbons’s fabulous carvings in St Mary Abchurch, or Henry Moore’s startling altar in St Stephen Walbrook, installed after a controversial campaign in the 1980s? Taken as a whole, Wren’s City churches and their contents are far more interesting, aesthetically and historically, than the entire collection of Tate Modern. Yet they probably attract fewer than one-thousandth of the visitors who flock to that temple to overhyped conceptual art.

Well, now’s the chance to remedy that sad imbalance. One glory of the current City of London Festival (which runs for another fortnight) is that it is using no fewer than 12 Wren churches, as well as St Paul’s, as venues for its concerts. It’s a chance to hear superb music-making in eye-dazzlingly beautiful surroundings, as well as an opportunity to get a handle on some of London’s weirder historical quirks.

Not a lot of people know, for instance, that St James Garlickhythe has a 200-year-old mummy – nicknamed Jimmy Garlick – encased in its tower. Or that St Bride’s in Fleet Street owes its reconstruction after the war to the generosity of newspaper journalists and their proprietors. Yes, hard to believe, I know, but true.

Quite a lot of Wren’s churches needed reconstruction – sometimes a comprehensive one – after the Blitz. The irony is that 20th-century planners treated his wrecked masterpieces with far more reverence than he treated the charred remains of the medieval churches burnt in the Great Fire. They were right to do so.

Notwithstanding the charms of Nash, Lutyens, Vanbrugh, Pugin, Gilbert Scott, Foster, Rogers et al, Wren remains the grandest and most protean of British architects. Now we just need to rediscover why.

www.colf.org

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