Architecture

For a detailed summary of Robert Hooke's architectural career see:

The Walpole Society published an article by Marjorie Batten in 1936-37 on 'The Architecture of Dr Robert Hooke FRS' (Batten, 1936).

Extant buildings

Only a few buildings by Hooke are thought to exist today, including:

  • Boone's Chapel was built in 1682 for Christopher and Mary Boone as a private almshouse chapel with four houses attached, gateway to the owners’ mansion, Lee Place. It appears that Christopher Wren may have been commissioned to build the chapel and almshouses, but "Hooke ... actually undertook construction" (Wikipedia).
  • Buntingford almshouses, Hertfordshire, erected in 1684 for the mathematician and astronomer Bishop Seth Ward.
  • Historic England attributes to Hooke a gazebo of 1672, built for Sir William Hooker (later Lord Mayor of London) at Crooms Hill in Greenwich. Pevsner describes it as "Brick with pyramidal roof, arched openings, one with a scrolled open pediment" (Pevsner, 1983).
  • Hooke designed a building for Magdalene College, Cambridge, which may be the Pepys Library. The College website describes Hooke as the "founder of modern structural engineering".
  • Ragley Hall, designed for Edward Conway, 1st Earl of Conway, in 1680 but not completed until after his death.
  • Ramsbury Manor, Wiltshire, built in the 1680s for the lawyer and politician Sir William Jones.
  • Although usually credited to Christopher Wren, contemporary accounts suggest that it was Hooke who played the major role in the design and construction of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.
  • Shenfield Place, Essex, built in the 1680s for Lord John Vaughan, 3rd Earl of Carbery, who was President of the Royal Society from 1686 to 1689.
  • Dr Richard Busby, the headmaster of Westminster School, was also appointed Prebendary of Westminster Abbey on 5th July 1660, and Treasurer four days later. Hooke was a pupil at the school, remained friendly with Busby for the rest of his life, and undertook several commissions for him. (Smith, 2006)

Lost buildings

Other buildings by Hooke have since been demolished, including:

The architectural historian Giles Worsley has suggested that, on the basis of personal and professional links and stylistic analogies, Hooke might have been the architect of various other major houses, the responsibility for the design of which has always been problematic, including Petworth and Boughton. (Worsley 2004).

The Monument

Hooke's Hospital of Bethlehem [Bedlam] at Moorfields, London: seen from the north. (Image 1)

The Monument

The Monument in 1753 (Image 2)

Westminster Abbey plaque

Westminster Abbey floor plaque (Image 3)

Gazebo at Crooms Hill

Gazebo at Crooms Hill, Greenwich (Image 4)

Willen Church

Church of St Mary Magdalene, Willen (Image 5)

Ramsbury Manor

Ramsbury Manor from the north-east (Image 6)

Rebuilding London after the Great Fire

The task of leading the rebuilding of London after the fire of 1666 was handed to a committee of six men. Three represented the King, of whom the best known is Sir Christopher Wren, and three represented the City of London, including Hooke.

In the aftermath of the fire, private land was taken by the City for new and widened streets, new markets, wharves alongside the Fleet River, and quays and wharves along the northern bank of the Thames. The amount of compensation paid by the City to owners of property depended on the location of the site and the area of ground lost. Hooke worked on the measuring and staking out of widened streets and new building foundations, mediating subsequent property disputes, and writing certification of the areas of ground taken away. It is estimated that he dealt with about 3,000 of the 8,394 foundations recorded by the City treasurer, and about half of the areas of ground taken away for streets and other new works.

In the next phase of the reconstruction process, Wren and Hooke together designed and supervised the building of many of the new properties. Wren is usually credited every time, but in some cases Hooke took the lead. One example is the Monument. Erected in Fish Street Hill, close to the source of the fire in Pudding Lane, this 202ft column is now thought to be principally the work of Hooke, signed off by Wren (Walker, 2011).

Lisa Jardine (Jardine 2003) states that Hooke's 1672-83 diary records his visits to about thirty of the London churches then being rebuilt after the Great Fire, and adds, "In many cases these visits are sufficiently numerous to suggest that, even if he was not the design architect, he nevertheless played a significant role in their final built form". Anthony Geraghty, who catalogued the Wren papers at All Souls College, Oxford (Geraghty, 2007), suggests that Hooke's duties within Wren's office have been exaggerated, but his analysis is based upon the authorship of the drawings rather than overall supervision of the rebuilding, and it is noteworthy that he sometimes quotes Hooke's diary in relation to designs drawn by somebody else, such as St Peter, Cornhill.

In the past, Wren has usually been credited with the rebuilding of all of these churches. It is certainly true that he led and supervised the campaign but Paul Jeffery suggests that "Wren's contribution to the rebuilding [of] the parish churches in terms of design was numerically modest, with Hooke having the greater part of the task and the greater number now to his credit" (Jeffery 1996, p.66). It now seems likely that Hooke made a major contribution to the following at least:

Property dispute report

This document summarises a property dispute between Will Sanders, a draper, and John Rowley, a skinner. The pair had once shared a house and shop on Ludgate Hill, one of the areas destroyed by the fire. Sanders no longer wanted Rowley to occupy the second story of his house but agreed to allot him a space next door. Hooke and his fellow surveyor John Oliver approved of this plan, signing the document at lower right. (Image 7)

St Benet's, Paul's Wharf

St Benet's, Paul's Wharf. The church avoided major Victorian remodelling, and was one of only four City churches to escape bombing in 1939-45. (Image 8)

St Paul's Cathedral

Although he had no formal role (Geraghty, 2007), Hooke seems to have assisted Wren on the construction of the new St Paul's Cathedral.

Wren's son and biographer says of his father in Parentalia, that "He raised another structure over the first cupola, a cone of brick, so as to support a stone lantern of an elegant figure. ... And he covered and hid out of sight the brick cone with another cupola of timber and lead".

On 5th June 1675, Hooke records in his diary, "At Sir Chr. Wren ... He promised Fitch at Paulls. He was making up my principle about arches and altered his module by it". (Heyman 2006)

A pen and ink study of about 1690, drawn by Wren, which is now in the British Museum (not the one illustrated here), shows that the design for the brick cone duly employed "a formula devised by Robert Hooke in about 1671 for calculating the curve of a parabolic dome and reducing its thickness. Hooke had explored this curve, the three-dimensional equivalent of the 'hanging chain', or catenary arch: the shape of a weighted chain which, when inverted, produces the ideal profile for a self-supporting arch." (Designs for the Dome, c.1687-1708)

St Pauls Dome

Construction of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, showing the internal brick cone between two cupolas (Image 9)

 
St Pauls plaque

Memorial to Hooke in the crypt of the cathedral, next to the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren (Image 10). The quotation around the edge is from Micrographia.

Photographs

Sources for the images on this page are given below. Many more may be found on the web, including on Flickr and Geograph.

The photographs on Flickr by Ian Stubbs, in particular, include several of prints depicting Montague House in London, now replaced by the present British Museum building.

 
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Montague House

Montague House, London, rebuilt after a fire. (Image 11).


References

  1. Batten (1936): Marjorie Isabel Batten, 'The Architecture of Dr Robert Hooke FRS', Walpole Society (London), vol.25 (1936-37), pp.83-113. Partial text available
  2. Colvin (1978): Howard Colvin, A Biographical dictionary of British architects, 1600-1840 (Murray, 1978), pp.428-431. Text available on loan. (This version has now been superseded by later editions.)
  3. Cooper (2003): Michael Cooper, Robert Hooke and the rebuilding of London (Sutton, 2003), p.190.
  4. Geraghty (2007): Anthony Geraghty, The Architectural drawings of Sir Christopher Wren at All Souls College, Oxford: a complete catalogue (Lund Humphries, 2007), especially the chapter entitled 'The drawings: technique and purpose'. Also available online.
  5. Heyman (2006): Jacques Heyman, 'Hooke and Bedlam', in Robert Hooke: tercentennial studies, edited by Michael Cooper and Michael Hunter (Routledge, 2016), p.164.
  6. Inwood (2002): Stephen Inwood, The Man who knew too much (Macmillan, 2002).
  7. Jardine (2003): Lisa Jardine, The Curious life of Robert Hooke (HarperCollins, 2003), p.152.
  8. Jeffery (1996): Paul Jeffery, The City churches of Sir Christopher Wren (Hambledon Press, 1996). Despite its title, the contribution of Robert Hooke to London's post-Fire church building campaign is discussed throughout this book. There are many references to him in the text which are not mentioned in the index, such as pp.175-177.
  9. Pevsner (1983): Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London 2, South (Yale UP, 1983), p.267.
  10. Smith (2006): Edward Smith, 'Hooke and Westminster', in Robert Hooke: tercentennial studies, edited by Michael Cooper and Michael Hunter (Routledge, 2016), pp.219-32.
  11. Walker (2011): Matthew F. Walker, 'The limits of collaboration: Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren and the designing of the Monument to the Great Fire of London', Notes and records of the Royal Society of London, vol.65, no.2 (20th June 2011), pp.121-143. Abstract available
  12. Worsley (2004): Giles Worsley, 'Taking Hooke seriously', The Georgian Group journal, vol.14 (2004), pp.1-25.

 
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Image acknowledgments

So far as we know, all of the images reproduced on this page are in the public domain. We shall immediately take down on demand any that are still in copyright.

  1. Engraving of Bethlehem Hospital [Bedlam] at Moorfields, London: seen from the north, with people walking in the foreground. Image from the Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons.
  2. Extract from a drawing of The Monument by Sutton Nicholls between 1725 and 1728, held by the British Library.
  3. Westminster Abbey floor plaque.Image by Peter King.
  4. Gazebo at Crooms Hill, Greenwich © Ethan Doyle White, via Wikimedia Commons reproduced under this licence.
  5. Church of St Mary Magdalene, Willen. Image by Chris Nyborg, CC BY-SA 3.0 from Wikimedia Commons.
  6. Ramsbury Manor from the north-east. Image from In English homes by Charles Latham and H. Avray Tipping (Country Life, 1909), vol.3, p.159, via Wikimedia Commons.
  7. Report dated 4th July 1670, signed by Hooke, settling a dispute about a property on Ludgate Hill. Image courtesy of Seth Kaller, Inc.
  8. Photograph by George Rex of St Benet's church, Paul's Wharf, from Wikimedia Commons. The caption says "nominally built by Wren's company but designed by Dr Robert Hooke".
  9. Extract from a drawing of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral © Penn State University Library, reproduced under this licence.
  10. Memorial to Robert Hooke in St Paul's Cathedral. The stone was cut by Richard Kindersley. It is sited in the crypt, next to the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren. The quotation around the edge is from Micrographia. At the bottom of the memorial is an engraved metal bookworm in brass and chrome, recessed into the stone surface. As the crypt is dark, a pale stone was chosen and the carved letters were painted with blue and red watercolour to make them more legible. Image by Rita Greer, via Wikimedia Commons reproduced under this licence.
  11. Montague House in London, rebuilt after a fire, subsequently the home of the British Museum. Image of 1849 from the Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons reproduced under this licence.

 
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Page last amended 14th December 2024