Book review: Burning ambition that fuelled London's rise from the ashes

THE PHOENIX: ST PAUL'S CATHEDRAL AND THE MEN WHO MADE MODERN LONDON

Leo Hollis

Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, £20

LEO Hollis has set himself a daunting task in giving us the biographies of five men, recounting the history of England from the end of Charles I's reign to the start of Queen Anne's, describing the Great Fire of London and its aftermath, and all focused around the rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral. He has brought it off triumphantly.

The entire work is written in lively modern English without a trace of scholastic starch as Hollis successfully juggles the lives of the men while riding the uneasy monocycle of 17th-century politics and religious debate to give us a thoroughly engrossing adventure story.

The five men he claims to be at the heart of the metropolis's resurrection were Sir Christopher Wren, astronomer and Surveyor-General; John Evelyn, gardener and diarist; Robert Hooke, scientist and surveyor of the city of London; John Locke, philosopher and political theorist; and Nicholas Barbon, Puritan and property speculator. Three of these polymaths were founder members of the Royal Society and all were adherents of the New Philosophy that questioned both the dogma of Rome and the cheerless rigour of the Puritans.

Hollis cleverly uses the personalities and careers of his leading characters to take us gently through the controversies of the time and, not so gently but extremely vividly, through the plague of 1665. Then he leads us terrifyingly through the Great Fire of 1666. While the book would have benefited from more detailed maps and illustrations, these sections in themselves are a standalone tour de force. However, this is a narrative as well as a political history, and Hollis stimulates us with a wealth of anecdotes.

The lives and characters of his five protagonists are sympathetically drawn and the masters of power – we have five monarchs and two Lord Protectors – appear only as often as they are needed.

Hollis tells us of the decay and destruction of St Paul's and the medieval city, followed by the rebuilding of a city – measured on the ground by Hooke and bought and sold by Barbon. Meanwhile, Locke is in and out of exile as his thought leads us to the 21st century. This book, though, lays the foundations for more than just London. From roots like these came modern Britain.