To commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of Sir Christopher Wren’s death on March 8, 1723, I recently chaired a talk in St Mary Abchurch.

It’s one of the loveliest of his City churches, built in 1686 on the footprint of its predecessor, which had burned to the ground in the Great Fire of London in 1666.

“As well as being a great architect, Wren was a tremendous engineer and scientist, and brilliant with acoustics,” I said confidently.

At this, a distinguished-looking elderly lady in the audience put up her hand and said, “No, he wasn’t. I haven’t heard a word any of you have spoken for the last half hour.”

At the end of the talk, the vicar of the church confirmed this. “You have to talk very slowly,” he said. “Otherwise, the words bounce into each other in the dome.”

The Archdeacon of London, also at the event, said the acoustics in Wren’s masterpiece—St Paul’s Cathedral—also weren’t great, again because of its echoing dome.

Perhaps Wren wasn’t the greatest acoustics expert. But he remains Britain’s most important architect.

So I have to review my superlatives. Perhaps Wren wasn’t the greatest acoustics expert. But he remains Britain’s most important architect—the man who rebuilt fifty-one City churches, as well as St Paul’s; the man who reshaped Oxford; the man who created a new ideal of British Baroque, while mastering the ancient Gothic, too.

It’s always dangerous to praise any British architect ahead of, say, Michelangelo,