Great Fire of London in 1666. Reconstruction was assigned to Wren, who oversaw a decades long programme to rebuild St. Paul's Cathedral and approximately 50 parish churches. There appears to have been some debate about the form the new Christ Church should take. A surviving unused design shows a structure considerably larger than the one eventually built. The parish was united with that of St Leonard, Foster Lane, which was not rebuilt Parishioners raised £1,000 to begin work on the design. To save time and money, the foundations of the gothic church were partially reused. The new church and tower (without steeple) were completed in 1687, at a total cost of £11,778 9s. 7¼d. Smaller than the gothic structure, the building measured long and wide, occupying only the eastern end of the site of the medieval church, the western part becoming its churchyard. The tower, rising from the west end of the church, had a simple round-arched main entranceway and, above, windows decorated with neoclassical pediments. Large carved pineapples, symbols of welcome, graced the four roof corners of the main church structure. Unique among the Wren churches, the east and west walls had buttresses. The interior was divided into nave and aisles by Corinthian columns, raised on tall plinths so that their bases were level with the gallery floors. The aisles had flat ceilings, while the nave had a shallow cross-vault. The north and south walls had large round-arched windows of clear glass, which allowed for a brightly lit interior. The east end had trinity windows, a large wooden altar screen and a carved hexagonal pulpit, reached by stairs. There was elaborate carved wainscoting. A pavement of reddish brown and grey marble to the west of the altar rails was said to date from the original gothic church. Galleries stood over the north and south aisles, built at special request of the officers of Christ's Hospital as seating for the school's students. Pews were said to have been made from the timbers of a wrecked Spanish galleon. The organ, on the west wall over the main nave door, was built by Renatus Harris in 1690, according to a pre-war guide to the church. The steeple, standing about tall, was finished in 1704 at an additional cost of £1,963, 8s. 3½ d. It has three diminishing storeys, square in plan, the middle one with a freestanding Ionic colonnade. Over the course