Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich

Mary II ordered a hospital for wounded and worn-out sailors after seeing the casualties of the 1692 Battle of La Hogue come home, and Wren, as Surveyor of the King's Works, gave his services for free, working from 1696 alongside his assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor. The site already held the Queen's House, Inigo Jones's small Palladian villa set back from the river, and Wren's most consequential decision was structural in the loosest sense: rather than build one grand block across the axis, he split the hospital into two symmetrical pairs of courts, keeping the sightline from the Queen's House to the Thames open down the middle. Twin domed towers, each carrying a clock, close the composition at the riverfront. Wren's own part of the work ran until 1712; Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor completed later ranges, and James "Athenian" Stuart finished the chapel in 1789 after a fire. Sir James Thornhill's vast painted ceiling in the Painted Hall, begun in 1707, took nineteen years to finish; Nelson's body lay in state beneath it in 1806. The complex became the Royal Naval College in 1873 and now houses the University of Greenwich and Trinity Laban Conservatoire.