That said, Christopher Wren was in high demand for designing churches after the Great Fire, So he made a deal: I will design you a church but no steeple (yet). Once the backlog of churches cleared he designed the steeples, and some churches had a 20 year gap.

Even pre-industrial London could crank out enough churches in a dozen years to keep a celebrated architect booked solid. But that’s an exceedingly dense urban era, capable of supporting a large array of skilled labor.