September 2nd - On this day in 1666, the Great
Fire of London broke out in the bakery of Thomas Faryner in Pudding Lane.
The associated Monument is
visited on our Thursday morning walk “Aldgate, Bishopsgate and beyond – Priories and
Playhouses” and on our Friday afternoon walk “Tower to Temple – The Heart of the City".
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| Map showing the area destroyed by the Great Fire (shaded), and the surviving structures (numbered) |
The Great Fire of London
(extract taken from “The
Lost City of London” - see our website for further details )
On the evening
of Saturday 1st September, 1666, the king’s baker Thomas Farriner or Faryner or
Farynor, whose premises were on Pudding
Lane, went to bed leaving the fire that heated his oven still burning, in
contravention of the curfew law passed six hundred years previously by William I, “the Conqueror” (the word curfew deriving from the Norman
French “cover-feu”, meaning,
literally, “cover fire”). In the early
hours of the following morning, a spark from the fire settled on a pile of
firewood stacked nearby for use on the following working day, and set it alight. Flames soon engulfed the house,
and although Farriner and his family were able to escape by climbing through an upstairs window
and along the outside of the building to a neighbouring one, his unfortunate
maid-servant stayed put, and burned to
death, becoming the first of reportedly mercifully few to die in what was still
yet to become the Great Fire. Her name was Rose.
The fire soon
spread from Farriner’s bakery to nearby Fish
Street Hill, burning down the “Star Inn”, where flammable faggots and straw
were stacked up in the yard, and the church of St Margaret Fish Street Hill,
the first to be destroyed; and thence on to Thames Street, where wood, cloth sails, rope, tar, coal and other
flammable materials were stacked up on the river-front. It
went on to take a firm hold of the City, largely built of wooden houses,
weatherproofed with pitch, and separated by only a few feet at ground level,
and even less at roof level (on account of the construction of successive
storeys further and further out into the street, affording more space, a
practice known as jettying), allowing flames to
leap from one to another with ease.
The spread of the fire was
further facilitated by the weather, with the strong easterly wind that had been
creaking and rattling shop signs on their hinges now fanning it and carrying it
towards the heart of the City; and
everything in its path tinder dry from the preceding exceptionally long, hot,
dry summer (which also meant that the supply of water with which to fight it
was short). Fortunately, its
spread across the river to Southwark
was halted at a gap in the buildings on London
Bridge that formed a natural firebreak
- ironically, the result of
another fire some thirty years previously. Nonetheless, Pepys (*1) wrote that he “did
see the houses at the end of the bridge all on fire”, and “rode down to the
waterside, ... and there saw a lamentable fire. ... Everybody endeavouring to
remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters
that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire
touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of
stairs by the waterside to another”. On
seeing this, he travelled to Westminster
to advise the King that the situation was getting out of hand, later recalling
“Having stayed, and in an hours time seen the fire rage every way, and nobody
to my sight endeavouring to quench it, ... to Whitehall and there up to the
King’s closet in the Chapel, where I did give them an account that dismayed
them all, and the word was carried to the King.
So I was called for, and did tell the King ... what I saw; and that
unless His Majesty did command houses to be pulled down, nothing could stop the
fire. They seemed much troubled, and the
King commanded me to go to my Lord Mayor from him, and command him spare no
houses”. And at the King’s behest, he
returned to the scene, and “At last met my Lord Mayor in Canning Streete ...
with a hankercher about his neck. To the
King’s message, he cried like a fainting woman, ‘Lord, what can I do? I am spent!
People will not obey me. I have
been pull[ing] down houses. But fire
overtakes us faster than we can do it’”.
Pulling down or even blowing up buildings to create further firebreaks
did indeed prove a partially successful strategy in fighting the fire, saving
the churches of All Hallows Barking and St Olave Hart Street, but unfortunately
it was also one that was implemented too late to make much of a difference to
the eventual outcome (possibly for fear of law-suits from property
owners). The fire eventually essentially
halted in its own tracks, spent, after the wind dropped, on the fourth day.
Recriminations
rapidly followed, with the Lord Mayor
Sir Thomas Bloodworth or Bludworth singled out for criticism over his initial
complacency and subsequent indecisiveness (when first informed of the fire, he
is reported to have remarked that a woman might have pissed it out, which
indeed she might, if she had acted promptly, but he did not, and must soon have
come to rue his rash words). The
rudimentary fire brigade was also criticised, for acting in an un-coordinated
fashion, and, in its desperation,
digging up roads and cutting pipes to get at the water to fill its buckets, in so doing cutting off the supply to
others. However, given the chaotic
situation they found themselves confronted with, and the tools at their
disposal with which to deal with it, including primitive fire engines that
looked and likely handled more like tea
trolleys, they would appear to have performed perfectly admirably. In the
end, everything was essentially ascribed
to an act of God, albeit one that the wit and hand of man would attempt
to ensure was never repeated. (Many,
though, falsely believed the fire to
have been deliberately set, by a
fanatical Papist or Dissenter, or by a Dutch or French saboteur; and indeed a
Frenchman, Robert Hubert, was executed for having set it, after a confession
obtained under duress, and a “show
trial” presided over by members of Farriner’s family - who had their own reasons to
attach the blame to such a convenient scapegoat).
The stark fact remained that the fire had largely
destroyed the City that had witnessed so much history in the making. As intimated above, loss of life appears to
have been comparatively low, although it may have been higher than reported, given that the fire had
evidently been sufficiently hot as to
have burned bodies to ash within as
little as an hour or two (hot enough to melt not only the lead on the rooves of
the churches (300degC), but also iron bells (1200degC), glass (1500degC), and
even pottery (1700degC)). However, eighty percent of the area within the walls
was more or less completely burnt out, and only the extreme north and east had
survived substantially intact (the walls
had essentially confined the fire to the City within, although some areas
without to the west had also been affected).
Around 13000 private residences and places of business within and
immediately without the walls of the City were either essentially or entirely
destroyed, alongside 85 parish churches and St
Paul’s Cathedral, 45 Livery Company Halls, the Custom House, the Guildhall,
the Royal Exchange, the Royal Wardrobe and Castle Baynard. Damage to
property and trade was on an entirely unprecedented scale, as was associated
homelessness and loss of livelihood.
Around 100000 persons were made
homeless, and had to be temporarily rehoused in camps, like the one on Moorfields, or in those - still
substantial - parts of what we might think of as Greater London that were not affected by the fire. There would appear to have been a certain
amount of profiteering by landlords at this time, and a little later, as
rebuilding work began, by builders’ merchants, although the general mood would
appear to have been one of shared
hardship and public-spiritedness, somewhat akin to that of the Blitz of the
Second World War.
Footnote:
(*1) Aside
from Pepys’s vivid eye-witness account,
for which we can perhaps forgive him the infamous “parmazan” episode, there are a number of contemporary paintings of the fire at its
height, one of which, attributed to Waggoner, survives, in the Guildhall
Art Gallery; and another, by an anonymous artist, in the Museum of London. A panorama of the aftermath of the fire, by
Hollar, survives in the British Museum.
Other graphic images of the fire
and its aftermath also survive, although mainly outside London. A significant proportion are by Dutch
artists, one of whom entitled his work “Sic
Punit”, or “Thus He Punishes” - remember that England was at war with Holland
at the time of the fire.
Aftermath
(extract taken from “The Lost City of London” - see our website for further details)
Would the City
ever be rebuilt, or be the same again?
Well, of
course it would, not least because the prosperity of the City was essential not
only to that of the country as a whole but also to that of powerful men with
vested interests, watching anxiously from the sidelines as “day by day the
City’s wealth flowed out of the gate” to other boroughs.
The Lord Mayor
initiated the process essentially straight away, within weeks commissioning a
detailed survey of the fire-damaged area of the City to assist with the
assessment of compensation claims, and to use as a template for reconstruction plans. The survey was undertaken by the Bohemian
Wencesla(u)s Hollar (1607-77), who had travelled widely before eventually settling
in London, and earned a reputation as an
engraver and print-maker of some skill, specialising in landscape scenes. Other surveys were undertaken, and maps made,
by Doornick, Leake, and Ogilby and Morgan.
A number of
revolutionary reconstruction plans for the City were submitted, by, among
others, Christopher Wren (1632-1723), Robert Hooke (1635-1703) and John Evelyn
(1620-1706), any one of which, if implemented,
would have given it a radically new look and feel, much more like that of the great European cities of the day,
and indeed of today, with their uniform architecture, broad boulevards and open piazzas. (Evelyn wrote that “In the disposure of the
streets, due consideration should be had, what are the competent breadths for
commerce and intercourse (!), cheerfulness and state”). But these
plans were over-ambitious, apart from anything else, and were abandoned
on the grounds of practicality in favour of
one requiring much less groundwork, and much more like the old one
(although allowing of at least one concession to modernity, in the widening,
and freeing from encumbrance to the flow
of traffic, of the streets). The City
that might have been never came to be, and
that that had been would come to
be again: for the most part neither particularly beautiful nor harmonious; but,
rather, “lived in” and fractious; and
yet, familiar and loved.
The man
selected to oversee and implement the chosen reconstruction plan was the
aforementioned Christopher Wren, an architect and a member of an aristocratic family who had
finally found favour in the Restoration, after years in the wilderness during
the Protectorate and Commonwealth: his assistants, the aforementioned brilliant
but curmudgeonly Robert Hooke, memorably described by Pepys as
“the most, and promises the
least, of any man in the world that I ever saw”; and the young and prodigiously
gifted Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736).
Incidentally, Wren was an anatomist and astronomer as well as an
architect (one wonders whether he, like Sartre’s autodidact, acquired his
learning by reading an encyclopaedia, starting with the letter “A”); a follower
of the “New Philosophy” of Francis Bacon (1561-1626); and a founder member of
the Royal Society. He was, in short, an
archetypal (English) Renaissance Man,
and, most definitely, the right man, in the right place, at the right time - an
unusually happy conjunction in the history of the City.
Wren and
his office set about their
reconstruction work as hastily, or rather speedily, as practicable, so as to provide the City with the opportunity of
re-establishing itself with the minimum of delay and loss. In all, they rebuilt 51 parish churches
within and immediately without the walls, that is, around half of those that had
been destroyed in the Great Fire (*2), together with St Paul’s Cathedral, and also rebuilt numerous other public and
private buildings, many in the High (English) Renaissance or Early Baroque
style - the cost of the entire enterprise being covered by a tax on coal. The most glorious of Wren’s many glorious
achievements was undoubtedly St Paul’s
Cathedral. The cathedral is faced in
plain Portland Stone, wonderfully reflective of the City’s light and mood. It is crowned with a glorious and iconic
dome, making it unique among all the cathedrals of England. Wren’s simple epitaph inside the cathedral
reads “Lector, si monumentum requiris,
circumspice”, meaning “Reader, should you seek his memorial, look about
you”. On the pediment above the south
door is a stone bearing the image of a Phoenix rising from the ashes, and the
inscription of the single word “Resurgam”,
meaning “I shall rise again” (the inscription repeating that on another stone found by one of Wren’s
workmen among the debris of the old,
burnt-out cathedral - a positive portent if ever there was one).
And so, out of
the ashes arose a new London. And England was re-born.
Footnote:
(*2) Of these 51 churches, 30 are still standing,
together with St Paul’s Cathedral,
and 21 are not. Of the 21 that are no longer standing, 17, far more than one might have hoped, were
demolished by our own over-zealous town planners and engineers in the pell-mell
expansion of London following the Industrial Revolution – in some cases, at
least marginally justifiably, to allow for development, but in many others
simply because they were deemed, under the incomprehensibly philistine Union of
Benifices Act of 1860, to be surplus to requirements! Only 4, far fewer than one might have feared,
were completely destroyed by German bombing during the Blitz of the Second
World War. However, a number of others were also damaged to
varying extents at this time, some of which were subsequently restored,
and some left as empty shells. Two, St
Mary Aldermanbury and St Stephen
Coleman Street, were destroyed, and
8, Christ
Church, St Alban, St Andrew by the Wardrobe, St Anne and St Agnes, St
Augustine, St Bride, St Lawrence Jewry and St Vedast alias Foster, damaged, on a single, fateful night,
Sunday 29th December, 1940, when thousands of incendiaries were
dropped on an essentially unguarded City.
At least many of the original plans of these recently lost
churches still survive, as do some later paintings and photographs.
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