Is the City history – The Great Fire of London

Having visited Smithfield last week to look at the Peasants’ Revolt, the next stop (chronologically) on our historical tour of the City is the Monument that was built to commemorate the Great Fire of London. I have a real affinity for the Monument, it now feels like a poor cousin to the grander views from the Sky Garden at the Walkie Talkie, the Gherkin or even St Pauls, but its Wren-designed elegance is undeniable. 

It’s also a bite-sized trip that is highly recommended. Last time I went up I did it over lunch in a suit (and spent an extremely uncomfortable/damp afternoon sat at my desk – it’s steeper than expected). The view from the top is now obscured slightly by the office blocks all around and it doesn’t appear to be that big but, at 61.5 metres, it is the tallest isolated stone column in the world. It’s also worth imagining how it must have appeared when it was first completed in 1677, bigger than almost all the surrounding buildings (save for churches) and adorned at the top with its bright gilt-bronze urn. It’s a confident statement that the City has and will endure. 

Visiting today, it is quiet. The pub around the corner that is normally fairly packed is empty. The road over London Bridge that overlooks it is basically empty (save for a few cyclists). It feels like the City has evacuated. But it’s the perfect atmosphere to remember the events of 2nd to 6th September 1666. The fire began around 2am at a bakery on Pudding Lane. Fires were common in a City that was packed with timber houses, with no real planning and where the only light source was flame. The conflagration was treated initially with some disdain. When the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, was called for, he immediately went back to bed declaring,

“Pish! A woman might piss it out.” 

It would prove a huge error of judgement. 

Much of what we know about the fire is provided by England’s greatest diarist, Samuel Pepys. I went to the same college as him and his library (containing the small unassuming leather books where he wrote) were in the same building as we used to write our essays (with not even a fraction of the same merit). 

What marks his diaries out is the frankness with which he treats his daily life. Not a wart, massive drinking session or drunken liaison is missed out. But his depiction of the Great Fire is probably what he will be best remembered for (although he also invented the bookcase – which is fairly amazing).

After the first night, Pepys tells us that 300 houses were burnt down so he went to have a look from the Tower. Climbing up one of the high places,

“there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other end of the bridge.”

Pepys spent the day visiting the King and attempting to mobilise some action. By the evening he was describing the fire from an alehouse on Bankside:

"In the corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid malicious, bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire…We staid till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it."

It’s an incredible image and that one that forced Pepys to begin removing the valuables from his house on the expectation it would be burnt. Incredibly, he also dug a pit in the garden and put his Parmesan cheese in it to keep it safe should the house burn down. I hope that we all, faced with the end of the world as we know it, have the fortitude to “bury our Parmesan cheese” (a much better motto than “Stay Alert”). 

By the time the fire had burnt itself out, almost 400 acres had been burnt within the City (and a further 63 outside the walls). 87 churches were destroyed, along with 44 livery halls and 13,200 houses. Despite the widespread devastation, less than 10 people died (although that has been open to some serious debate). More than two thirds of what we would now call the City was destroyed at a cost of an estimated ï¿¡1.7 billion in today’s money. 

Interestingly, there is a second, much less well-known monument to the Great Fire of London very close to Smithfield and opposite St Barts. There, above the street sits a small statue of a naked boy that is covered in the same gilt as the Monument. This marks the point at which the Great Fire was stopped and under it sits the quote: “This boy is in Memmory [sic] Put up for the late FIRE of LONDON Occasion’d by the Sin of Gluttony 1666.” The connection between the Sin of Gluttony and the fire is not elaborated upon. The scale of the job of rebuilding must have seemed enormous but it happened quickly and without much fanfare. 

The Golden Boy of Pye Corner

Both John Evelyn and Wren put together incredible plans that would have created a very different City with long vistas and piazzas but the practicalities of ownership of land and making a working City put an end to this. However, the fire did result in radical changes to the City with access to water being key and the reconstructed buildings being built in stone rather than wood.   I think we should all take comfort in the rebuilding process. The scale of what was faced the day after the fire was put out must have been enormous. It puts our current crisis into perspective. 

An abandoned view of St Pauls

The challenges we face today into returning to some sort of normality are no less difficult. But things will recover and, from the ashes of our current difficulties, perhaps some buildings with stone foundations can be built. 

There is one final lesson that can be drawn from Pepys and his diaries which has particular relevance for those of us working in the City. Pepys wrote his diaries in code, largely to avoid some of the saucier details of his liaisons and big nights out being read by his wife (trust me, some of these aren’t suitable for LinkedIn). 

The code was predominantly a particular type of shorthand (Shelton’s Tachygraphy) mixed (when something sensitive came up) with Spanish, French, Italian and a fair splattering of schoolboy euphemism. Unfortunately, Shelton’s Tachygraphy had fallen out of common use by the early 19th century and Pepy’s diaries became the greatest historical source in the country that could not be read.

Enter an industrious young Magdalene undergraduate called John Smith. He slaved over the diaries decoding them (in a similar manner to the way the Rosetta stone was used to translate ancient hieroglyphics) by using a longhand section of the diary as a key. It was quite an achievement, worthy of no short amount of acclaim. 

Somewhat disappointingly though, having decoded a big chunk of the books, it was eventually pointed out to Smith that the diaries might be written in Shelton’s Tachygraphy. This posed another problem, if this was the case, how would one go about learning it? It turns out Pepys had kept the textbook he had learnt from and it sat slightly above Smith’s head at the desk he was working at. Proof that, sometimes, the answer really is staring us all in the face. 

Monument

Dan Dodman is a partner in Goodman Derrick's commercial litigation team where he specialises in civil fraud and shareholder disputes. When not working, Dan has spent most of lockdown being taught about dinosaurs by his son and tinkering with his (growing) collection of film cameras.