In Our Time - The Fire of London

Episode Date: November 11, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Great Fire of London which destroyed up to a third of the city in 1666. Samuel Pepys described the scene in his diary:“all over the Thames, with one's face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops…and in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, we saw the fire …It made me weep to see it.”The London that rose from the ashes was a visible manifestation of ideas; of the politics, religion, economics and science of the heady Restoration period. Christopher Wren, of course, but also Robert Hooke, The Royal Society, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Restoration court of Charles II and, inevitably, building regulations. With Lisa Jardine, Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London; Vanessa Harding, Reader in London History at Birkbeck, University of London and Jonathan Sawday, Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, on a balmy evening in September 1666, Samuel Pepys sat in a pub by the River Thames and watched London burning. He wrote in his diary,

All over the Thames with one's face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of fire drops. and in corners and upon steeples and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the city, we saw the fire. It made me weep to see it. The great fire of London was a conflagration of barely imaginable proportion. Up to a third of the city was destroyed. But the burning of London, the interpretation of the fire,

and the arguments and ideas about what should be rebuilt gives us insight into a city and a period that housed the Royal Society and the restored Stuart Monarchy, a place of religious anxiety, and fear of foreign invasion in a country still haunted by the recent civil war. With me to discuss the Great Fire of London, a Jonathan Sourday, Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde, Vanessa Harding, reader in London history, Burke Beck, University of London,

and Lisa Jardine, a centenary professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London. Lisa Jardine, can we just start in 1665, the year before the Great Five, because that doesn't so much set the scene, but it shows, gives us an idea of the time. rather graphic. The graphic thing there was the play. Can you talk about that? Yes. So in 1665, you really do have London in turmoil. I mean, it goes beyond London, but London is in turmoil. You have a huge plague outbreak in the summer. You have war with Holland, the second Dutch war. You also have intellectual ferment, if we're allowed to be a little bit colourful about this, as well as the living and the dying, the terrible, horrors of the plague, those who left London because of the plague were busy in a ferment of

activity around science and discovery, understanding the heavens. When they looked at the heavens in that year, they saw a major comet, a major astronomical event, which they tracked with their new telescopes. They, incidentally being Sir Christopher Wren and his second in command, Robert Hook, who was curator of experiments at the new Royal Society. So you have both. death, devastation, war and intellectual innovation all in one. Let's try to get some idea of the scale of the death. London was, let's say, 350 to 400,000 people there? Bigger than that.

Bigger than that. Could we just ask for Nessa? You just get the figure right, because it can... 400 to 450, I think. All right, not 350 to 400, 400, 440. Because it's growing in. Let's settle for 450,000, okay? And in the plague, at least, here we go again, about 70,000?

Something like that. 70,000, so we're okay. So it gives us some idea of the city of about 4 to 450,000, 70,000's dead of the plague and all the thing around it. So we already have a devastated city. Yes. And then in Anumouton, in 1666, the fire breaks out, the great fire. Can you tell us about that year before, that summer, that of 66, if we broke out in September? Yeah.

I see that summer as being a moment of London holding its breath in a really quite dramatic way. People were expecting plague again because it had happened the previous year. It was cyclical. It happened obviously in the hot season. They had just, first of all, been subjected to quite considerable damage by the Dutch in the war. We mustn't forget the war. and in August, Sir Robert Holmes, who was notionally in charge of naval forces for England, for the king, set fire to 150 merchant vessels off Flea into Schelling in the Netherlands,

actually an act of piracy. That was also in August. In August, Wren was at the top of St. Paul's doing a survey with John Evel in the Dyrist because the king, in the midst of all this, wanted a continual. of Inigo Jones's renovation of what was actually a nearly derelict 16th century, sorry, a cathedral that had not been in good shape since the 1560s. And you also have, which I keep returning to, the scientists also up St. Paul's, doing experiments with long pendular and all sorts of other barometric experiments with the heights of St. Paul's.

There's a sort of holding your breath in expectation of something, and that something turns out not to be plague, not in the intensification of the war, not scientific breakthrough, but a terrible cataclysmic accident. Vanessa Hining, before we come to the accident itself, before we go to Pudding Lane, can you just give us some idea of the city itself? We've said 400,000, 450,000 people. What was it like? How is it built? What was it built of? Well, London in the 1660s is actually a fairly new city because so much of the growth has happened in the last 100 years. So either you've got new spreading suburbs

or you've got newly rebuilt fine houses in the centre. It's probably fairly uniform in what it looks like is that it's all made of brick and tile and plaster, but it's very various in the detail. So there are fine houses, wonderfully decorated, beautifully presented on the street, and then there are increasing number of spreading slums, really poor quality housing in which the quality of life is very poor indeed.

And there's a lot of wood in those houses, isn't there? They're almost all timber frame. There's quite a bit of brick around, but it's not really structural at this stage. So almost everything, and particularly because, as Lisa says, it's a long, hot summer, everything is tinder dry by the end of August. Can you just tell this as what you mean when you're saying London and what you mean when you're talking about the suburbs? People know there's the east end and there's the city,

and then there's the west end, and then there's the Chelsea Kendington and Bitton, and the south London, then, the North. But can you give us some idea where London was then? This is the right question to ask historians because we're always wondering what we're talking about. I suppose it extends from about Whitechapal to Piccadilly in Westminster. That's really the built-up area. And quite a lot of that is absolutely new, as I say.

The medieval core is the bit from the tower, including St Paul's down Fleet Street. And that's the densest and richest and best-built part of the city. And then there's the west end, the suburb, the courtly suburb, around Westminster itself. The Westminster is then a suburb, is it? Westminster is virtually a suburb of the city at that stage, yes. But it's where everything happens.

You say it's been built up very quickly in the previous hundred years. So it is very much a city of migrants, isn't it, at this stage? Yes, I would think that most Londoners are actually, if not first-generation migrants, not more than second-generation migrants. London's health is so poor that they're not producing large numbers of children, or at least not large numbers of children who survive. Is it all-called mainly because of the plagues? Not really, no.

It's just really poor infant care and infant survival. Something like a third of all babies born in London died. What's that to do? The sewerage, what's it to do? Or the non-surge? Well, I don't know. What does Lisa think about this? It's a way of life.

It's urban life. Urban life is both dangerous and poor. It's really difficult to say what the babies are dying of. So where are people coming from? are they migrating from different parts of the UK? Is there any worn frost coming in, say, from the north or west or whatever? By that time they're coming from the whole of the UK. There's quite a lot of people coming from Ireland because of the troubles there in recent years.

A lot of people coming from Scotland. A few comparatively small at this stage, but more soon coming from the Netherlands. But basically it's just drawing on the whole of England, Wales and Scotland. So we already have this mixed city, which is also the focus city. Okay. In the early hours of September the 2nd, a small flame kindled in a pudding street bakery. Can you take us through the first day or so of the events following that? It sounds as though people heard about it quite soon,

that Peeps was wakened by his maid servants to say, you know, there's a fire going on just down the road, and that to begin with, it wasn't necessarily any different from any other fire. There are always fires in London. They usually put out quite quickly. It's not quite clear how it managed to get a hold so soon, but really by halfway through Sunday morning we're talking about something that started first at 2 o'clock and Sunday morning

it's become beyond the scale of anything that already existed Let's be even more precise about this pudding street bakery Can you tell us a little more about that? What do we know about that? This specific place? It's an ordinary house like many others and what you find in London at this time is that there are businesses including bakeries

just interspersed with other properties so it's not a distinctively different kind of house it's an ordinary house that has a bakehouse at the back. And so you have, and the conflagration builds up quite quickly. Yes. And people, I might not be being, very few people were killed, will come to that in a moment, but people obviously be murray shifting houses. But there wasn't a great, there wasn't a huge anxiety at the start,

you're suggesting. Not at the very beginning. I think by midway through Sunday, as I say, they really are worried that something serious is happening, and Peeps goes up to Westminster and the Lord Mayor is running around in a state of panic. and people are thinking that what they need to do is to move their stuff away, to get out of the line of fire. But they don't think it's going to spread anything like as far as it does,

so they move their stuff a couple of streets away. Can I just turn to Jonathan, through a quotation, if you don't mind John. I quoted peeps at the beginning of the programme, another diarist John Evelyn in this cry said, the conflagration was so universal, that people so astonished that from the beginning they hardly stirred to quench it, so there's nothing heard or seen but crying out and lamentation, running about like distracted creatures without attempting to see,

save even their goods. So can you take up from Vanessa's, let's say we're in the Sunday, we're halfway through Sunday, Sunday of the first day. This is going to go for four, four and a half days. They don't know that at the time. I mean, this is a thing that's running out of control, and they're kind of desperately worried about, but what I think is rather interesting is Vanessa uses the word stuff. And when you read the accounts of the fire, the eyewitness accounts, peeps and Evelyn and others, there is this tremendous kind of emphasis on movable goods, on getting hold of your stuff and then kind of constantly

what the thing that's terrifying peeps all the time is not actually loss of life so much as what's going to happen to his material goods that he's spent so long building up so you get this impression of London being clogged the streets being clogged with people trying to move their stuff as it were and of course you know it's desperate

I mean they lose it all so much gets lost Peep's actually clever old peeps you tell the listeners what clever old peps do well the Parmesan cheese yeah I mean that other stuff his wine, his parmesan cheese, and some money, yet he buries it. But other people are doing that as well.

But he shipped everything away. Yeah, but people realised that putting stuff in the ground was actually the way to kind of keep it. So they're all frantically, you know, digging away. I mean, there are these terrible accounts of sort of scalded cats being dragged out of cellars, you know, alive. Underneath the ground, they realised was probably the place you were going to be able to keep hold of your stuff. Well, we've got a chance to concentrate on a small amount of time, which we don't often do. here. So let's stick with it. We're on first day, second day. People are rushing around it.

Can you just give us more detail how it's building up? You said the mayor who came out of this very badly. Bloodworth, poor old Bloodworth, he sort of has a bad fire. Some people have good fires and some people have bad fires. Bloodwood had a bad fire. Bloodworth is nominally in charge, I think, is that right, Messer

of the city. And his job is, as it were, to kind of try and contain or control this whole thing. But he's also sponsored by city merchants. He's his constituency are the people whose property he is supposed to be protecting. Now, they were very used to fires. I mean, I think something we need to be kind of aware of. Burning cities were not an unusual phenomenon in the 17th century or in earlier centuries. Parish churches had firehooks,

had scaling ladders, had means of combating the fires. Bloodworth knew that the way to deal with this outbreak of fire was to start pulling properties down, but he knew that in pulling properties down, he was incurring or possibly incurring the wrath of his supporters. So he's kind of caught in a clasp stick, he's in a bit of a mess on this. So by the I think the Monday, he knows exactly what to do, but it's kind of frozen

caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. He was a watery metaphor. He doesn't have the legal powers to do what he really needs to do. Because they knew how to control it. They pulled buildings down and so the fire couldn't leap that far across to the next building. They had fire engines not very effective.

fire engines, but they certainly had pumps. And of course, this goes back to what Lisa was saying at the beginning of the programme, you know, the interest in science and so on. I mean, people would be working on pumps, more efficient pumps and so on. They had, if you like, the apparatus. They knew what they should be doing, but it was actually getting people moving.

Because one of the things I think that comes out, if you read the Peeeps account, by the Monday, Tuesday, there's a sort of hysteria. People are frozen. They can't think through. And I think, I mean, you know, you can think of other examples, of cities that are under attack or find themselves in a kind of desperate situation, a kind of stasis, a kind of paralysis takes over. Well, this is an interesting sort of balance to get.

So Sunday morning, 2 a.m. in the morning, it's gone through Sunday. We've talked about Monday. It's a long time. This is no longer one of the normal fires over 17 days. It's also in the middle of this massively populated place. People will see London burning and Peeps is weeping. And John Evelyn is saying London was, but is no more. They know what's going on.

The mayor, is it incompetence at that stage? Or has the fire got... Can I just face it, sorry. Sorry. Or has the fire got literally out of control that all the engines they have can't control it anymore? I don't think it's incompetence. I'm sort of looking across at Vanessa on this one,

because I think... I would say he's not... That isn't what he thought he was being elected to do. You know, he's a businessman. The mayor? The mayor. So it's not in confidence, but it's dereliction of duty. He's just not...

prepared for this kind of thing. I don't want to get it right. So he's running around doing nothing when he should be pulling down houses of his supporters. Well, he's trying to organise people, but he's not thinking big enough. Well, he also actually went to bed in the end, didn't he? I mean, he gave up at a certain point.

And he just left the scene of the crime. But it is, I mean, in view of what Vanessa said about not having the powers to act, what is so interesting is that action only begins when the only people who do have those kind of powers, which is specifically actually James Duke of York, the brother of the king, who is lots of things that are suitable for this job.

He's the head of the Navy. He is a big bossy bully, but he also is a prime mover in the scientific establishment. So he knows what has to be done and has the ability to do it. Back to Jonathan Sordia for a moment. In the sense, as it were the mayor had it, you said, not me. The mayor had a bad fire. The royal

family, Charles and James particularly had a good fire. Yeah, I think they did have a good fire. I think James, James organised the kind of I think by about the second, third day he's sort of organising the outer defences if you like on the western side of the city and he's very much in the thick of it. I mean this is a kind of, you know, restoration aristocrat.

My view of restoration aristocrats tends to be that of, you know, looking at a picture of Lord Rochester or something like that in a full-bottom wig and being pretty ineffective. But quite clearly people rallied to. He had the charisma necessary. and he had the wherewithal to actually start doing what was necessary, which was the destruction of property.

He was blowing up, he was blowing up the suburbs, the outer parts, rather, of the city. And Charles, too, Charles II, again, you know, sort of dissolute and foppish, as we sort of perhaps tend to think of him now. He seems to have been decisive, both in the kind of period of the fire and in the aftermath. He's very clear about what has to be done. So it's kind of curious because you would have thought that here's this city, of kind of commerce, engagement, science and so on,

where you would have thought they would have been able to cope with this. And it's actually, in a sense, it's the old order. It's the kind of restoration court who have, you know, come over from France in the last five, six years, who were sort of, you know, drinking themselves under the table. It's actually that court that runs the thing effectively. It's very curious from that point of view. And as I, Harding, the fire burned over four days and nights.

Then they petered out on the 6th of September. It was helped to peter out by James. What, in general, What had been lost with about 90,000 people home, obviously a lot of houses, let's take that. What else, that's enough, but what else have been lost? Well, people seem to think that about 13,000 houses have been built, and as you say, about 80, 90,000 people have been displaced. But an enormous quantity of valuable commercial goods have been lost

because it burns right down to the water side where all the warehouses with the East India trade are. In particular, when it destroys St. Paul's, it also destroys all the stocks, of the stationers who have carefully put their books in the crypt of St. Paul's to be saved. When the roof of Stipa Falls falls in, that destroys that. So it's probably the stationers as a group who lose most of their commercial goods. The whole of John Wilkins's is a new language, book on a new universal character, the entire stock of that. These would be loose sheets as well, wouldn't they? They wouldn't necessarily be bound up books.

This was the final stock of that particular book. William Dougdale lost all of his. his stock. It was an absolute calamity for authors and stationers. It's almost impossible to estimate what the cost to individual traders was. I mean, some people say that they lost £1,000 worth of goods, £1,500 worth. Probably many people lost actually rather more than that. Just completely incinerated. And no insurance, of course.

No, no. And the churches, the old churches in that area? Yes, about 80 churches are burnt. They're not all burnt to the ground. In some cases, there's quite a lot left standing, because they're, They're probably among the few largely stone-built buildings, but they're still more or less destroyed and made unusable. And then we enter into blame, Leo.

Who was blamed? Well, right away. Right away. In the course of the fire, there are some very ugly scenes during those four days. Remember, Vanessa said this is a very mingled city, very diverse. People turned in the streets on anybody with a foreign accent, which turned out to be the French, French immigrants, who'd been there for a long time.

but we have records of French being beaten up in the streets and a blacksmith with an iron bar hitting random Frenchmen in the street over the head. And of course the Dutch viewed as responsible because we were at war with the Dutch. And we had just set fire to their merchant ships. For John Bresordo, in terms of the French, can you take us to Hubert?

Yeah, well, the French, I think, again, the court comes into play here because one of the things that I think Charles and the sort of the court supporters spend a lot of time doing is rescuing French people, random French people in the street. And of course, they are more open to the kind of the foreigner. But when you say, you know, because they themselves had been in exile, until very shortly beforehand, when you say blame though, who's to blame,

one of the immediate reactions is that London is to blame, that the city is to blame because it's a godless city. It's become Sodom and Gomorrah. It's become a city that has turned away. This is still a place, remember, that only Tony, years previously been a hotbed of republicanism and a hot bed of kind of sectarianism, sectarianism in the sense of the

kind of various radical sects of the civil war period. So the fire in some sense, in that sense, rather, is a justifiable punishment from a wrathful god. But one poor Frenchman actually gets... He gets hung. And to our, probably to our everlasting shame because he was a simple man who confessed to the fire,

actually wanted to confess to having... Even the judge... The judge who condemned him, I think, felt that this was probably, it was impossible for him to have done this. But they needed to hang somebody. Somebody had to be kind of. What about this judgment, Vanessa, but the judgment of God, how did that rate to the streets woe? And we have earned this retribution by our loose ways and bringing back the stewards and dissolution and turning away from. Well, the interesting thing is that, of course, you can blame anybody for it. I mean, either God is giving you a judgment for the restoration, therefore, for,

bring back the monarchy or God is judging you for, is judging London for its long-term republicanism, you know, that you can identify almost anything as being the reason why God might be striking you. Can you give us some idea? The fires petered over after five days. We've talked

about the number of people made homeless. Where did they go? How were they fed? What was going on? Some people just disappeared, I think. You get these accounts of people leaving their properties, and later accounts. People have left their properties and they just never come back. So they kind of disperse, you like. But I think if you think of

a sort of a third world city, the worst parts of a third world city, I think that's what London must have looked like. I mean, it become as a city of hovels, really, tense, you know, people living in the ruins. Oh, sorry. Well, it was well organised. I mean, we do, we have to get hold on the fact that after the

first chaos, the royal faction, and you know, Pepys is part of that, because Peeps is not just an onlooker in this, Peebs is actually he works for the Navy office, he's directing some of these operations. People are assembled at Moorfields, open land, the piazza at Covent Garden. The various open spaces are tented and the people go there with their rags and bits and pieces and what they've rescued.

They're then fed. And the king appears, at least at Moorfields. We have an account. Very early on, he appears at Moorfields on a horseback. He both distributes food. And he also tells them it wasn't the French. He makes an announcement that this is an act of God and that nobody is to blame.

But London would have looked extraordinary in that those people didn't, they did, as you say, slipped away to relatives and so on, but the majority stayed put because they had property to keep an eye on, what was left of their property. And so you have tented enclaves all around. It's where the sort of what they call the out parts,

what we, I suppose now would call the suburbs, sort of really come into play though because I think there's a sense of people dispersing into those kind of areas away from the centre because the centre becomes uninhabitable. I mean it's like a nuclear bomb, it's hit, the centre of London. Yes, though within quite a short time people are... I mean, as soon as the ground has cooled,

people are moving back and setting up little, you know, booths and hovels and so on, as you say, and trying to re-establish exactly where they were before because obviously there's bound to be a huge reconstruction project. So people want to not lose touch with where they were and with their customers and their neighbours. But they're moving back to a levelled place. One of you says you can stand on cheap side and look right down to the Thames.

They're looking back, this is a ruined, flattened, massive part, central part of the city. I would say ruined rather than actually flattened because there's an enormous amount of building debris. That's going to be one of the major problems is how they're going to clear that up. Because they've got to clear the streets so they can see where the streets were. They've got to clear the individual properties so they can rebuild. So I think that the images of the city that show it, as a shell rather than an absolute plane

are probably the accurate ones, that it was a terrible jumble, absolutely incomprehensible to begin with. We have then the tension aggrowing, Meera Jard, in the next few days, weeks, months and years about what sort of city is going to emerge from this? And there are broadly speaking two factions,

or those who want to go back and grab their plots of land and somehow I rather start again, where they were, get it going again. And there are those who say, this is an opportunity to build a magnificent new city, have it now. Let's go for that. Look at France. Look at France. It's doing all this magnificent, all this organisation, all this

public buildings. Let's do it here. So can you take us through the first moves on the second faction? That is those who want to build a grand city. Well, the first of those to get organised was Sir Christopher Wren, who much to the annoyance of the Royal Society, went straight to the... Royal Society has been founded in

1660. So it's founded in great... It's full of great persons. It's full of great persons. Well, it's full of great persons, full of great promise, but the London, but was mocked by the King for doing absolutely nothing. And they were therefore aggrieved that when something was done immediately by one of their senior members, Christopher, in fact, one of their founding members, Christopher Wren,

took a plan to the King, which was a radiating boulevard city with a new rebuilt St. Paul's radial streets, which would have resemble housemen, later Paris, the Arcter Triumph with the avenues. It's very grand.

It involves raising the city. It tells you, frankly, in a sense, how high and royalist Ren was, that he was actually

not thinking about the little, the muneupup, the little people. He was thinking about grandeur for the king. The king liked it.

However, within days, the Royal Society had got hooked to produce something which we don't quite know what, but was on a grid, rather like New York. Evelyn had produced a possible plan for the city, and these were the new guard. These were the people

who thought this was the perfect opportunity. Evelyn had written a pamphlet about the terrible state of the streets in the city before the fire. Wren also had talked about the state of the bad state, which Vanessa described to us. This was going to be a raise and rebuild. Jonathan, can you give us some idea of what

actually happened and how what actually happened as it rebutted most of, not all of, but most of what at least has described. These visionary plans, yeah, because the visionary plans never came about. What actually happened, of course, is the first thing that you had to know what had been lost. So the first thing that really happens is the beginning of the surveying. That's to say, to actually trying to measure the impact of the fire, but also to know who owned what. I mean, if you think about this, the aftermath, the immediate aftermath is one of chaos, trying to sort out. in a orbit of ground, so that any rebuilding that takes place, you know whose property you're actually building,

whose property you're getting reconstructed. The second thing that happens, of course, is trying to come to finance the whole thing. Charles II, very soon after the fire, issues a proclamation on the rebuilding of London, calling for the rebuilding of London. He recognises how vital it is to the whole country that this commercial centre is put together once more.

And as part of that proclamation, the fire courts are set up. The fire courts are a means of recompensing as far as was possible people, property holders, and sorting out the relationships between landowners, leases, tenants, etc., sort out who had the responsibility for building things. And then largely what happens is that London is being rebuilt over the next 20, 25, 30 years, but it's being rebuilt on pretty much the same street plan. The streets are a little bit more organised, slightly more organised, but it's pretty much the old street plan, because that's where people own the land.

That's the pattern of ownership. The pattern of ownership is being replicated in the city. That's what I thought, please, can you develop this? And I said the idea that these grand plans, some thought grandiose, but certainly grand and magnificent in their way, were stubbed by people saying, no, you kind of, that's my two square metres of freehold, and I own that freehold, as it were,

rebutted idealism in that sense. I think it's perhaps rebutting absolutism rather than idealism. And in a sense what happened... There was something idealistic in Wren. I mean, I think to call him an absolutist is a bit rough. Well, in a sense of what I was meaning is that, you know, it was royalism and absolutism that knew how to deal with a fire when it's an immediate emergency,

but it's actually the process of law and a much more democratic view of how London is going to be redeveloped that is what wins out. And so if the city has a bad fire or the city authorities have a bad fire, they actually have a very good rebuilding. Does the mayor emerge from his bed and come into the scene?

Yes, but he actually doesn't have that much longer to serve. So perhaps he's lucky he can then go away in October and it's somebody else's problem, the rebuilding. But really the way in which London's rebuilt is, I mean, it's not a model, but it's actually very admirable. the kinds of things that Jonathan was talking about legal frameworks to try and establish who owned what and how the cost of rebuilding

is going to be attributed, how people who lose parts of their properties when the streets are widened are going to be recompensed, who's going to pay for the public rebuildings, what sorts of rules are going to be made? It's actually, it's really very well organised. And so we are talking about this being done with regard to law, done with a sense of justice, done fairly,

we are talking about a good system at work here. It's quite extraordinary, and for me it's one of the things that indicates that London was poised for a kind of regeneration, even without the fire. The fire courts are put in place with extraordinary rapidity, and the people who are put in place, not just the judges, who seem to have acted pretty impeccably, but the people on the ground,

the hero amongst whom was my hero, Robert Hook, who was appointed by the corporation to be in charge of the surveying of, of the city. We have his accounts for dealing with the money that was given in restitution to households where they lost

a bit of land in order to widen the street or whether a neighbour got a little bit more land to make their city, their house sound. He never cheated anybody out of a hapenny. And the accounts down there, you can see the accounts in the Guildhall records, he makes these little sums in the margin. It's impeccable

administration. So we've got wonderful judiciary and impeccable. But the respectable administration. Is it because of that, Jonathan, that civil unrest is avoided? The administrative side? Yeah, I suppose that's a possibility, but I think the administrative side comes out as well in the way that London begins to be represented.

One of the things that changes after the fire is the way in which London is mapped, and you move from those familiar images of, you know, from Shakespeare's London, of the kind of little three-dimensional houses, into this very precise, and people like Hook, of course, absolutely responsible for this, very precise topography of London. The streets are measured.

You move from a bird's eye view of London to the kind of characteristic two-dimensional maps that we're used to the A to Z. It's sort of the A to Z emerges at this point. And a new sense of people's place in the city emerges. Whether it was the kind of good administration that prompted a break, the prompted, you know, the meant that wasn't. It wasn't the chaos and civil disorder. I don't know. I think that the authorities were clearly desperately frightened

that that was going to happen. The King's intervention and the necessity of rebuilding, the necessity of organised rebuilding, is perhaps tried to deal with that possibility. Can you talk a little more about Hookerba and about the speed of the operation? I think our listeners weren't, as I don't quite understand, how fast they moved. I mean, this was a terrible disaster, and yet they're in there on day six.

It's absolutely extraordinary. I mean, you know, the Hook writes about, I mean, the ground was hot. But they went to start surveying when it was too hot to stand for very long in one spot. As Vanessa said, there is debris everywhere. And to get us an idea of that, St Paul's, we talk about St Paul's being burned to the ground. It was going to take a year nearly of demolitions to get St. Paul's down so you could start rebuilding. So you'd have bits of walls. It was impossible situation to start surveying, but Hook did. He was a completely obsessive man. I think four people were appointed to survey, of whom only two survived the first week, one of whom was Hook, and it's pretty clear shortly thereafter that he's the only one who's working night and day.

He was a total insomomeroom. Hook's appointed by the city, isn't he? By the city, whereas the court appointed at surveyors and the city, but Hook is the one that holds for. Yes, but he was the lead city appointee, but there were four people who were going to measure and stake out, and they literally, Melvin, walk

the street with, of course, the local residents who come off more fields and say that was my bit and I own this and here's my deeds which I'm sure people would have taken with them and he stakes out with twine and wooden posts the streets of London

the blocks where people lived he was at he has in his diary we have a little bit of the period in his diary and he goes to seven or eight people's places of residents a day to check with them that the perimeter of their house is correct

Vanessa, do you want to talk about this, the beginning of the rebuild and how it was done? I would say that not much rebuilding takes place for the first six or eight months. They really can't start until the spring of 67. But by that time, the legal structures that allow people to have their foundations surveyed, to get a certificate that says this has all been checked and you can go ahead. And so there's probably about 800 building starts in 1667 and then 1,500, 1,500 and 1668. So, I mean, if this was December 1668, we would be looking at a city that's only partly rebuilt.

A lot of it is still to go. But that the systems are all in hand, that everything seems to be working and that I think by 68 people are really confident that it's going to happen, whereas at the end of 66, Peeps says, I don't think it's ever going to be rebuilt again. Jonathan, can you talk, were there, were there any, there must have been some internal tensions

and some disagreements and upsets. We are presenting not an idealised picture. I wouldn't use the word idealise again, but that's enough of a day at least. But so we are presenting a very good picture, which is fine and good, and if it's true, that's terrific. Well, I think it was a good thing. I think people behaved remarkably well. I mean, there was a search for scapegoats. Yes, we've talked about that.

There was this poor man who is hanged, but, you know, it felt even at the time that he's not really to blame. But there isn't a chaotic collapse. In fact, I mean, the fire enters the city's kind of, you like, mythos about itself, as being something which, you know, the image of the fire is a phoenix. It is a bird re-rising from the ashes again. And I think that that, although it seems rather sort of, you know,

perhaps almost romantic-romantic-sides, I think that actually is. It's one of those moments where romantic versions of history are probably appropriate. Was there, I mean, one little, one factor that have emitted, whether it goes to the Civil War, we just, this country just decapitated a king, not many years before,

60 and 17 years of the punishment. idea. It comes back to the idea that the city is a Sodom and Gomorrah, that the liberty in court and so on and so on. But remember as well that there is a kind of literature of burning cities that, you know, you go back

to your Bible, you'll find examples of cities that are destroyed through, you know, the agency of a wrathful God. And this is a population, a world, that has the scriptures absolutely at its fingertips. There's also the kind of literature, Republican literature, of the destruction of Troy. And one of the ways

in which London is figured after the fire is very much as Troy. Troy is burned to the ground disappears, but it becomes a kind of source of rejuvenation. It's the myth that the Trojans come to found Britain in the end. So there's a sort of literary

recycling. And of course, other cities had burned. London was not unique. Early modern cities were flammable places. But hardly on that scale. Not on that scale. We're talking about a kind of destruction that no other European city has seen

within centuries, as I would have said. Probably up until the Second War. Yes, yes. I had to repeat. It's a strange irony, isn't it? That in the first great fire, the Great Burning,

what came out of it was St Paul's, and in the second Great Burning, the blitz, what remained of it was St. Paul's. But I think we should grasp that idea, that moment, the rebuilding, you mentioned the rebuilding of St. Paul's. what is so striking about the rebuilding of the public monuments is they are rebuilt with full modernity. I mean, it's as if you've taken a deep breath and leapt a period

that otherwise London, because I think both Vanessa and I think that absolutism was not going to be allowed to triumph in this commercial world, it leaped a sort of almost leapt a generation. And the way you see that is that both St. Paul's and ultimately the monument of the Great Fire are conceived of from their inception as both buildings and scientific instruments so that the science is built

so that both are built to allow telescopic Zenith telescope observation. Now the idea that you plan your new buildings, you please the corporation of London, you please the Burgers of London, but you also quietly build in a state of the art facility for doing the kind of science

for which London will become famous for the next two centuries. Who is paying for this, Vanessa? The poor people who lived there mostly. Not the poor people, the middle class people. The people who paid for the rebuilding of private houses were on the whole the leaseholders. That what they negotiated with the help of the fire court with their landlords was that they would pay the capital cost of rebuilding

but they'd be granted long leases at low rents. So they pay the immediate cost, the freeholders tend to pay a long-term cost of loss of income, which is quite serious for institutions like Christ's Hospital or St. Bartholomew's Hospital, which own a lot of property, and therefore have something like a 60-year decline in their income. The public buildings are paid for by a tax on coal, which actually yields an enormous amount of money.

There's a nice to allow me. I was going to say, yes. But they raised, what is it, £40,000, £50,000, pounds, which is not enough to rebuild all the public buildings, but certainly makes an enormous contribution to it. One of the things I think that's very interesting after the fire is the way in which the concept of the street seems to change

and the visual sense of the city, I think, must have moved. You get this sense before the fire London as being an incredibly cluttered place, with signs coming out from the walls, with kind of visual signs of what people are doing. It becomes, I think, from reading the accounts, somehow less cluttered, signs are reorganised, the way in which the geography of the city is being mapped. It becomes a more topographically kind of coherent city. And the life of the street seems to change.

Ways in which private and public space are organised seem to shift in certain ways. So that there's a stricter demarcation of what is private space, what's public space. you're looking skeptical but I'm certainly agreeing with you about tidying up the streets because one of the things people have in mind is that they're going to widen narrow lanes they're going to open up cheap sides so that you can sort of more or less

move easily from one end of the city to another because they're already worried about traffic so that sense that you open up you aerate the central parts of the city I think is very important but when you're talking about private and public are you thinking sort of the development of coffee-hound you? I'm thinking of how in the literature

after the fire, the idea of walking the streets become such a kind of topos, such a kind of metaphor, of wandering around London, whereas I don't think in the sort of 16th century, in the early 17th century, you get that image of the city as a place of what... The idea of a flaneur, for example,

somebody observing, like Peep's observes, or even observes, it's something that seems to happen after the fire, and just doesn't seem to appear in the literature in the same way before the fire. I'm not sure about why that might be the cave. Well, perhaps the historian's response to that would be that building regulations, administration, the outcome of the fire courts,

this is a perfect city to flan, a perfect city to wander, because it is so beautifully structurally organised, and I'm afraid that Melvin's hope that there might have been subversion beneath. It's a nice, it's a wonderful story of everybody in London pulling together. It wasn't a hope. It was just, I was just trying to pick away what really happened. It's very nice you being a French word to play at the end of this conversation. Thank you very much, Lisa Jardine and John & Sorda and Vanessa Harding.

We didn't get much of peeps or evening in Sarmine. Bang masses of it into the newsletter. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.