Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 80: Great Fire of London

Episode Date: August 25, 2021

the pope did it the very great and capable staff of Current Affairs magazine were laid off by their boss for the crime of organizing a worker co-op - you can financially support them here: https://cash.app/$pastaffairs and read their statement here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qzPaisfCy0wNwVYxwaf443z8Aom4ELTU/view TICKETS FOR THE LIVESHOW: https://www.caveat.nyc/event/well-theres-your-problem-9-3-2021 Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp we are working on international shipping Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance

And I am like premeditating ahead of time, an act of like deadly violence against them. Having a nice time, we're recording having a nice time. Having a nice time, yes. So. No, I'm not gonna, I'm not, all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna like get the, you know, get their job taken from them and like sue them. No, that's fine. You put those law skills to work, girl.

Oh yeah, definitely. I'm calling, I'm calling this illicit during the morning and it's gonna be a whole thing. Sorry. I need to disclose to our listeners, as an apology ahead of time, I am on vacation with my girlfriend's family at an undisclosed location. My girlfriend's sister has taken up the kitchen table, so I am recording outside in a resort community. You also sound like you have the fucking hantavirus, is the thing.

I, Alice, I have been drinking nonstop for four days, I, I feel great. I'm wearing, I'm wearing white sweatpants and a camo hoodie, so let's hope I don't get my period. All right, scene here, let's get started. Scene here is what Alice is gonna do tomorrow morning to the city of London. That's right. That's right. Yeah.

Because I am deranged with fury, you know, I just realized. Yes, Roz. This is, this is a picture of the wrong fire. It's fine. It's fine. It's a fire, it's state stuff combusting, it's, it's, is it in London? Of course it is. Yeah, it is in London.

It's the fire of 1861, not the one we're covering today. Well, we're only off by 205 years. Everything before like 1870 happened at the same time. Yeah. You know how like it's been 2016 for the last five years and also it's already 2030. It was, it was a lot like that in that like everything prior to the 1870s was just a day. You know, I took one look at that fandom time hypothesis and I was like, yeah, that sounds about right.

Yeah. Kasparov believes it, you know. Yeah. Does Kasparov believe that? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if he's backed off of it now, but he was like one of the big like adherents of the like missing time theory.

So welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who is talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I am Alice Coldwell Kelly. I am the person who is talking now.

My pronouns. She and her. Hi. I'm Liam Anderson. Yeah. I'm the protest. The time zone difference is kicking my ass a little bit. My pronouns are he and him.

That night. Where are you? Disclosed location. Oh, man. I'll tell you where I am. I'll tell you. Weather's really nice this year. How beautiful, bright, sunny, redacted.

Yeah. Beautiful. Yo, I'm in a place known for its beautiful weather. It's gray. It's overcast. I'm in a, as far as I know, I'm in some sort of resort community. I wanted to be there. I, the last couple of days, a bit of blur.

Oh, man. Fear and loathing in unannounced location. Redacted. Yes. All right. So what you see in front of you are buildings that are on fire. This is the wrong fire, but it is in the right place. What for telling that?

I was saying before we started, man, the slides for this are looking great. I'm really happy with how these came out. Not already. Already screwed this up. Today we're talking about the great fire of London of 1666, not 1861 as is depicted here. So what happens when you don't, you don't read things before you put them on the slide? I don't even know how to read, so honestly, should I start drinking Scotch now or later?

Now. Yeah. I guess now. All right. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, today we're going to talk about the great fire of London. I also wanted to say before, before we get into this, you may have heard that the entire staff of current affairs magazine was fired by Nathan J. Robinson because he caught small

business owner disease. Yeah. I just wanted to say, you know, I know these people, they aren't like Afghanistan refugees, but like, you know, they have, there is a solidarity fund you can contribute to. I'm going to put that in the description, right? Nice. Anyway. And please do not judge all people who dress like ridiculous, fancy, like 18th century

dandies for Nathan J. Robinson. This is not a disease that is caused, it's a disease caused by like you owning a small business. Same thing happened to Senkweager. It's like, it's not something that's like inherent in the cravat. Yes, exactly. It's not, the clothes don't make the man. Anyway, let's let's go on to the goddamn news.

Yes. Yes, as as it's corrupt and despised leaders flee their offices with suitcases full of cash, the nation of Afghanistan faces an uncertain future. And it's true. We're having a bit of a Suez moment, a bit of a Saigon moment. Everybody. Yeah, I wanted to say real quick that, you know, obviously the United States Division of Afghanistan, given that Taliban, as far as we know, and who knows that

they would have kept up their end of the bargain was willing to hand over Osama bin Laden on September 12th, and this war never needed to happen. I just wanted to say that it is absolutely fucking disgraceful that the United States did not simply sit at Kabul Airport with all the C-47s and say, come on board, we've got room. It's absolutely a fucking atrocity. We should be ashamed of ourselves as a country. We should be ashamed of ourselves as human beings.

Yeah, you know, that my position wasn't is that you can hold the airport, basically add infinitum. What are they going to fucking do about it? And you simply load up the C-47s and you say, come on board. And if you're my dad and in his ingenious ways to his his counter to people who were like, well, where are you going to put them all? Was Guam for some reason? My dad was just like, Guam's nice.

You're going to have to vastly enrich the culture of Guam. Not in a xenophobic way, but just like, oh, they're so worried about where we're going to put them. That's what Guam's for. And then he said, and then he said, who said imperialism is bad? Oh, my gosh, you know, this is this is just like classic classic empire stuff like doing doing a horrible idea, doing it badly. And then even as you end it, you fuck up doing that too.

Right. I mean, I can run. Can run exactly. Yeah. And and now it's China's problem, which I wish them every success with it. You know, I I'm reminded of of obviously how we fucked over the Kurds. But you remember that I think that No Reservations episode where the Kurdish man is saying to Anthony Bourdain, like, oh, the United States are our friends. And like, we know we know that we can trust the United States.

Like, obviously, as leftist, as anarchists or as an anarchist myself, you too, as communists, you shouldn't have any faith in empire. But like, you should believe that you're feeling your feelings. Right. Because you could absolutely have simply sat at Kabul Airport with all the C forty sevens. And if the Taliban or whoever tries to take it in advance on Kabul Airport, you simply blot out the sky with Daisy Cutters. Well, I mean, the fun thing is, Britain, in particular,

we're getting absolutely deranged about this because I've seen this. Yes, our national press is having fits about the idea of like, why can't we do that any of this unilaterally? Why are we dependent on the whims of sleepy Joe Biden? And the answer is because, you know, we haven't been a world power and going on 70 years, but we've hyped ourselves up so much that we still absolutely believe that we are and we've alienated every other possible ally.

So we're just in with you guys. We're not even a junior partner. We're just along for the ride, but we cannot accept that. And so we're just like, you have all of these Tory MPs who like, we're all like, you know, guards officers in Afghanistan who are like, well, I think we should just go back in and reoccupy the place. And like, no, sorry, that's not your decision. That's that's the decision of one senile man in Washington, D.C.

They couldn't even do that at the height of the Empire's power. No, they got their asses kicked in the 1840s. Also, yes. In the 1880s, I think. I can't. There have been three British invasions of Afghanistan. Yeah. One really disastrous, two only mildly disastrous. And for more about Afghanistan, please listen to our sister show. Lion's Blood by Doggies. Yes, the Soviet Afghan, the Soviet Afghan

Ark taught me a lot about, I guess, Afghanistan. But yeah, I just want to. Alice had a really good point about it can still hurt your feelings and it can still be disgraceful that you you don't do the best you can to the thing that everyone on the plains. The thing that got me with the Biden administration that activated a sort of like Tory lobe of my brain that I didn't even know existed was the Biden administration briefing that,

like, well, you know, the Afghan national forces, they lost the war because they didn't want it badly enough. They didn't have like the will to fight. And I was just like, and not only is this disgraceful, it's like actively dishonorable, you would say this. Yes, yes, I had the same thought about about about a country that had like an order of magnitude, more combat casualties in this 20 times more casualties than we did.

Like to say and also, like, you know, when you. If you're my age, I'm 29 years old, you saw the first Afghani civil war. You saw the Taliban make incredible advances as a child. And then you've known nothing but conflict for 20 years. And now they're taking 60 percent of the country in a matter of weeks. You know, I, I, I don't know how much I'd like my chances if someone came into my village and said, yes, we know you're part of the Afghan

National Army, but I've got your baby daughter here and a bayonet to her throat. Wouldn't you like to cooperate? Or even just the opposite of that, which is the, you know, would you like to get paid for the first time in nine months? Yeah, and not have your commander steal all your money and or a warlord or whomever. Yeah, we put the worst people in the country with like maybe one exception in power and now the maybe one exception or in power instead, which is just fantastic.

Yes. Ah, 20 years, 20, almost perfectly coming up to the anniversary of 9 11. And yeah, no, it would have been more profitable and more moral and more effective, not just for the United States, but for all the peoples of the world, if the response to 9 11 had been to do nothing. Yep. All right, well, well, in other news.

Meanwhile, as it's corrupt and despised leaders flee their offices with suitcases full of cash, the nation of New York faces an uncertain future. He has resigned. Andrew Cuomo resigned. I think he was gonna, I think he was gonna. I really thought he was gonna drop from the last episode where I stupid was like, yeah, he's not gonna fucking resign. Of course he did.

Braz and I thought that he would say sort of psych at the at the 11th hour and and simply said, I don't know, organize some sort of presidential kill. Fortified. He was going to use. I thought he was going to use Hurricane Henry as an excuse to stay in office. I really did. I really did, too. And declare some sort of out. Yeah. I mean, he managed to like abandon his dog on the way out, which was quite funny.

Curtis Liu is now like in Albany trying to mount a rescue mission for Cuomo's dog captain. This guy is a piece of work with Iron Woods. But in terms of I want to say again, I made the point when we recorded the Cuomo episode. But, you know, when these people, whether they be like on your team, ostensibly on your team in quotes, you know what I mean? I you should be absolutely fucking furious when people do this.

Like not not just like a like, I know that it's hard to still get angry at shit like this when we know about Epstein and all that. But no, you should still be pissed off. But you should still be pissed off. Andrew Cuomo should be beaten with should have a nice time. No, that's fine. You didn't say what he might what he should have been beaten with. It could have been anything like a wiffle mat.

Yeah, I just like, man, I I am so fucking, you know, I'm tired myself. Obviously, we're all exhausted all the time because everything sucks ass. But you you can still get pissed off when people fuck up like this. And that's the compromise like times up on the way out, too, which another another great move. Yeah, I just I I hate these fucking people. You have a voice one more time for all time.

So yeah, Roz, I just want to tell the people of New York. Thank you for electing me to office. There's there's a great fucking article by great. I mean, it's a terrible article by one of these women who was like, I'm a homosexual back in the day. It's like, are all of army and all of my friends stupid? No, I don't think so. I think we were fooled by like the Svangali like powers of Andrew Cuomo.

Yes, here being the most seductive man in New York. It really is a sad day for Italian Americans. This just goes to show representation within the institutions is never going to be profitable. It's never going to get you what you want. You're right. The system, the system reifies itself. You don't solve capitalism with no Italian capitalism.

Let's see. Let's see. Italian Malcolm X. Mario. Oh, fuck it. It actually might be Sacco and Vanzetti. Yeah, Sacco and Vanzetti, Roz. Yeah. We ain't going to fight capitalism with the cap with Italian capitalism.

I can't wait to see Andrew Cuomo take on his years of lead phase. What do you think is like post gubernatorial thing is going to be, though? Because like he's going to write a memoir, dude. You already wrote a memoir. He's going to write another one. He's going to write another one. I want I want this is perfect for the like the thing of the like news segment of this episode is I want a bookshelf that has two books on it.

One is like Cuomo's leadership lessons from Covid. And the other is Ashraf Ghani's How to Fix Failed States. These are the only two books I am going to read. All right, I'm calling it. That was the goddamn news. How are you? So we have to start by asking a question. What is London?

It's the only city in the United Kingdom. It's true. There's no others. You may have heard of Birmingham. That's in Alabama, Manchester. That's in New Hampshire. That's right. That's right. Newcastle. I'm pretty sure it's in Australia.

No, I genuinely cannot stress enough how much like if you haven't lived, if you haven't lived here, because I grew up in London, London is the only place in the United Kingdom. Everywhere else is like devoted to the service of London. It is like the only place that's allowed to be. It is it is the United Kingdom's elder God. Yes, yes, absolutely. All other cities must must pay tribute.

Yes, and it's and it's shit. It's absolutely shit. It's a shit hole. I've picked out for quiet state. Yes, literally, I did. I did a sort of like I did myself a brain injury here, picking out a little mood board of like things I can think about when I think about London. And, you know, we have like some some pigeons shitting on some

likes and boris bikes. We've got Pound World. We've got a guy on a penny farthing in Shoreditch. We have guys, the two guys who opened the serial themed cafe that like costs three pounds fifty for a bowl of cereal. We have local newspaper advertisements, most notably Ghost Haunts Council flat. Previous episodes, the the Grenfell Tower fire,

some parking dispute and a screenshot from Children of Man. And that was how I was able to like sum up what London's deal is. And there's also there's a part of London called the City of London. Yes, which is different. It's not the City of London. The City of London is different from the City of London. Yes. The City of London with a capital C is like roughly a square mile of of like

essentially enclosed mercantilist bullshit that like is also the financial centre of London. And it has its own like its own sort of boundaries. It has its own police force. It has certain like legal privileges like the Queen cannot enter the City of London without advanced written permission. And, you know, that's very tight. Yeah, yeah.

Like the whole deal is that it was like entirely a sort of like merchant enclave. And it kind of like it became that over time. During the time when we're we're talking about this episode, like normal people live there. But at this point, like the City of London is like this, like maybe like 2000 people who actually live in it. Yeah, 2000 people and shitloads of corporations.

Oh, yeah, it's just a bunch. It's tax advantage, too. So, you know, it's kind of like it's like Delaware. It's a very inhospitable place to be as the thing. It's very like sort of like brushed steel like plate glass. There's no street furniture or anything and all of the like there's no bins, most notably, because they welded all of them shut during the IRA bombing campaign of the 1980s.

Yeah, Lord. Hmm. So if I want to throw out my trash, I just do it on the gleaming sidewalk. Nobody has trash in the city is the thing. Yeah, if you if you look as if you have trash, that you are escorted out. I have been given a mimosa.

So, yeah, finally, I can start drinking. Very nice. Additionally, what is baking? What is baking? Baking, I mean, I'm not a food scientist, but I think the way to describe it for our purposes is that you it's a way of burning down a city that sometimes incidentally produces bread. Yes.

You hear one of the national foods of Philadelphia. That's right. Yes, you put you put some yeast and some dough in an oven and then the oven gets very hot and then the thing rises and it makes a bread or a cake that you can eat. But then also you have a very, very hot oven and in particular, like that oven used to be fueled with like coal or just wood. Yes.

It's very dangerous. So now before we talk about the whole thing, we got to we got to do some historical context. I hate when we do that. The English Civil War and the restoration. Yeah, see, seen here, the image is the the war banner of I think it's his name is Horatio Carey's Regiment of Horse, which was entirely designed to like taunt

opposing royalist commanders by calling them cocks. This is some big return to tradition right here. We love these. Is this a dog in a barrel? Yeah, I think it's like making fun of a guy's coat of arms. But I'm not I'm not exactly sure how. It's sort of like a vexological shitpost. Yeah, this is great.

The other side of it, by the way, says cuckolds, we come. Oh, well, you do you, man. Alice, you wrote this slide. Tell us about the Civil War. No, I didn't. June wrote this slide. Oh, well, in any case, the English. June wrote the slide. Not June. I fucked up.

Ann Marie. Ann Marie wrote the slide. Oh, sorry, Ann Marie. Ann Marie wrote the slide. Yeah, no, I would just extemporize about the English Civil War. OK, so essentially, like we never really had a like a revolution and sort of like fun class sense in England, but we did behead one of our kings, Charles the First, for essentially trying to do too much like

too much kingly shit, trying to like use his royal prerogatives to rule like a French king would or like a Catholic would. And those two things are going to be like very closely linked in the English imagination of like foreignness and Catholicism. And so like out of a combination of sort of like desire to preserve the largely invented, but like is somewhat like popular rights of parliament against the king

and also to, you know, preserve Protestantism and Puritanism. Parliament raised an army and fought the king and won. And Charles the First got beheaded at the Banqueting Hall in London. It's I mean, this sort of resulted in a period of like purge and counter purge and also resulted in Oliver Cromwell making himself making himself Lord Protector of England, abolishing the celebration of Christmas and also doing

some of the worst war crimes in England's history, which is saying something in Ireland. He tried to like pass this this like Lord Protector thing onto his son, didn't really work out. And we got the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, where Charles the Second, Charles the Son, got returned from his sort of like very fancy boy upbringing in France and brought back a lot of fun French things,

but hopefully no Catholicism. All right, well, you know, without hesitation, deviation or repetition. What does that mean? Oh, I'm it's from just a minute. It's like a BBC radio show where like the guests have to like talk about a thing about which they sort of vaguely know for a minute without hesitating or repeating themselves or going off topic.

I was conveying that I was proud of myself, that I had managed to like do a sort of potted summary of the English Civil War. I see. So like one of the effects of this, right, is that London is a big stronghold of like, I guess you'd say Republicanism, right? Yeah, you know, they were they were big on Oliver Cromwell. They didn't like the monarchy, right? The Restoration happened 1660, I think.

Or there are about 6658, 1660, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we're about six years past this in London, right? So the English Civil War is over. The Restoration has just happened. They just had a plague outbreak, right? The immediately previous year. Yeah. Yeah. And London at this point was a big city.

I want to say about 500,000 people, which for 1666, that's a lot of people. Massive. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, they sort of grew over a long period of time, relatively rapidly from being sort of the consumer of last resort for the Hanseatic League, right? Which you can learn about a little bit in our beer bonus episode. And to his merchants, sort of guild precincts, sort of like formalized mercantilist rule over the city of London.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Every everything comes down to the Hanseatic League eventually. And they had a giant like a sort of like essentially like a German embassy compounds just occupying bits of London like a spaceship. Um, it was run by Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth, right? Who was kind of, you know, bad guy in a movie ass name. Yes. Oh, yeah. This is the guy who's like his opening, his opening sequence.

This is him like very long, dark coat, whistling to himself. An orphan begs him for change, and he just like stomps him back into the gutter. Like adjusts his his coat frock and just like he's a puppy. I should also point out that like trying to get the formula for the everlasting gobstopper. Also, I should point out that like England is more or less in a sort of a cold war at this point.

Like we're still deep in the morass of the European wars of religion, which is to say that there's this absolute paranoia that Catholic Europe, there's Spain in particular, France in particular, are just going to come over and vade and make everybody be Catholic. The worst thing you can be. Yeah, that's that's trying to get the recipe for the everlasting. Exactly, exactly. I'll be knowing I'll be knowing to them.

Willy Wonka is a commander in the IRA. Now, if you'll follow my diagram. Yeah, they wouldn't let Willy Wonka on TV because that's abandoned. Yes, yeah. Also, we actually were at war with the Dutch at this point. But we were kind of like one of those on again, off again, trade wars. We're like occasion. Yeah, like I think they had like, you know, it's one of those things

where they they every once in a while, they sail up the Thames and set fires to a bunch of stuff for the most part is like some light piracy. Yeah, yeah, it's like Burning Town, Rotterdam. They're just, you know, every every once in a while, you got to let these Dutchmen know their place, you know. They got the damn truth, Ross. So all right, there's lots of paranoia over this, you know, sort of vague, vague, cold, warish sort of situation in London.

Now, London is a big city and it's made mostly of wood. And that seems foreboding. Yes. One of the most common types of buildings was a sort of tenement, right? And these were all these were all built with a technique called jettying, right? As you can see here, each successive floor can of levers out farther than the floor below it. Oh, it looks real dangerous.

Oh, yeah. And one of the weird things is this actually made the buildings easier to build. It also gave you a little bit more floor space. Supposedly it made the building a little bit more stable just because of how the woodwork is done, right? Makes the streets very narrow at the top, though, kind of blocks out the sunlight. You get these long winding lanes. It used to be a sort of a measurement of these things that like if you you could

actually like reach into the house across the street from the top floor. Yes. And and the ones we see on the screen here are only three stories tall. Some of the ones in London's some of the ones in London would go up, you know, six or seven stories, right? You know, essentially touching each other at the top. You know, it's some it's some it's some like Harry Potter, Diagon, Alice. Yeah, yeah. So extremely janky.

And in addition to this, London had a whole lot of warehouses, right? Hmm. Yes. A warehouse, a warehouse is a place where you store stuff, right? Yes, we don't really do those anymore because we have just in time logistics, which works really well. But also, particularly for for London, like you have to put the warehouses by the river because all of the stuff comes in and goes out by the river. And ideally, you want to move this shit as little as possible.

Like, if possible, you want to like move it off the shit and put it in the warehouse with the same crane. This is like, I think it's the pool of London, but this is 18th century and you can tell that it's 18th century. Sorry, the what of London? The pool of London. It's like a sort of like, yeah, it's like a sort of like lagoon, I guess. It's where everyone can go for a swim.

Yeah. Wow. But like the reason you can tell this is an eight year one. The reason you can tell this is an 18th century painting is because the warehouses are made out of brick. You can really build like a large structure out of brick and in the 17th century, certainly not in the 1760s. What you would build it of was like maybe stone, if you're lucky, but like probably just wood. Wood. Yes.

And there's this like the stuff that's getting moved in and out that you've got like grain, which is tremendously dangerous, the love to explode, gunpowder, which is tremendously dangerous because it loves to explode. Yes, like it textiles cotton linen. And like any number of things that burn really, really well, just say anything associated with like like for leather tanning. Yeah. Are they using like like, you know, we know now, obviously,

the like in in haberdashery, mercury makes you go mad. But are they are we at the point where they discovered these processes and are using these like elements, chemicals? I don't think so. I think I just didn't know off the top of my head. Yeah. But in any case, it's like there's basically no sort of attention. Because I don't I don't I don't I don't love the way mercury fire rolls off my tongue. There's just a huge ship rolls in and, you know,

the stevedars are hauling out big sacks that say Ye Olde Ampho. Ye Olde IRA led by Ye Olde Commandot Willy Wonka. Yeah, it's revenge for Drageta. Yeah. So, no, this is like, obviously, a huge, huge safety issue. But like, it's also the more or less the driver of the whole city's economy and keeping everybody fed. And like, this is at a point where, you know, food riots and no joke, right? So you don't want to mess around with this stuff too much.

Ideally, you want to leave this to sort of generate money on its own and hope that nothing to to catastrophic happens. Yeah. And then another another aspect of it is with the gunpowder. You know, since the English Civil War, it just happened. People are still, you know, storing black powder in their houses. Yeah, just in case. Just in case. Yeah. It's cool being a minute, man. Exactly. It's it's called the second amendment, folks.

I know it's my rights. You know, Willy Wonka just up the lane. He'll hook you up. Seventeenth century liberal being like the guys who drafted the like Magna Carta never imagined that you could have pike and shot at the same time. Listen, what Tyler would have been a lot more efficient if he had the guns? We're we're we're going to we're going to do piecemeal gun regulations by banning bayonets. Yeah.

You do like a reserve thing. You have to put like a special like longer than five and a half feet. This is actually the salt pike, if you have it this long. To pay a tax stamp. Any man who can load more than more than five rounds a minute is a matter society. All right. And I see here, William Penn,

hero of Pennsylvania, putting out a fire. Early modern firefighting is seen here. This is a keeling engine. So we're basically in sort of in and cap territory here, right? Because there's there's no there's not a professional firefighter. That's an invention of the 19th century. It's either a sort of an amateur civic responsibility like a militia, where like in order to show that you're sort of like

a prominent man of standing in your community, you join this sort of like amateur firefighting organization and you like put out fires when you need to. Or it's sort of a private operation run by an insurance company. And I mean, private fire brigades are great. I love a private fire brigade ever since like at a minimum ancient Rome, like Crassus, you may it may have heard of as one of the conspirators to assassinate the richest one, the money guy. He got rich by owning private fire brigades.

And the thing of the private fire brigade is that you only fight fires in the buildings that you insure. You typically have like a little plaque up on the outside that says, you know, this house is insured by, you know, such and such a company. Therefore, please put it out when it's on fire. But that's a great way of generating new revenue and new customers because you show up to someone whose house is on fire and you're like, oh, would you like a policy or alternatively?

If you want to buy their house very cheaply, you can be like, would you would you like us to give you, you know, five pounds for this house? Or would you like to own a heap of rubble? And like it in a large city and London is at this point, a very large city, you would have multiple competing brigades. It wouldn't be like a sort of a municipal department. It would be like whatever like organization individuals could put together.

Yeah. And and and so, you know, these these there, there are like early modern fire engines they have by this point. You know, they're very primitive. You can see here they're they're they have to manually pump the doohickey. Yeah, it's like two pairs of bellows, one of the agenda. Yeah. Some of them don't even have wheels at this point. You just drag it on a sled. You just carry it. Oh, Jesus.

Interestingly enough, London had a rudimentary municipal plumbing at this point. They had a water supply system made of wooden pipes under the street. Jesus. Yeah. They were they were fed by a water tower. Water was pumped up to that water tower by water wheels underneath the underneath London Bridge, which, you know, those are made of wood.

And of course, they're next to all the flammable warehouses. And London Bridge, of course, has a bunch of flammable buildings on it. Yeah, there is no possible flaw with this plan. Yes. Now, if a fire got big, these fire engines weren't very good at solving the fire issue, right? So then you have to move on to your secondary firefighting tactic, which is fire breaks, right?

Yeah, same way we fight like wild wildland fires now. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Tear shit down that's in the way of it. Exactly. You just you just remove the buildings and then there's less fuel available for the fire. This is annoying because you have to, like, tear down whole buildings with like people stuffing them very quickly. Yeah. And like with hand tools as well.

Yes. Like generally speaking, your experience of like firefighting is a couple of dozen very large men show up and like they essentially tear your house apart with pickaxes. Yes. So anyway. Knowing knowing all of this, knowing everything from the restoration to baking to early modern fire engines armed with this knowledge. We can now talk about September 2nd, 1666. Yes. So a man named Thomas Farrener had a bakery on Pudding Lane, right?

Nominative determinism. Yes. Yes. And shortly after midnight, it caught fire because he didn't quench his ovens properly. No. Yeah, he claimed that like both he and one of his dorsals like checked to make sure there were no embers and like he raked over the coals to make sure that the ovens weren't weren't smoking. I submit, given that we can't lie,

but the guy who's been dead for 400 years, that this is what we might call a lie. Mm hmm. To wake up. Yeah, he's tired. Yeah, he's tired, you know. Long day of baking the tasty cakes. Yeah, exactly. He's got, you know, there's some sort of evil

megalomaniacal corporation moving in on Pudding Lane. Yeah, he's got to stay up all night worrying about Catholics. He he and his he and his family managed to escape the fire by climbing out of a window. Yeah, their maid wouldn't leave the building, though. She didn't want to fall out the window as a result. She died in the fire. Oops, lady. Fall out of the window. Fall out of the window.

It's better than the alternative. Yeah, even knowing 17th century treatment for like a broken leg or something. I I still just jump out the window. Yeah. So that the neighbors woke up and they were like they came out to help try and douse the flames, too. But, you know, they didn't quite didn't quite put it out, right? And about an hour later, you know, the firefighters showed up

to sort of private fire brigade. They determined that, all right, we're we're probably going to need to do a fire break to contain this properly. And the name was like time to this. Fireplaces have loved doing this shit. You ever seen a firefighter when they work out that they're allowed to like break in a window or a door? I love that shit.

Really, really excited. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, shit, I get to break stuff. Yeah, I don't even looking. Yeah, I think we're going to need a fire break for this. Yeah. And that really gets me. Oh, go ahead, go ahead.

The neighbors, the neighbors protested this decision. They're like, I don't don't tear down my house. But it's your job. Yeah, they didn't want to lose their homes and businesses. So they have to call the mayor to issue the order. To tear down the houses, right? Now, by the time Mayor Bloodworth arrived, the adjacent houses were also on fire and an even larger fire was firebreak was necessary, right?

Firefighters are just like, yeah, you called. Yeah, you stalled for time, baby. We're all these hands together. And and Mayor Bloodworth, you know, was like unwilling to, you know, start condemning houses and, you know, start votes. Yeah, those are votes. Yeah, you know, that's the property of his cronies as well. And he told the firefighters, nah, just put the fire out.

Put the fire out. He said he said he said a woman could piss it out and left. Oh, OK, bye. He doesn't know what he doesn't know will hurt him. Fire breaks, fire breaks everywhere. So that's such a like great move to be to the firefighters. Like, yeah, have you tried putting it out? Idiot, if you try.

Yeah, as we know, put the wet stuff on the red stuff, the wet stuff. As we know, as we know from the the Texas oil explosion, many firefighters had to stand in the line proudly jerking themselves and their buddies off a heroic elephant, a heroic elephant walk in the face of grave danger as the mayor of London said, a woman could come out. Yes. So whatever our biggest primary sources here is the diary of Samuel Peeps, who was a member of parliament and I think later chief secretary of the Admiralty.

He wrote like volumes and volumes of diaries of which he documented everything. And my favorite line from any of Peeps's diaries is about his his neighbors toilet leaking. And so he records in his diary that he stepped out into the street and doing this sort of like like restoration thing of capitalizing every word, stepped directly into a and great heat of turds. So Sunday morning, you know, this fire has been burning all night.

He ascended the Tower of London to view the conflagration, right? And he saw that by this time, about 300 buildings were burning, including some on London Bridge. Yeah, which as you see here, just has built on the top of it. It's like a street. Yes. And and he was like, oh, not good. He went, he went to go carry word to King Charles II at Whitehall, right? And this starts to sort of back and forth, right?

Because Charles II doesn't want to interfere in the affairs of London. You know, it's sort of like it's supposed to be like a good faith gesture, you know, to regain the trust of Londoners, right? But but on the other hand, the Lord Mayor is clearly not doing his job. Yeah, you might say they're having a bad time. Yes. So, you know, when Charles II learns about the fire, he told Peeps to go back and tell the Lord Mayor

to start doing some goddamn fire breaks, right? You know, and Peeps goes back. He finds, you know, Lord Bloodworth is not doing so great trying to to command the fire breaking effort, right? He's having an anxiety attack. He's quite literally having an anxiety attack. He's like like a fainting woman, I believe he was described as. So and he was saying that, you know, the fire breaks that he ordered

the fire was overtaking the houses before the breaks could be completed, right? And eventually. Eventually, Charles II came down to inspect the scene himself, because, you know, if you want a job done, right, I guess you got to do it yourself. And he saw, of course, that, you know, the fire breaks weren't really being done at all. And just completely overrode the Lord Mayor to get them done properly. And but by this time, you know, the fire is very bad. I mean, it's sort of a raging inferno.

It's creating its own weather and updraft, feeding the fire through, you know, sort of natural convection currents, right? You can see this diagram up here shows the city of London, including the original Roman walls and sort of the pink area is the burned area at this time. That's the Tower of London on the right there. Yes. Gotcha. I think that's actually St. Paul's is the cross thing, too. Yes. So on day two of the fire, they didn't they didn't put the fire out.

They haven't really contained it by this point, right? Oh, good. Yeah. So day two, of course, Mayor Bloodworth's ineptitude forced Londoners to come to terms with the fact that, you know, this fire is completely out of control. No one can do anything about it. It was time to get your stuff and get out, right? So this was really good news for anyone with a boat or a cart

or who was able-bodied, right? It's called entrepreneurship. Yes. Good time. Good time to start doing this. This fun thing called price gouging, right? We call it pricing now. Yeah, we do call it. Actually, it's actually pull yourself up by your boat straps.

Very good. Ye oldie Uber. Due to increased demand, fares will be higher. Yes. So, you know, hiring a cart was heard to go as for as much as 40 pounds, which is about, I think, four thousand dollars today, maybe maybe more than that. Now, back in the day, of course, people owned less stuff. Inflation calculator UK and see if it goes back to 1666. I bet you it won't because they regulated the currency

in, like, yeah, this is only going to go back to, like, oh, no, it actually does. OK, 1666, 40 pounds. What does that get me now? 9,599 pounds and 26 pounds. So, yeah, would you like to buy a new car? Or would you like to, like, receive passage out of the Inferno? Yes.

I can give you an Xbox and if you want. Back in the day, I mean, you know, people owned less stuff. That stuff was more valuable, though. So people were hauling out, you know, their valuables, their clothes, their furniture, their books, documents, everything. They either dumped it in carts or they brought it to the water and put it on lighters, right, which is, you know, sort of boat, right? Or one other idea a lot of people had.

Put it in a building they didn't think was going to burn down, which in practice meant a stone church, right? Yeah, it's protected by being stone and by being a church. Yeah, exactly. I mean, God's not going to let the church burn down, right? Yeah, OK. Yes. The issue here was the fire was really big. As a result, you know, it was very intense.

It shattered windows, burning embers flying through the air would go through the go through the broken window. And they'd sell all these churches on fire, which are, of course, also full of kindling in the form of everyone's valuables. So all these churches burned down very quickly. Oh, well. Now, people who were, you know, trying to go in and price gouge with their horses and carts, they're all trying to get in towards the fire,

right? So they can take people's stuff, right? This is a lot of stealing. Yeah, also also stealing, looting, everything. Yeah. Meanwhile, people are trying to evacuate away from the fire, right? Now, this is this is an issue because of the existence of these city walls, right? So there were, you know, a couple gates. I forget what they are called offhand. Old gate, more gates, struggling with the rest of them.

The walls at this point have been like built over and like scavenged with stone and stuff, but because they're an easy access control point for like tolls and taxes and stuff, the gates are mostly still there. Right. Yeah. And so there's a huge mass of people trying to squeeze through both ways, through all of these gates, right? It's just pandemonium and mayhem, you know, and a complete breakdown of order. And the officials at the gates actually decided at one point, you know, OK, we need to get these people instead of panicking and trying to run away,

we need to get them to fight the fire. So they had the the bright idea of what if we just close the gates? People will be more motivated to fight the fire instead of run away. Welcome to the Voluntold Fire, it's called Nudge Theory. Yes. No, it's called Impressment. Six of one half a dozen of the other. And this idea did not work. They were forced to reopen the gates pretty quickly.

Now, so to the west of the fire was this building called Baynard's Castle, right? And this is sort of like the Western equivalent of the Tower of London. You can see the picture here, right? So a lot of people thought as this fire was burning, you know, once once it reaches Baynard's Castle, right, with this big fixed stone walls, it's going to burn out. It can't possibly get past this gigantic building with the huge stone walls, right? Well, it was sort of like a medieval palace, I guess, is what this was.

Not really like a castle, castle. But so this is where the fire was going to start stop. And well, what actually happened is it burned down immediately. And the fire managed to leap over the old city walls. Yeah, I mean, you can still see the ruins of the the walls of the city of London and places and like they actually haven't changed that much because once something's mostly collapsed, it kind of stays that way. And yeah, it's basically just like a small ditch at this point with like a big

stone hump in the middle of it. OK, so we've we've immediately blown through like our two line first lines of defense here of churches. Church is on its castle. Yes. Well, so. One one thing that everyone thought would be the safest place was St. Paul's Cathedral, right? St. Paul's St. Paul's was in a large plaza.

It didn't have buildings abutting it like everything else. And that was supposed to act as like a natural firebreak, right? So. Lots of people started piling all their crap in the cathedral, much like the smaller churches. But, you know, because St. Paul's was so far away from everything, it sort of lasted a little bit longer. And among the things they piled into St. Paul's Cathedral were the entire stock of goods from the booksellers and print shops on the adjoining

patternosed to row, right? So the cathedral is just full of paper. Good. You know, and one issue, though, with St. Paul's was Sir Christopher Wren. And that's usually the issue. Yes. Had been commissioned to do a renovation on the cathedral. As such, the whole building was covered in wood and scaffolding.

Right. Yes. Yes. Oh. So, yeah, the scaffolding caught fire again very quickly. Well, and then the cathedral caught fire from all the paper in it. And the whole thing burnt. Once it caught fire, it burned down very, very quickly. I think that I think the tin roof actually melted. Um, I guess a good lesson here is even if it's economically or sentimentally important, if stuff is on fire,

you should probably shouldn't try and save your stuff. Like, yeah, any any of your stuff. That's like, that's kind of why in fire drills. They tell you not to like stop to take any of your shit. You should just live. You should just be. Yeah. Leave town. Yeah. Leave town. Don't look back. Just just keep walking.

Steal a horse and cart. Do not be a lot's wife. Do not be a lot's wife. Just walk out. You're a fire of lonesome if you're fast enough. So, I mean, a lot of people who were trying to escape the fire, they would they would leave their house and they'd go like down the street to what they thought was a safe house. And then a couple of couple hours later, they'd have to move again.

And then a couple of hours later, they'd have to move again. Right. You know, this was, you know, a lot of people thought they could get away from the fire a lot easier than they actually could. So, meanwhile, to the west of the everything, the Duke of York was commanding a bunch of firefighters to make a firebreak at the River Fleet. Right. That's here. And one of the tributaries into the Thames.

Yes, exactly. It's it's it's today. It's Farringdon Road. Since they sewerized it from 1737 to 1769. A lot of people think like three to five underground rivers in central London off the top of my head. Yeah, a lot of people think the River Fleet is under Fleet Street. It's not. No, Fleet Street is actually named for the Anima brand.

I see. So, you know, the thinking was that with a little bit of effort, the River Fleet and, you know, the walls and everything, this is going to be a firebreak, basically all on its own, right? That thinking was wrong. Yeah. So driven by driven by a strong gale, the fire just leapt right over the River Fleet and started burning the suburbs

outside the city walls. And of course, this fire is throwing up all these hot burning embers so that there's like fires starting randomly everywhere, right? People are panicking because they think, you know, this is since the fires are starting randomly, they think, you know, some Dutchmen have come to burn down the city or some or Catholics, right? Yeah, it's got to be an act of war. There's lots, lots and lots of trutherism going on already.

Mm. Well, bear in mind that, like, sailing up the Thames and burning down London is like the classic move. If you want to, like, fuck with the Dutchmen loves to do it, but also, like, even way back, the Norse love to do it. It's an easy, easy thing to do. The Thames is not a very defensible river. Yeah, you think at some point they would learn to put the city up with fireproof materials, but it's not that bad.

It's not that day. Yeah. Mm. And then the winds eventually shifted east, right? The fire started creeping towards the Tower of London, right? And it's very large gunpowder stores. Oh, good. So the garrison located there, you know, they had they had no permission to do any fire breaks, but they decided just to do it anyway.

And so, you know, they managed to save the Tower of London just by going out and blowing stuff up. So, you know, good on them. And now now London still has one cool Norman built castle. Yes, exactly one. Now that evening, the winds finally died down. So the fire wasn't being fueled quite as much, right? Which leads us to day four.

You can see before and after image here. Oh, dear. Yes. All the wooden buildings burned down and most of the stone. Oh, I see real estate opportunities. That's bad to say. Yeah. Yeah. And also at this point, the truth or is it really kicks in? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, because like, obviously, this has to have been a foreign French, Dutch, Spanish Catholic plot. Yes. And so, like, people just start getting lynched is the thing. Being being out on the streets and like even being perceived to be foreign as a death sentence. There's one story about a French guy who is carrying tennis balls of all things. And those are taken to be like incendiary grenades and he is killed. They have tennis back then.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's referenced in Shakespeare. Mock castles down from Henry the Fifth. Yeah, no, so like even even the sort of like the troops who are brought into Restore Order get more into this. Most notably the still extant regiment, the Coldstream Guards, they're brought into sort of Restore Order and more and more than half of them just like immediately desert to start both looting and also just like killing people.

And you also get a very, very dangerous, very precarious situation for the monarchy, which is people start blaming the king, which is a great thing to do when something goes wrong. But they start blaming him for A, starting the fire and B, being a secret Catholic. Yeah. This is I mean, bear in mind, the last time anybody accused an English king of being a secret Catholic, it was this guy's dad and it ended with him being beheaded.

So this is not something that you want to fuck around with if you're chance the second. But to say better go do something like, I don't know, go start a war with them. Kissing babies or kissing babies. Well, he'd already tried the war starting thing because he'd already like more or less started the second Anglo-Dutch war. As a way of demonstrating that he was sufficiently Protestant. And yet still the assembled hogs, the scum are like, no, you're still you're still too Catholic. You like too many nice things and you grew up in France, so maybe you're Catholic.

So obviously what you need in a situation like this is you need a convenient scapegoat. Yes. And you're able to find a convenient scapegoat fairly easily. In this case, it was a French watchmaker called Robert Hubert or Robert Hubert, if you'd rather. He had arrived in London like two days after the fire. But, you know, since when did that matter? He was arrested on the basis of being too French and immediately confessed to every possible combination of things, like multiple contradictory accounts

that, to me, carry the heavy implication of like, please stop turning thumb screws on me. Yes, well, yeah. Yeah, I think what he ended up finally like confessing, confessing to was that he threw like an incendiary grenade through Farron's window because he was evil, like on behalf of like the French crown and also the Pope. Uh-huh. Well, it seems reasonable to me. Yes. And if Farron and all of his family signed a writ saying that they think he did it,

which is, you know, sort of knowingly condemning the innocent man to death, but who cares? Nobody actually believes that he did it. But at the same time, everybody believes that the Catholics did it, right? It's like, it's sort of like believing that like Al Qaeda did 9-11, but not those specific 19 guys. Yeah, I mean, you know, every once in a while, you all got to get together and, you know, just hang a Frenchman for the hell of it, you know? Yes, which is exactly what they did.

And this this here is the gallows at Tyburn, the Tyburn tree, a triangular shaped and he is sentenced to hang. He is hanged and as his body is being taken down to be given to the anatomists to be dissected, the crowd tears it apart, limb from limb. Jesus Christ. Seventeenth century London was a delightful place. The past was not weird or gross at all. And it was all totally, totally normal.

Yeah, they just send the time a more elegant time. Yeah, just just physically tearing apart a guy who didn't really was just like in the wrong place at the wrong time. Um, yeah, Lord. But of course, there is there are there are beneficiaries to this, most notably the Puritans love this shit. Because as much as the as much as sort of Royalists had suspected London's being the sort of like

a hotbed of parliamentarianism, Puritans always hated London for the same reason that like all religious there. Let's hate any big city, right? Is that's like it's this den of vice and iniquity, which it certainly is. But like now, of course, it has been been punished for its sin as is as is right and proper. And there's there's a very sort of tangible, physical relationship between those things in the mind of the Puritan preacher.

The 17th century, if you've if you've read the sermon, sinners in the hands of an angry God, very much very much that vibe. It's like, yes, sin is like bodily rewarded in life with its with its just deserts, its own misery. The wages of sin is death as it turns out. Yeah, I've got a little selection of pamphlets here. You can see they've used the same the same woodcut image of St. Paul's burning, which is obviously a tremendously impactful thing religiously.

And I hope a stampable plot. Rise, you're up. Lesson, lesson. I I trust the pope knew what he was doing, setting this fire. Yeah, speaking ex-cathedra to say it's good wrong burned, actually. Excuse me, London. Yeah, this is this is a file which has spiritual causes. God has allowed this to happen through the agency of this one French

dude and the pope because of London's sins of gluttony and lust and of toleration of Catholicism. And so what we have to do is we have to get a lot more Protestant and a lot more hysterical about Catholic and full traces. And this this sort of like this proceeds for decades, if not centuries, but it sort of culminates at this time in the popish, a damnable plot, the popish plot of 1678 to roughly 1681, where a guy called Titus Oates basically makes up a plot for attention and everybody wants to believe

it so badly that they execute a bunch of people. So that's what's happening in the top left there is Viscount Stafford being executed for being like a crypto Catholic because just like a guy thought it would be fun to like invent a plot. It reminds me of like the satanic panic and stuff like that. You know, very much. People just get all worked up over something that's not real. They make up a guy and then get mad at that guy.

Yes. Well, at least like at least there were at least there were Catholic powers in Europe, right? So it's it's a lot like the Red Scare to me. It's like, OK, sure. These these like, you know, these great powers exist, and they don't really have any any interest in, you know, a sort of a Protestant counter ways in England. But they're also not responsible for every misfortune

as one's own sin isn't. But in any case, like anti-Catholic hysteria is like sort of a stand by within the Protestant English psyche, like as late as 1780, you have waves of riots. You I mean, you could reasonably call it a pogrom, right? Of like waves of lynchings of Catholics, because weird. Um, I'm like genuinely the Catholic emancipation, having like legal equality in the right to like citizen MP, things like that.

That that only applied in England and Wales from like 1830, I think. So this this stuff has like a long legacy. Oh, yeah. I mean, well, you know, every once in a while, you got to if they weren't mad at the Catholics, they'd find someone else to get mad at. So. Yeah. Well, the good news is that a bunch of the craziest of these guys founded the United States of America.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. All right. But in the meantime, of course, there is this huge plot of vacant land in the middle of London that they got to figure out what to do with. Hmm. Right. Stealing glass and stealing glass and build the shard. Well, the Enlightenment hasn't been invented yet. So nobody's going to be like, are you going to put a bunch of weird

Masonic symbolism in here? Exactly. Right. You know, so you get this big blank slate, right? Which is the dream of every architect of the period, including luminaries like Sir Christopher Wren, right? You know, this is a chance to remake London into sort of a world class city, one that rivaled any, you know, Baroque planned city like Rome or Rome or Rome, because Paris, Paris hadn't been housemenized yet and Washington, D.C. hadn't been invented.

So, you know, this would have been like one of the first great Baroque planned cities, right? So several architects submit several plans for rebuilding London. This is Christopher Wren's right here. You can see the nice wide boulevards, all these nice public squares, stuff like that. I really like that his idea for the fleet to like make more of it rather than less. Kind of like, yes, an L shaped London. You could have had interesting. You could have had your own little, it'd be like the Skookle, you know,

just just a nice little river as opposed to a gigantic annoying one. So Christopher Wren submits a plan. That's this one. John Evelyn also submits a plan, which is a sort of different geometric shapes. It's like a bunch of squares with some of the squares or circles and some of the squares or triangles. Kind of weird. He's going to Charles the Second and asking him to rotate two cubes in his mind.

Yeah, exactly. You got to you got to bear with me as I rotate a cube in my mind. There was a third guy who submitted a plan. I don't remember who it is and I don't care about him. And then there was Valentine Knight, right, who proposed a genuinely awful street grid, ugly as hell. The the planet itself is awful to look at. That's why I didn't put it on here.

One of the features on it, though, was it's just it is it is visually repulsive. Um, but part of his plan that he presented to King Charles the Second was a kind of God in every one. In front of God and everyone was a told canal, right? And the total revenue would go to the king, right? And so just bribery, like your majesty. Look, I will have you raking in them poundy, poundy bills. I mean, I bet a French King would have gone for this French thing.

Oh, yeah, a French King whoever would have a French King, a French King would have gone with something like that. But the plan would have been better. Hmm. You know, you'd have some Versailles bullshit. Well, so his plan was so bad and the told canal was so offensive to Charles the Second, who's, you know, trying to improve relations with London as opposed to tolling them that Charles the Second had Valentin Knight thrown in prison. The correct response to any time.

Go to jail. Do not pass. Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. From Coolhouse, live from the big house. I think he only only was in jail for a short period of time, but I think that's very. That was a mistake. Back when that was like your sort of minor measure of like official disapproval was to like, yeah, just throw him in prison for like a week. Yeah. This plan sucks.

It's like a 10 minute timeout, you know. Yeah, throw them in the dungeon. Take them out like tomorrow. Just just just let them stew for a bit. This guy's annoying me. Just do something with it. So these plans, with the exception of Knight's plan, you know, these plans are hardly debated, you know, as to which was going to be the rebuilding plan. And in the meantime, property owners just started rebuilding on the plots they owned.

And as a result, none of these plans were carried out. And London retained its medieval hodgepodge streets. Terrible character inertia wins again, as it always does with London. Hey, but we did rebuild St. Paul's, though. So yes. Yeah, Christopher Wren did get a major hand in sort of the rebuilding in the form of St. Paul's in the form of a whole shitload of churches in the form. He made a bunch of money off of this.

A lot of commissions. Hell yeah. Yeah. He also did a bit more rebuilding because in commemoration, the city put up a big obelisk, which everyone knows about, and a little statue of a naked child, which not everyone knows about. Right here at Cough Lane. Interesting. Right here at Cough Lane, yes. So the big obelisk is just it's technically it's like the monument to the Great Fire of London,

but everyone calls it the monument. It's why there's a tube station called monument. And it's a big obelisk of stairs. There's a viewing platform. You can go and look out and like it's got inscriptions on the side, showing the fire starting, progressing. It's by sort of putting light in roughly. And the inscriptions actually blame the fire on Catholics.

Nice. The burning of this Protestant city begun and carried on by the treachery and malice of the Popish faction. But Popish frenzy, which wrought such horrors, is not yet quenched. Oh, they only remove these with Catholic emancipation in 1830, which goes to show that centering statuary to despair people's feelings is good. We should. Yes. They also added those suicide nets on the top in the 1850s

because people kept jumping off of it. Kind of spoils the view, but it's an early iteration of the vessel. More or less. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Alexander Pope hated it. He's like he was like a sort of this bullying, looming presence. Yeah. The little little naked child that commemorates the point where the fire was like finally put out or it was stopped called pi lane, incidentally, because we go from pudding to pie, which is weird.

And like this is also like a profoundly like moralizing statue, right? It's the idea is that the fire is caused by sin and specifically the sin of gluttony. Oh, no. But that's my favorite. Both too many tasty cakes, but also because this area was a red light district, which is incidentally also the origin of cock lane. And it's very, very interesting to me that the prostitution here is like a sin of gluttony rather than a lust. It's like you can have too much of a good thing. Yeah.

And so in order to like warn people against the sin of gluttony, they decided to put up a little statue of a fat child. And like that's genuinely like in the design. Yeah, has to be prodigiously fat, which weird, weird. Yeah. Very weird. It used to be above the the daughter of pub called the fortune of war, which was the hunt, the the like horn to the London's grave robbers.

And that's that's like the sort of like that's the civic commemoration of the great fire of London. We didn't actually do anything material like the London fire brigade wasn't founded until the 19th century in terms of like actually doing stuff to make it less likely for this to happen again. We just didn't bother. Fat kid statue, fat kid statue. Because that way people are going to be less likely to sin. And if they're less likely to sin,

they're less likely to set everybody's houses on fire. I I just like it was a mistake. But I do enjoy how everyone just, you know, did everything in their power to just forget or avoid the idea that this was just an accident. Yeah, to everyone runs as far away from any kind of material cause as possible and instead blames it on popery. Which is which is we can record a podcast on it.

Yeah, it's easy and fun, but fun and easy. Blame the pope. Oh, just blame the pope for anything that happens. I'll be right back. OK. Lame the pope for everything that happens in your life. If you had a bad day, that was the pope. You stubbed your toe. Just cursing. Well, yeah, curse the Holy See.

Devilish papery. We must we must launch a crusade against Rome. You lippin around because you stubbed your toe. Yeah. What's another nice mild inconvenience? Oh, stepping on a Lego. Stepping on a Lego. That was definitely the pope. That was that was definitely the pope. That was that was the pope.

Yes, the pope in Rome. The pope in Rome is the cause of all of life's minor inconveniences. I'm I'm happily to announce I am converting to Anglicanism, I guess. Yeah, the religion that makes you that makes you very normal. Yes, give us the candelabra back. Yes. All right. Well, so we've learned nothing.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing. Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Shake hands for danger. Hello, Justin, Alice, Liam and any potential WTYP guest hosts. Hello. Hello. I am a helicopter pilot. I used to do opening sentence ever.

Yes, hello. You have my attention. I used to do helicopter construction, but I have moved on to aerial firefighting overseas based. Liam, I don't know what the Greeks have done or what they are doing to draw the wrath of the Jewish space laser. But damn, son. They know what they did. Thank you. I'll take you back to the time.

The time of the Maccabees. There we were. Thank you for your service. Safety Third writer. Yes. It's September 2017. Hurricane Maria laid waste to Puerto Rico and my company was hired to help rebuild the Puerto Rico power grid. I assume this was due to popery.

Well, the thing about Puerto Rico is they have quite a lot of popery in it already. So that's the reason that would be more natural disasters. It's a good point. Yeah. You could do a whole episode on the bullshit that went on rebuilding Puerto Rico. But of all the stupid, unsafe and criminal things I witnessed in Puerto Rico, this is the one that stands out most in my mind. After arriving in Puerto Rico a few days after the storm, most of Puerto Rico's power distribution system look like picture number one right here.

See this. No good. Power pole has fallen over. For those who are not watching on YouTube, the power grid was royally fucked. My job was to use the big ass helicopter in picture number two right here. Nice. To pick stuff up and put stuff down. Yes, I think so. One of the things we normally picked up and put down were guide V transmission towers. Picture number three here.

After setting the base and guy anchors, we fly the tower up the mountainside to the power line right of way. We would hold the tower upright on the base while the ground crew attached and tensioned the guy wires. This was all well and good for the first few days until we started running out of towers to set. Hurricane Maria had turned a large number of towers into twisted scrap metal after running through the small number of spares that were on the island

and stealing towers from a 10 year old never completed line. Materials were running short, so reusing anything possible became the order of the day. One such tower that was to be reused was a structure that had survived the hurricane, but had two of the three phases, which are the big lines that carry the power, ripped off. The remaining phase was still connected by the insulator, but the cable disappeared into the jungle up and downhill of the tower. The tension of the still connected phase had pulled the tower about 10 to 15

feet to one side and twisted it quite noticeably. See figure number four. You can see you can see it's leaning like that. Yes. No. We got a phone call. Don't worry. We got a phone call that they wanted us to use our big gas helicopter with a long line and grapple to pull on the remaining phase

to remove the tension on the tower so an iron worker could cut the wire free. So the other pilot I was flying with an eye headed up the hill and hooked onto the wire. I always hate these like mission packs for flights in games. That's so unrealistic. The helicopter I flew on at the time had a load had a load cell attached to the cargo hook so we know exactly how much things weigh. We yanked on the wire with over 9000 pounds of force and it didn't move at all.

To put this in perspective, the tower itself only weighs 7800 to 8500 pounds. Right. After seeing enough road one after seeing enough road runner cartoons, I knew that being in the giant slingshot never worked out well. So we called the guys on the ground and said the plan wasn't going to work. And we don't want to be connected to this thing when it cuts loose. They then asked us to just wait overhead and pull the power line back into the right of way after they cut it free from the tower.

After a quick cut, cut after a quick cockpit discussion about how stupid this plan was, we responded OK, just to watch the show. It's wrong. We moved off to a safe distance and watch the iron worker hang off the arm of the tower and start cutting with the huge gas powered saw. See picture five. I forgot to put picture five on here. Shit.

Um, imagine picture five. Imagine picture five. The cable let loose with a crack that we could hear in the helicopter over the noise of two turbine engines with head steps on. The cable racketed off and sides through the jungle, cutting down trees like it was cutting grass. At this point, the poor iron worker got a demonstration of the transition of potential energy into kinetic energy.

The tower began to whip violently back and forth. On about the fourth oscillation, the poor iron worker slash bull rider, who was holding on with one hand and holding on to the saw with the other that was now running at full throttle, judging from the white smoke pouring from the exhaust, decided to let go of the saw. Everyone on the ground was running in every direction to get away from the eight thousand pound very angry tower and flying chop saw. Oh, my God.

Well, the tower found its happy place and we sat speechless, watching the iron worker who to his credit was actually tied off roll over onto his back, close his eyes and and cross his arm over his chest. He lay up there a little while before climbing down. Well, after almost killing a guy to save a tower, it was found the structure was too damaged from the storm and Mr. Toad's wild ride to be reused. Mr. Toad, they just cut the guy wires and let it fall like a tree.

And we never could find the wire that I is that rocketed through the jungle and I assume is still there to this day. Incredible. Keep up the good work. Name redacted. I got nothing for this one man. I'm glad that one of the protagonists of the game, Take On Helicopters, is written in this is this is pretty pretty Looney Tunes.

That is a stay away for helicopters. We cannot emphasize this enough. They are a dangerous machine. Yes, I mean, you know, the combination of helicopters and high tension wires is a great one. You know that the wacky stuff they do with helicopters around power lines is always astonishing, you know, like the thing where a guy is sitting on the like side board thing.

And yeah, you have to equalize the voltage between the helicopter and the wires. And then you got like the giant saw that hangs below the helicopter, the trim trees. You know, it's it's a power transmission. It's wild. Hmm. It's mixing two incredibly dangerous technologies. Yes. So. Always always a big fan of this. Thanks for nothing.

Yes. Well, what have we learned? What have we learned? Everything that goes wrong is the fault of the pope of the pope. Yes. Also, do a fire break sooner than you think. Yes, exactly. Start start making one now.

Air down your own house. Yes, tear down your own house right now. Make sure it doesn't catch fire. Become ungovernable. Become ungovernable. Our next episode will be take any of your shit. Anywhere. Our next episode will be about another disaster caused by Popery,

which is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. Anyone got commercials before we go? Yeah, there's going to be a trash future live show in London the first so like a week from now. I don't know if we're going to live stream it or anything. We're going to do my best to be there. So I don't know if there's I don't know if there's still tickets, but if there's not, just show up outside the venue,

which is the Voxhole Comedy Club just first of September at 9 p.m. Just just be there and like try and like get in. Yeah, you fine. Maybe you could maybe you could cause a fire break by giving you access down the buildings either side of the Voxhole Comedy Club. Yes, exactly. We also have a live show.

Yes, we do. On the third of September and the 30th of September. Live tickets are sold out. However, live stream tickets are still available. If you're a patron of our show, you get a discount code, which I have posted on the Patreon. If you're not, go sign up for it. Give us more money than you should.

Yes. Yeah. And subscribe to YouTube because I want a little plaque from YouTube. Yes, the thing. Yeah, we're almost halfway there. Be sure to smash that subscribe button and push the bell. Shirts are being restocked by Union Pete. We will have I'm just going to announce it now. A extremely limited run of commemorative shirts

and hoodies at the live show. So I'm excited for that. Listen to Kill James Bond. Listen to Trash Future. Listen to Lions led by Donkeys by Joe Cossabian's new book. I watch the channel. Do not eat. Yes. All right.

The pope is responsible for Frank. Follow follow Justin's like Steam Workshop updates. Yeah, exactly. Starkas in real life on Twitter. Come to our house where you will be met with Castle doctrine. Yes. Anything else? My battery is dying.

No, I think this is it. Well, thank you. Thank you for listening, everyone. Yes. Thank you. Thanks guys. Just don't fall into the trap that is popery. Until next time. Kill the pope. I mean, have a nice time.

Have a nice time is what I meant. That one hits different when you live in Glasgow. All right. Bye, everyone. Bye. Bye, guys.