Episode Description
‘Where there’s muck, there’s brass’, and that was certainly the case with rebuilding London from the mess of ash and rubble that remained. And developers like Nicholas Barbon knew how to make as much brass as possible, and as fast as possible.
Download Podcast - 439 London Reborn (Right Click and select Save Link As)
Quite a few people have asked about the material on coal and windows (in episode 440). The principal jumping off point for me (and about Nicholas Barbon) was Bernabas Calder ‘Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency’, Penquin, 2021
Here’s a nice article from the Guardian about how London might have rebuilt if the English were less pragmatic.
Transcript
Last time, we heard about 1666, which saw a year of mixed emotions in the Second Anglo Dutch war, and a year of decidedly unmixed emotions in London. This time we’ll also have a game of two halves, but the other way round – we’ll start off by talking about London, and maybe have time to come back to the war. Let’s see how things go.
On Friday 7th September, John Evelyn took himself to walk through London. He was of course gutted by what he saw when he reached the ruined St Pauls, with it’s fallen walls and melted bells. Everyone was wandering around in a daze
The people who now walked about in the ruins appeared like men in some dismal desert…to which was added the stench that came from some poor creature’s body, beds and other combustible goods…the ground and air, smoke and fiery vapour continued so intense that my hair was almost singed, and my feet insufferably sore… Nor could one have possibly known where one was but by the ruins of some church or hall that had some remarkable tower…standing
The death toll from the fire was officially 6; but that is of course nonsense, and simply reflects people wealthy enough to be counted; the poorer sections of society in the cellars and packed tenements must have died in far greater numbers. A 15 year old Schoolboy made his way to St Pauls – almost his last experience, as he came close to being crushed by still-falling masonry. And then near the East wall
A human body presented itself to me, parched up as it were with the flames; whole as to skin, as meagre as to flesh, yellow as to colour. This was an old decrepit woman, who had fled there for safety, imagining the flames would not reach her there. Her clothes were burnt and every limb reduced to coal
The destruction was immense. 4/5ths of London inside the wall and 13,000 houses had been destroyed; 52 livery halls had been destroyed, along with much of their wealth – and therefore their ability to hand out charity. 87 churches were gone, the built template of parishes devastated. Erven the London Stone had been shattered into pieces – how symbolic was that!?
The fire was out of all proportion to anything which had gone before in Britain; though it doesn’t quite measure up to the big boys worldwide; by point of comparison the Great Firesof Edo 1657 ruined three-quarters of the city, and killed about one seventh of its population of 600,000. The Istanbul fire of 1660 destroyed two-thirds of the city, razing 280,000 houses and killing as many as 40,000.
But it was bad enough. London’s trade infrastructure was gone as well – warehouses full of goods had been destroyed and businesses with it – one merchant lost £20,000 worth of tobacco. Blackwell Hall took with it vast amounts of woollen cloth; Bridewell was burnt with £40,000 worth of grain. Gresham’s Royal Exchange, opened by Good Queen Bess in 1571, and the heart and hub of city business, public gossip and news – was a pile of rubble. The Customs house on the river would no longer need to be avoided by dodgy traders.
As the post match analysis started, people would not stop suspecting the French and Dutch; one Dutchman wrote home that he was afraid to go out and wrote
It will be a long time before the people of London forget their wild rage against foreigners. [1]
To be fair the Dutch at home were celebrating it all as God’s judgement of the city, and called it the ‘purification of the city’. So you know, they could hardly complain.
But Londoners knew who the chief culprit was:
People do all the world over cry out of the simplicity of my Lord Mayor in general; and more particularly in this business of the fire, laying it all upon him
Wrote Pepys on 7th. 60 years later the Bludworth family still bore the shame, as Daniel Defoe wrote
But this they never forgot, or forgave to him, or his Family after him; but fix’d the Expression on him, as a Mark of Indelible Reproach, even to this Day
And despite their heroics during the fire, the royals didn’t escape blame either
Cries are now heard on every hand, that since the House of Stuart came to the throne, England has never enjoyed felicity but has suffered from incessant miseries
Good point! More immediately though, was the problem of the homeless, 100,000 of them. Tens of thousands had streamed northwards through the city walls at Moorgate into the wide park of Moorfields – once boggy fenland, now drained and a public park – much noted for various extra curricula activities, but now the site of a desperate refugee camp. Most people had almost nothing, just what they could carry; only the rich had been able to afford the vastly inflated fees charged by carriers in all the chaos. But there were homeless people everywhere – camping on the sides of the roads leading to Islington and Highgate.
Emergency relief started; the King ordered the navy to distribute its ships biscuits to the homeless, and it’s supplies of canvas to allow people to make tents; churches were told to take people in. The London Common Council set itself up in Gresham College, which had managed to escape the fire. The Council offered 7 year leases for areas of open space, where people could live while they rebuilt, and they established temporary markets so that within a week, food supplies started to arrive.
Meanwhile across the country people started collecting on behalf of their poor fellow citizens. There was an established process for this, in the form of ‘briefs’. Like pretty much anything of any note, the mechanism worked through the Parishes; warrants for Briefs arrived by October, the village priest promoted the appeal from the pulpit, and the churchwardens set out to knock on doors collecting, as it were. It was a well established process; to give you an idea of scale, from 1672 to 1706, 136 briefs were read in the village of Clent in Staffordshire. Quite a lot of the appeals were for fires, about 3/4s of them. There were three major national briefs in the second half of the 17th century. The first was in 1655, inspired by Cromwell’s advocacy for the persecuted protestants of the Vaudois; that raised £40,000, about £4m worth. Obviously, it’s less straightforward to elicit sympathy for a Londoner, but the collection managed a healthy £17,000, about £1.8m in today’s money; there would be a third collection to rebuild St Paul’s when it comes to that. You can probably guess how the money was distributed – it went, of course, to the London parishes. Obs.
But before long many of the refugees had left the roadsides and Moorfields, and returned to try and find their old plots, and before long the piles of rubble started to be reinhabited by a shanty town. Certainly you had to be well off indeed to find yourself a new place to rent – Landlords would suck their teeth and talk about the work of Ibn Taymiyyah [ibn tay-mee-YAH] the 13th century Muslim scholar who explained that prices are affected by the number of suppliers and buyers. The Landlords would predict the work of Adam Smith and the supply and demand curves of Alfred Marshal, in England of the 1890s, and they would do it in a practical way – by demanding a rent 10 times higher than before the fire.
So, tents, makeshift walls, anything that could be moulded into some sort of shelter, started appearing among the rubble. Because anyway, the camps had became uninhabitable; and because however shattered – it was home; and more practically because if you didn’t claim your patch someone else probably would and if the Fire Court got it wrong you might be lost. And so London became frontier land again just as it had been when the Romans created a crossing across the Thames back in the first century on their way to conquer Britain. London became a collection of huts and shacks and markets; with no constables or watch left to patrol and keep order. When Pepys took a coach through London he looked about with sympathy and distress; and carried a drawn sword.
Now then, when I was in the heady world of commerce, I distinctly remember being told not to talk about Problems – but instead to speak of Opportunities. As in ’Thank you for the opportunity I have gained from having my house burned to a crisp’. London was now a tabular rasa; so of course you all know what’s going to happen; just as Augustus found Rome made of brick and left it built of marble, so Charles would transform London into a gleaming example of modernity. And indeed before you could say ‘don’t bring me problems bring me solutions’ Charles had issued a declaration promising that London would be rebuilt, ‘Better than it was before. Better… stronger… faster’ and unlike Steve Austin not just with a dodgy left eye, but so that it would
Rather appear to the world as purged with fire…to a wonderful beauty and comeliness than consumed by it
There were plans on his desk before he could pass Barbara Castlemaine the breakfast goose pie. At least 6 of them, and including proposals from John Evelyn, Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren. They are all rather fascinating; of course none of them suggested sticking with the lovely organic, quirky network of streets and neighbourhoods. Grid patterns predominated; did I read somewhere that later John Locke would ordain a grid layout for Charleston? I may have dreamed that. And what is it about the human race and straight lines? If I ever make enough dosh to do an Ed Sheeran and plant a new forest, I swear to all that is holy that I will not plant in straight lines; I’ll employ the best possible tech to design my perfect plantation according to the most advanced fractal chaotic AI can design.
Wren proposed a city with nice wide boulevards focused on two key points – St Pauls and the Royal Exchange. Which kind of makes sense – God and Mammon. Evelyn was into zoning – removing nasty industry from residential areas, which also kind of does make sense and sounds quite modern. There was a very nice article in the Grauniad about it, with folks from Riba, the royal Institute of British Architects, commentating on all the plans – I’ll put a link on the episode post. Rather hearteningly, they were all quite pleased it never happened; they did say that such plans would probably have resulted in segregation – poor and rich separated[2]. Although if you’ve ever walked through St James you’ll know that can happen anyway!
Anyway, Charles woke up and smelled his toast and marmalade. If this brave new world was to happen, the state, or the king, would have to buy up all the land from its owners; do you have any idea how long that would take and what it would cost? London had been erased, it’s trade and revenue with it, and astoundingly vibrant though Loughborough is, raising the taxes in places like that isn’t going to make up the revenue lost. We need London back, and we need it now. And so it would be built back; a bit better than it was before, slightly stronger, somewhat nippier; but rebuilt by its landowners, piecemeal, as it was not some great transformation.
So there was a commission set up of six people, which was a collab – apparently we can’t say collaboration any more, takes far too long – a collab between king and city. The king proposed three of the members, there were two architects, who know appear to have a stonking reputation with a list of projects as long as your arm – Sir Roger Pratt, and Hugh May. But of course the one history is most interested in, including this programme, is Christopher Wren. The City proposed the three other members. There was Peter Mills, the City Surveyor; I looked him up, and he seems to be connected with a style called Artisan Mannerism when he built Thorpe Hall for Cromwell’s old mucker Oliver St John. Sounds – fantastic; a non-specialist’s mash up of Jacobean, Dutch and Classical components. And then a bloke called Edward Jerman, and he was cut from the same cloth; a craftsman–architect like Peter Mills bold but unscholarly. Fascinating – highfalutin high flyers from the Crown, practical workaday doers from the City. And their third choice, the ultimate in practical genius, Robert Hooke of Wadham College days and the Royal Society.
I feel this would be a good point at which to start talking about Wren; would you mind? It just seems I need to explain why he’s a leading member of this very important group, and also because he’s a big name in English history, which you’ll be hearing more of, so please indulge me. I have always been a bit resistant to Sir Chris; I mean I’ve not been protesting outside the Royal Society or chaining myself to 17th century telescopes or anything, but as a lover of the gothic and Jacobean architecture, and with a dislike of the flim-flam of Baroque and the derivative pomposity of neo classical, I have always rather pushed Chris Wren away. I’m sorry Chris, if I have been hurtful.
So it’s been interesting to find out more, and why I was so wrong – although I reserve the right not to find his style always to my taste, but it appears I really should appreciate his genius. Wren was a child of Wiltshire; he would attend Oxford University as a gentleman commoner, which I think had a technical definition back then, but is a helpful description. His mother was the daughter of a minor landowner, his father a rector. He attended Wadham College in 1650, during the Commonwealth – that time which was the engine room and breeding ground of genius and the Royal Society we’ve talked about before.
In 1657, he was appointed to the Chair of Astronomy at Gresham College; an appointment he seems to have owed to Oliver Cromwell, who intervened personally to make it possible. Like many natural philosophers of the time, Wren was a polymath; and in 1658 he will respond to a Mathematical Challenge put out by the great French mathematician, physicist and inventor Blaise Pascal; he seems to have given brilliant solutions Pascal commended, but not the numerical workings so Pascal withheld the prizes – pretty much like Maths O level if I remember rightly. Not that I’m comparing myself to Sir Chris, you understand.
But if I have understood what I read, Wren never had quite that passion for developing the theory behind the practical, despite his mastery of the practical; so the architectural historian Kerry Downes wrote that ‘Accumulations of statistical or observational data bored him’; and that contemporaries complained that Wren valued the neatness of a solution rather than working through the proof for his conclusions – once you’d stated the truth, the proof was obvious sort of thing. There’s a lot of interest in his inaugural Gresham lecture where although it might be expected he’d praise Francis Bacon, a guiding light for the Royal Society, he didn’t mention him, and that although he absolutely agreed with the experimental method, he valued the importance in mathematics and geometry of intuitive as well as logical thought. So he talked about Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes obviously – but calls a man called William Gilbert the ‘Father of the new Philosophy’, not Francis Bacon; sadly I’d never heard of Gilbert, but apparently he pioneered the study of the invisible force of magnetism, as well as espousing the scientific method.
Anyway, a key point here I ought to make is that by 1666 when Wren was 33 years old, he already has a big reputation; he had already started to concentrate on architecture, and created the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, and he had a royal connection too which always helps – although he’d turned down a job in Tangiers, he’d been advising on work on St Pauls – before the fire rather changed the question.
And his contemporaries already recognised they had something special on their hands. In 1662 Isaac Barrow described him as
‘once a prodigy of a boy; now, a miracle of a man, nay, even something divine’
Golly, steady on. And then in 1665, Robert Hooke, now his colleague on the Rebuilding Commission, wrote
‘Since the time of Archimedes, there scarce ever met in one man, in so great a perfection, such a Mechanical Hand, and so Philosophical a Mind.’
Which is also undeniably complimentary.
Well the Commission for Rebuilding put their heads together, with wet towels and no doubt pints of strong ale, and meanwhile London was cleared. Workmen descended on London like the 8th plague, demolishing, carting away rubble and timber, knocking down the surviving wobbly walls. By November, the tabula has been fully rasa’d, ready for the moving finger to write. Meanwhile there was squabbling, as you would expect, about who owned what; and so there was established the Court of Fires with senior judges hearing disputes about who owned what where, why and when, and possibly how. And – who would be responsible for rebuilding – landlord or tenant. They met at one of the Inns of Court, Clifford Inn, which had survived the fire, and apparently there is still a bit of furniture there, called the fire table, around which they met. Decisions were to be quick, final, possibly therefore bruising for the losers – but look, it’s a wasteland out there, we need to get on with it.
They moved quickly. The Rebuilding act went through parliament, and laid out some rules, which could be achieved without messing too much with people’s property rights. The road layout and plots would stay the same; except the roads would be slightly widened; so there were no fancy new boulevards or piazzas; though in the end there were two new roads, Kings Street and Queen Street, which were established to ensure good access to the river from commercial centres such as the Guildhall. There are 4 types of buildings to be allowed – from two storey high buildings with attic and cellar, designed for alleys and things; then there are 3 storey, 4 storey and then a last one, ‘mansion houses for people of extraordinary quality’ – so, History of England podcast members, basically. The heights of the storeys were also defined, and none of them could jut out over the street, to make sure access remained. It’s a set of quantitative building regulations essentially, very much inspired by Wren’s motto Numero, pondere et mensura, Latin for “By number, weight, and measure” which I am told Newton will also adopt. These rules applied to residential buildings – and will be updated in 1671 to include public buildings like churches.
Now there was another critical requirement. Roofs must be made of slate. The rest of the building must be built using stone or brick – no wood except the structural elements. Given the price and availability of stone in London, that meant that Augustus would have been horrified – London would be rebuilt not in marble, but in brick. And that, gentle listeners, leads me on to a bit of a digression, about the impact, oddly enough, of coal.
Until the mid 16th century, most countries in temperate climates in particular relied heavily on building in wood, outside of a tiny elite. Stone was more difficult to work, more difficult to get hold of. Sometimes it was all that was available, but wood was always important anyway, not just for building but because it was the primary source of heat. It was a critical, and essential resource, especially when you consider it required several trees to construct one peasant dwelling, and a yeoman farm house would require well over a hundred trees.
The reliance on wood for fire, energy and building material was a fundamental constraint on wealth, growth and happiness. Because when you planted a wood to supply those needs, that land was then unavailable for agriculture, and societies were constantly on the edge of famine, especially if 2 or 3 bad years came together; so land use was a critical decision. This has a name, I believe, it is called the photosynthetic constraint – the need to balance the use of the finite resource of land. As Mark Twain once said of land I think, ‘they aren’t making any more’ – although the Duitch would like a word.
This is a principal reason why medieval life was so grindingly hard for the vast majority, in cold, damp houses, filled with smoke because the more holes you had the more warmth escaped – even the 16th Great Rebuilding we talked about with brick chimneys, passed most people by; because 7/8th of the heat of a fire goes up a chimney, and the poor could not afford to find or buy 8 times more firewood. And coincidentally it’s one of the reasons us wet north western European regions had been so poor, soggy and second rate compared to the gloriously warm, regions of southern Europe, where the photosynthetic constraint existed, but was less acute due to land productivity and lower demand for firewood.
It was a constraint on urban growth too; the bigger a place grew. the heavier and heavier the demand for food and firewood for cooking and heating. It’s been estimated that a medieval city of 10,000 souls needed 25,000 acres of woodland to support it; a monster like medieval London with 100,000 people needed something like 20 square miles of woodland every year, and by the time the city grew to 400,000 by 1650, its gates would have been clogged with carts hauling wood into the city every day; the cities in northern Scandinavia needed 10 square miles more fuel per person than the mildest cities in southern Italy – just to make the point again about the long standing economic and cultural dominance of southern Europe[3].
To rebuild London in wood, then, would have required a frankly impossible effort, to add to the woodland for firewood, maybe an extra 5,000 acres of woodland all to be cut, processed and transported over long miles to London.
Which brings us to coal. There is a bigger story here, the story of the industrial revolution which now looms over us, and is starting here. There are so, so many theories about why the industrial revolution started, started at all, and more specifically started here in England. People will talk about financial systems and institutions, capital accumulation, agricultural improvement, external trade, capitalism, slavery, colonialism, urban growth and demand, or even over a whiggish glass of port in Whites or Boodles in clubland, the constitution and marvellous ingenuity of the English. And all these things have their part to play but if you have to choose one, let it be coal. Because it was coal that started humankind’s escape from the Photosynthetic constraint.
Coal had been used to some degree since the 13th century; it was so abundant around Newcastle that there were seams right on the surface which could be easily mined and transported – ‘coals from Newcastle’; it stank to high heaven of course, dirty and sooty, so as far back as 1288 there were petitions in London against its use. Energy heavy industries like brewing and dyeing used it where they could; its greater intensity of heat was better for blacksmithing and burning for lime. And of course it cost far, far less land, and the same weight produced 3 times the amount of energy as wood, both things making it far cheaper per unit of energy than wood.
Still, people moved slowly to coal; but the powers that be were well aware of the vast and increasing pressure on woodland, the enormous challenge presented by the endlessly growing London. So they encouraged a move to coal, even legislated for it – in 1580 iron-making was not permitted to use wood within 25 miles of London, in 1615 it became illegal to make glass using anything other than coal for energy.
So, this is the context for the decision in 1667 to rebuild London using primarily brick. The reason normally given is as a fire prevention strategy, and of course that s true, but make no mistake it would have been close to impossible to rebuild in wood anyway. But also to rebuild in brick without coal would have been scarcely less daunting – demanded 300,000 tonnes of firewood to heat the furnaces that would create said bricks; for the same quantity, would require just 14,000 tonnes of coal. As work started, then, the streets of London were packed not just with construction sites, but with massed ranks of brickworks, all spewing out smoke next to them.
I know I am making a meal of this, so sorry. It’s one of those nerdy little irritations of history I live with, as countless programmes and off-hand comments warble on about x and y inventor, or at the moment it’s all the slave trade and colonialism, in the past it’s been Jethro Tull and the green revolution, or the evils of unbridled capitalism. All these things are super important, and I intend to warble fulsomely, never you fear, warbling is my north my south my east my west. But it seems to me that grotty, dusty, dirty, deeply unsexy coal never get’s its due. As far as the escape from poverty, famine and deprivation is concerned for at least a large proportion of humanity is concerned, coal was king.
Ok, that’s my rant. The great rebuilding of London plays its part in the great lift off for coal use, which will course be dwarfed by the later 18th century but is still significant; from maybe ¼m tonnes consumed in 1560, to 1 1/2 million tonnes in 1700. The rebuilding banished the open hearth for ever, and coal was everywhere the domestic fuel of choice, so much so that houses usually had a metal plate in the pavement outside, through which coal was poured directly into a house’ cellar; by the 1680s and 90s, London imported over 400,000 tonnes of coal each year – with next to no land taken out of agricultural production. And the economics of the demand for coal was the reverse of demand for wood; the more wood needed, the less agricultural land, there was for ever a constraint – let alone the time lag in bringing on new supplies. But as the demand for coal grew, the more was invested in the coal industry, in improving the technology of mining, the depth and efficiency of mines; and price of coal began to fall, and its use grow…and so to more investment and so on. Coal became the standard for domestic and industrial fuel, replacing wood.
It was a vast boost of energy for London industry. It also meant dangerous levels of pollution, and a London sky full of black, smelling, dusty soot which Evelyn described as more like
The suburbs of hell than an assembly of rational creatures
If London was a difficult place to find good stone, it was a brilliant place to find good clay – the city was built on the stuff. Although many of the bricks were made from a lighter, easily available material called Brick earth. All these bricks were made by hand, in moulds. Don’t think that once you’ve seen one brick you’ve seen them all – there is a hierarchy among bricks, and the best ones were kept for the front. The cheaper tat, the ‘place bricks’, were the staple for the rest of the building. This is a feature of the architecture of the period, and especially the later Georgian period; take a crappy old building and slap a bit of smart, symmetrical brick work or ashlar stone on the front; keeps the cost down, you’ll still look the bees elbow, but not cost the earth…the Georgians were all about display.
During the rebuilding, brick makers found that clay which had been adulterated by ash from the burned city could be fired faster and needed less energy and heat – halving the amount of coal needed. That was a result. Straightaway everyone started harvesting all the debris and ash lying around – Spanish ash they called it, after all English ash would have come from the burning of the finest, sturdiest heart of Oak, also probably a protestant oak, so couldn’t call it English Ash – although to be fair, it does also get called Town ash. It is mixed with brick earth, and you then get a distinctively coloured brick, a pale, brownish/pinkish-grey; by 1800 this will have evolved into the apparently iconic yellowish London Stockbrick. I hadn’t realised this was thing, London Stockbrick, but now I do, and I honour it.
How is this going by the way? I feel I may be going off piste – hopefully you may have come for war, battles kings and queens, but are happy to stay for the history of brick making. I do hope so.
Anywho where were we? One more thing, is a sermon from text of the Yorkshire bible, ‘where there’s muck there’s brass’. Rebuilding London was as clear a business opportunity as you are ever likely to see; despite the focus on brick, the demand for wood as the basic requirement of the structure remained, and fortunes were made importing wood from places like Sweden. But the story I wanted to tell was that of the rise of the property developer, and a chap called Nicholas Barbon is a great example of the property developers that descended on this business opportunity.
We have come across the family before; he was apparently christened ‘If Jesus Christ had not died for thee thou hadst been dammed’ Barbon, and maybe he was called Dammed for short, which as you will hear would be appropriate. His Dad had been the Barbon of the Barebones parliament in 1653. Barbon was a doer, and not always a very scrupulous one, but he was also a thinker; he wrote tracts exploring England’s population growth from ancient times, and the economic impacts of that growth; he understood the benefits of a growing economy on investment, efficiency and prices, and that the larger scale of business, the greater the benefits.
Armed with his philosophy, Barbon wrote that it was ‘not worth his while to deal little’. So he bought big, patches of property all around the City and on its fringes; on the way he frequently trampled over property rights. And he was not apologetic about it; when the students of Lincoln’s Inn fields organised into a band to stop his development of their green spaces, he brought in his mob and fought them in a pitched street battle. He improved his margins and ability to invest by refusing to pay his bills until his creditors had been taken through the lengthy and cumbersome legal process; he set up illegal brickworks, again calculating that by the time the legal process got round to stopping him, he’d already have made his money and exhausted the clay there.
He recognised that there was a business benefit in the Rebuilding regulations of 4 types of building. Because it allowed him to standardise the dimensions of windows and doors, and cheapen production, and he built massive quantities of housing along the Strand, in Bloomsbury, St Giles and Holborn. One of his earlier developments at Mincing Lane didn’t go well, and fell down, but much of his work remained. He also recognised a business opportunity in the awareness of fire – and offered Fire insurance, which would become standard, and the basis of house insurance. He recognised that the value of all this real estate presented wider opportunities, and in 1690, he set up the first Land Bank, a bank whose credit resided in the land they owned. Our Dammed Barbon is a pretty classic example of the pros and cons of property developers; they can often be wildly unpopular and unsavoury – but in the process often transform our world, and even transform it for the better sometimes. Sometimes.
Barbon also built outside the city walls, and one of the Great Fire’s impacts was to start the explosion of London beyond its own city walls, and the growth of the suburbs began. One reason for this was that richer citizens decided they couldn’t wait for all this development to happen and deal with all these new pettifogging regs; so they just got on with it and built new houses outside the walls. The other reason was that the 13,000 buildings burned down in 1666 were replaced by just 8,000. That was the impact of the widened streets and the new regulations, which swept away many of those over crowded tenements – so more space for new houses was needed anyway. Co-incidentally, the growth of burbs also reduced the power over London of the ancient City Corporation – because more and more activity now went on outside its jurisdiction, which was only over the square mile.
Charles also had a pop at the City Corporation at this time. As an aspiring absolutist, Charles was not a fan of the City’s independence which had caused his dad so many problems. So although the Temple Bar had not been destroyed, Charles insisted it be rebuilt by Wren in Portland stone. The Bar marked the entrance to the City Corporation’s jurisdiction and privileges, it was a symbol of its independence. The new Bar was festooned with Stuart royalist images and messages. Deeply symbolic.
The rebuilding of London may not have produced the monumental city envisaged by Wren and others but it was fast. In six years the reconstruction the residential buildings was largely completed; some larger public buildings took longer, but a new Royal Exchange was completed by 1669, the new Customs House by 1671. The rebuilding of St Pauls took longer; in 1669 Wren was appointed as Surveyor of Works, and so it fell to him; his masterpiece took until 1711 to finally finish, and there were many churches that took a while – 51 of which Wren would design, which really is quite remarkable. Almost half of them were bombed to bits in the Blitz, but my personal recommendation for a lovely little Wren church is St Magnus the Martyr, near London Bridge.
St Magnus is also right next to the very grand Monument to the Fire, designed by Robert Hooke, which was completed by 1677, near the bakery on Pudding Lane where it all started; you can climb to the top of it I think. The monument is also an interesting reflection of England’s changing attitudes to religious difference The original inscription blamed a Popish faction for the fire – thereby exonerating the French and Dutch, by the by; but in 1830, after Catholic Emancipation, that was chisled off, as not having aged well.
There is another less well known monument to the Great fire, which is at the corner of Cock Lane and Giltspur Street just by Smithfield. Rather than being the place for a Chicken market, Cock lane was one of the few areas of London where prostitution was legal; Giltspur Street was where Wat Tyler was stabbed by the Mayor of London. There was a 17th century Tailor’s shop there, which became a pub called the Fortune of War, which in the 1800s became a favourite hangout for resurrectionists – people who stole dead bodies from the nearby St Bartholomew’s Hospital, in a high minded service to help medical students pass their exams. For nothing more than a reasonable re-imbursement of their expenses, you understand.
Anyway, once more I warble; the point is, that there you will find the Golden Boy of Pie Corner, a gilded statue of a tubby little lad, with the inscription
This Boy is in Memory put up for the late Fire of London occasioned by the Sin of Gluttony.
So – not papists then; gluttony – the Fire which started at Pudding Lane, and ended at Pie Corner.
That’s it then for this time. I know we didn’t get to war and I am sorry for that, I am horribly ill disciplined. Also before we do get to war in the next episode, I still have another interesting story arising from the Great Fire, “interesting” in inverted commas, about Robert Hooke, glass making and windows which we didn’t have space for this time. But then we probably need to get back to the business of war – fingers crossed.
[1] Jackson, c: ‘Devil-land’, p402
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jan/25/how-london-might-have-looked-five-masterplans-after-great-fire-1666
[3] Calder, B: ‘Architecture’, p206