Long-time London resident and avid museum and theatre-goer. I started this blog in 2014, and got serious about it in 2020 when I realised how much I missed arts and culture during lockdowns. I go to a lot more events than anyone would think is sensible, and love sharing my thoughts in the forms of reviews, the occasional thought piece, and travel recommendations when I leave my London HQ.
An illustrated walk around the City of London. With a new book of London walks in hand, we retrace the first 24 hours of the 1666 Great Fire, and see what remains of pre-Fire London and the subsequent rebuild.
New book alert! Today’s walk comes from Discovering Off-Beat Walks in London, by John Wittich and Ron Phillips.
New Book, New Walks
I think I’ve been fairly transparent with my readers. I had done the odd heritage walk prior to 2020, but I have embraced it primarily as a way to cope with a third lockdown while engaging with the heritage in my local area. To give things a bit of structure and help me uncover hidden sights and stories, I have been drawing on the handful of London guidebooks and other resources I had at my disposal. But when I started on this journey I didn’t expect it to be such a long one. This is a roundabout way of saying that I decided recently to reinvigorate my selection of London walks by seeking out new materials. I chose a few new books which I thought were likely to have interesting themed walks I hadn’t tried before, and was excited as they arrived one by one in my letterbox.
Today’s walk is the first I undertook from this new batch of books. It comes from Discovering Off-Beat Walks in London, by John Wittich and Ron Phillips. The name John Wittich might ring a bell – he also wrote Discovering London Curiosities, which was our guide around the Roman walls and along the Thames (Part I and Part II). There’s a bit of overlap between the two books, but a few new ideas to discover as well. Like Discovering London Curiosities, part of the fun is in finding out what is still there and what isn’t; Discovering Off-Beat Walks in London was first printed in 1969, although this is a 1995 reprint so things are largely as described.
Enough About That, What About the Great Fire?
Wittich and Phillips’ book gives an interesting historic outline, which I will recount for you here. The Great Fire of London began on the night of 1 September 1666, in a bakery on Pudding Lane. Thomas Faryner, one of the king’s bakers, awoke to thick black smoke in the middle of the night. He and his family were able to escape by climbing out of an attic roof and jumping to the neighbours’ house; their little maidservant was too frightened to follow, and became the fire’s first victim.
The fire began to spread to neighbouring houses, aided by a strong wind and nearby stack of dry timber. The Lord Mayor didn’t think much of it, saying “a woman might piss it out.” Samuel Pepys was also not that impressed at first – he woke up due to the commotion but went back to bed. It was clear by the next day that it was pretty serious after all, and in fact the fire raged for three days in total. It was so intense that even a year later, timbers still smouldered in the rubble.
The Impact on London’s Built Environment
The destruction was incredible. Over 80% of the City of London burned, and tens or hundreds of thousands of people (depending on who you asked) became homeless. St Paul’s cathedral, and innumerable businesses and houses were all gone. There were a few silver linings, however. First of all, the rather serious plague outbreak of 1665 was brought to a halt. In 2021, this fact resonates with me like never before. It also caused Londoners to rethink fire safety precautions; until the mid-20th Century, it was not legal for buildings to be taller than the reach of fire-fighting equipment (thank you David for this fact). And lastly, it handed a spectacular opportunity to Christopher Wren. Even before the fire was fully extinguished, he was presenting rebuilding plans to King Charles II. Other architects did as well, but didn’t get a look in.
Today it is hard to imagine what London would look like without the Great Fire. In one fell swoop, the medieval city vanished. Streets became wider, and buildings less tightly packed (to help prevent another conflagration). And we still admire today Wren’s numerous churches; his designs looked away from the medieval past, and adopted a more European, Renaissance look. Foremost among these is of course St Paul’s Cathedral – you can learn more about its architecture here, and its precincts here. Today we will stick to a smaller area around the starting point of the Great Fire. The area we will cover is roughly what burned within the first 24 hours.
The Great Fire of London – The Monument and Market Porters
Here is the Monument to the Great Fire of London, generally known as The Monument. The fact that this monument is the Monument shows how important the Great Fire is in the history of the city. It is 202 feet high, which is the distance from its base to the point where the fire broke out. A ‘fluted Doric column of Portland stone’ according to our guidebook, it dates to 1677 and has 311 steps up to the top. The inscription is in Latin, and the relief shows how London will rise again from the ashes. The top of the Monument was unfortunately the site of a number of suicides, and so is now enclosed.
Precisely 202 feet away is Pudding Lane. One thing I like about the story of the Great Fire is how easy London was to comprehend back then. What was Thomas Faryner’s job? He was a baker (Faryner comes from the French ‘farine’, or flour). Pudding Lane is a ‘false friend’, however. ‘Pudding’ means offal in this context, so the ‘puddings’ from the butchers up the hill rolled down here to the river. In any case, most things still fitted quite neatly into their expected box in the Early Modern period.
The Walrus & The Carpenter takes its name from Lewis Carrol’s poem. There has been a pub here for a lot longer though – it is just across from the former Billingsgate Fish Market so there were a lot of workers to cater for. Our book relates a rather odd curiosity. Next to the pub once stood a cafe which served soup from a pot that was never allowed to run dry. When, under new management, the pot was given a thorough cleaning, they found an old-fashioned market porter’s hat in the bottom. Made of leather and wood to protect the porters’ heads while carrying big boxes of fish around, they were almost indestructible. The soup was never the same again.
The Great Fire of London – Lightermen, Rectors and Shopkeepers
Just around the corner from The Walrus & The Carpenter is a livery hall I hadn’t noticed before. This is the Hall of the Company of Watermen and Lightermen of the City of London. Lightermen, as described here, operated flat-bottomed barges to move goods and people on the Thames. Founded in the 16th Century, the Company’s Hall dates to 1786.
The street of St-Mary-at-Hill takes its name from this church, which looks rather peculiar from the street. The more ‘normal-looking’ side of the church is visible from the courtyard, which is unfortunately inaccessible at the moment due to lockdown. St-Mary-at-Hill survived the Great Fire, although this version dates to the 18th Century. St Thomas Becket may have been rector here.
At the top of the hill is a Wren church, St Margaret Pattens. The name may come from pattens, a type of wooden clog made in nearby Rood Lane.
A little block of Georgian shops lies directly in front of the church. Wittich and Phillips describe the shops as ‘very fine’; sadly they have fallen victim to the ‘unprecedented events’ we are living through, which is a shame.
The Great Fire of London – Of Mice and Markets
Can you spot the mice on this building in Philpot Lane? I don’t blame you if you can’t – we had to Google it to figure out what we were looking for. It doesn’t help that they are currently maroon! The story related by Wittich and Phillips is that a 19th Century workman spotted two grey mice devouring the lunch he had left on the scaffolding. Far from being annoyed, he asked a plasterer to immortalise the occasion.
We have seen Leadenhall Market before – on this occasion to see Sculpture in the City, and on this occasion in search of Roman remains. It really is a fabulous spot. As related in the Londinium walk, the city’s Roman forum once stood here. It has been a market since the Middle Ages; it was damaged but not destroyed in the Great Fire thanks to a rich merchant who threw money to the crowd to pull down surrounding buildings and create a fire break. This was the main means of fighting fires at the time. This version is from 1881 when Leadenhall was primarily a poultry market – note the surviving poulterer’s hooks in the bottom image.
Near Leadenhall Market is St-Peter-Upon-Cornhill, a very peculiar church: set back from the street and at an angle. The tradition is that this is a very old church indeed, dating back to 179 AD. It survived the Great Fire in a damaged state so Wren rebuilt it between 1677 and 1684.
Another church which hides itself away from the street level is St Michael’s Cornhill. It is a Wren church, but Sir George Gilbert Scott undertook a number of 19th Century alterations. The origins of the church are Saxon.
The Great Fire of London – Hidden Back Alleys
One of my favourite things about the City of London is investigating all the little alleys and courtyards, and there are some great ones around here. Immediately behind St Michael’s, Cornhill is the Jamaica Wine House. The current building is 19th Century, but on this site stood London’s first coffee house. Coffee houses swiftly became fashionable places to meet and discuss news and business. More on this shortly.
Very close to the Jamaica Wine House is the George & Vulture Chop House. The George & Vulture is very historic – Dickens’ bust looks out over the currently empty restaurant as he mentioned it in the Pickwick Papers. He is said to have thrown his hat in the air with joy when he discovered another quaint tavern to put in his books. It was originally two taverns, the George and the Lively Vulture, which were amalgamated after the Great Fire.
You have to brave the dark and mysterious Ball Court in order to find Simpson’s Tavern. Wittich and Phillips call this “a perfect 1757 eating house.”
There are a few commemorative plaques down Change Alley. The Marine Society was the world’s first charity for seafarers. And Garraway’s was one of the first city merchants to sell tea. Next door to Garraway’s was Jonathan’s Coffee House – a meeting place for stockbrokers who later founded the London Stock Exchange. Hence ‘Change’ Alley.
The Great Fire of London – Back To The Monument
We exit the maze of alleys at Lombard Street, where the bankers of Lombardy once set up shop to lend money. A number of hanging bank signs still exist, including this one for Thomas Gresham’s 1563 bank.
Not a Wren church this time, but a Hawksmoor one. Nicholas Hawksmoor was apprenticed to Christopher Wren – we have seen his churches before in Tower Hamlets and Greenwich. This one is the church of St Mary Woolnoth; the origin of the name is uncertain. This is another church which survived the Great Fire but was too damaged and had to be demolished and rebuilt. Below the church theses days is Bank Underground Station.
And a final Wren church before we head back over the crossroads at the Bank of England towards the Monument. Wren built about 50 in total after the Great Fire – around a dozen survive today in their original form; the Blitz destroyed or altered others; while some no longer exist for other reasons. There is a comprehensive list here. Even on this short walk, though, we have seen so many that there is no doubt about Wren’s influence on London Post-Fire to today. This church is St Clement, Eastcheap, which may be the St Clement’s of the nursery rhyme.
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4 thoughts on “The Great Fire of London – A Historic Walk”
4 thoughts on “The Great Fire of London – A Historic Walk”