In the aftermath of the Great Fire emerged a yellow-flowering plant known as London Rocket and, in 1667 and 1668, “it grew very abundantly on the ruins around St. Paul’s”; it was seen again, in 1945, “just outside the City boundary.” It is the true flower of fire. The Monument, erected on the site of the Fire’s first emergence, is also a form of rocket or vehicle of fire; it was first proposed that a statue of the king, or a great phoenix, should be placed upon its summit. But it was eventually agreed that an urn of flames, known as “the Blaze,” should furnish the column. Daniel Defoe deciphered the object as a great candle, with the urn as “handsome gilt flame!”
There were many representations of the events of those five days of fire, not least a series of long poems which can be found in an anthology entitled London in Flames, London in Glory. The burning city is severally compared to Rome, to Carthage, to Sodom and to Troy; the classical gods are depicted as wandering through the burning streets, together with Virgil and Jezebel, as the spectacle of flaming London conjures up images of dead or dying civilisations in past ages of the world. The painted images of the Fire were equally ostentatious, although some of them seem literally to have been sketched at the very time of the blaze itself. There are sober studies, including those of Hollar showing “A True and Exact Prospect of the Famous Citty of London” before the autumn of 1666 together with the same “As It Appeareth Now After the Sad Calamitie And Destruction by Fire”; it was sketched from the south bank of the river, and it is possible to see through the ruins right into Cheapside itself. But most works were in the style of “conflagration painting,” according to London in Paint, which found their inspiration in “biblical or mythic city fires.” Two of the most famous paintings, “after Jan Groffier the Elder,” depict the towers and portcullis of Ludgate in flames as if it were the entrance to Hell itself; there may be another explanation for the appearance of Ludgate, however, since the area beside it was considered an “artists’ quarter” in the middle of the seventeenth century. There are many small scenes and episodes reflected in these paintings: the woman running with wild face and arms outstretched from the encroaching fire, the man carrying a bundle of silver plate upon his head, the carts and horses being driven in a great crowd towards the open fields. But the most striking image is that of a man carrying a child on his shoulders against a backdrop of flame; it was re-employed by Blake, Doré, and other artists as a true representation of the mysteries and sufferings of London.
The Great Fire was not simply the inspiration, therefore, of contemporary artists. For over two hundred years it remained the most arresting image of the seventeenth century. Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, a great scenic designer in the London theatres, painted his own version at the end of the eighteenth century and in the following century the Great Fire was recreated every night at the Surrey Gardens.
But the conflation of the city and fire goes deeper than theatre or spectacle. To Panizzi, in the mid-nineteenth century, London had the appearance of a city that had somehow already been burned. In Night and Day Virginia Woolf describes it as “eternally burnt”; it seemed that “no darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the same spot.” In 1880 a Frenchman believed the entire capital to be “a temple of fire-worshippers”; his companion on this urban pilgrimage, Arthur Machen, went on to describe “all the fires of London reflected dimly in the sky, as if far away awful furnace doors were opened.” Mirbeau talked of London in terms “of mystery, of the conflagration, of the furnace” while Monet, at the end of the nineteenth century, wished to depict the sun “setting in an enormous ball of fire behind Parliament.” In some of that artist’s paintings, in fact, London seems to breathe and live within an atmosphere of fire surrounding all streets and buildings with the same unearthly glow.
By the mid-nineteenth century the sky above London was notable for “the glowing atmosphere that hangs over the capital for miles”; the brick kilns on the perimeter of the city in that period created a ring as if of stage fire, while the great dust mountains inside the capital had the appearance of volcanoes. It was a city “where fires can scarcely be kept under” while, in twentieth-century terms, it is characterised as an “urban heat island.” London was popularly known as the “Great Oven” and, in the 1920s, V.S. Pritchett confessed to the sensation of being “smoked and kippered” in the depths of the city. When the fire does eventually go out the city is forbidding, blackened and relentless, some charred monument of eternity filled with what Keats called “the Burden of Mystery.”
It became clear, after the Great Fire, that fire itself must be controlled. The twin visitations of flame and plague had been interpreted by moralists as the handiwork of a God enraged by the sinfulness and dissipation of London. But there were others, including Christopher Wren and Edmond Halley, who began to question the wisdom of placing all responsibility for its disasters on fate or divine displeasure. The Royal Society had been established in London in 1660, and the two visitations prompted its members to find “scientific” or “objective” causes for such violent events. In the name of “Reason”—what is “simple, solid, sensible”—it was hoped that London consciousness might be changed so that, in future ages, such pestilences and conflagrations might be averted. The greatest effect of the Fire, paradoxically, was to promote the advancement of science. Even before the end of September 1666, according to a quotation in London in Flames, London in Glory, “Men begin now everywhere to recover their spirits again, and think of repairing the old and rebuilding a new City.” Specifically it seemed an opportunity to exorcise “the rebellious Humours, the horrid Sacriledges … and gingling Extravagances” of the previous age. This refers to the civil war, and to the execution of Charles I, but it also suggests that extravagant piety and superstitious practice—precisely the citizens’ responses to the plague, as documented by Defoe—were no longer permitted. It was to be a new city in every sense.
After the Fire
Two plans of a London reconstructed after the Great Fire of 1666, one by Christopher Wren and the other by John Evelyn. Their theoretical and hypothetical city had no chance against the twin forces of tradition and commerce which obstinately recreated London in its former image.
CHAPTER 22
A London Address
The Great Fire had stopped by Fetter Lane which, for most of its existence, has been border territory. It runs from Fleet Street to Holborn, and the ancient route is now lined with twentieth-century air-conditioned office-blocks and some nineteenth-century survivals. In the stretch of Fetter Lane which leads directly out of Fleet Street, with, on the respective corners, a bookshop and a computer supplier, is Clifford’s Inn, the oldest Inn of Chancery and once the most important edifice in the street. Rebuilt now, and partitioned into offices and apartments, it is situated beside a modern restaurant, the Café Rouge, and opposite a new drinking establishment called the Hogshead. The judicial air of the lane has not entirely disappeared, however, since beside Clifford’s Inn is a building which contains the “Technology and Construction Court.” This stretch of the lane is continually busy with traffic, in particular with taxis decanting into Fleet Street.
Upward from this site, towards Holborn, the lane divides and the eastern fork is turned into New Fetter Lane. But the old Fetter Lane still pursues its course northward, albeit now with difficulty. Its whole eastern side has been demolished, as the foundations of taller and greater buildings are sunk within the ever receptive London earth. The former Public Record Office is still visible, to the west of the statue of John Wilkes down Rolls Buildings, while closer to Holborn the Mucky Duck and the Printer’s Devil have survived as public houses. Three mid-nineteenth-century houses remain, as if they were some ancient terrace preserving the memory of the street, and their ground floors are now occupied by coffee shops and sandwich bars.
And where did Fetter Lane get its name? John Stow, who knew it
well, believed that “Fetter” was “so called of fewters (or idle people) lying there, as in a way leading to gardens.” Others, however, have suggested that the word is derived from the Norman defaytor “defaulter.” Some prefer another French origin in foutre, “blackguard.” But there are other possibilities. Fetter may derive from the feuriers, or felt-makers, who are deemed to have inhabited the street in the fifteenth century. Or it may spring from the name of the landlord Viteri or Viter who lived there a century earlier. More ingenious antiquarians have in turn suggested that the name sprang from fetor or “offensive smell,” on the face of it unlikely in an area surrounded by gardens and orchards—unless the fewters, or foutres, or defaytors, were in some way responsible for the stink. Another connection has been made with frater, “brother,” which was a characteristic address between the men of law who frequented the area. A more simple connection has been made with the workshops of the street which manufactured fetters or lance vests for the Knights Templar who also congregated in the vicinity. The confusion and speculation will never be resolved, and the obscurity of Fetter Lane’s derivation serves only to demonstrate the unknowability of many London names. It is as if the city was striving to conceal its origins. Yet, as G.K. Chesterton once remarked, “The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon: every slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate covered with addition and subtraction sums.” It might also be suggested that every object, every doorway, throws a light upon the ancient territory of which the present Fetter Lane is now the custodian.
A Roman urn filled with coins was found beneath the surface of the lane, confirming Stow’s observation that an old Roman road had been located in the immediate vicinity. There was a wooden bridge over the Fleet here, too, so the early inhabitants of Fetter Lane and its environs had the advantage of living beside a swiftly flowing river. A ninth-century sword handle was also discovered within the depths of the lane. Its manufacture and material were of fine quality, indicating that it was employed for ceremonial rather than sanguinary purposes. It may then have some connection with a charter of 959 by which King Edgar of Wessex granted the neighbouring land to the monks of Westminster Abbey, one boundary of which was marked by a line parallel to Fetter Lane.
Throughout its history Fetter Lane acted as a boundary, or has been recorded as frontier territory; it was where the Great Fire stopped, and it marks the area where the City’s influence ceases. It is also the area where two parishes, St. Andrew’s, Holborn, and St. Dunstan’s in the West, meet. We may find, in turn, that it has attracted those who live upon “the edge.”
At the beginning of the fourteenth century its present contours emerged. In 1306 it was known as the “neu strete” but in 1329 it is styled as “a new lane called Faiteres Lane.” The earliest records suggest, however, that it had already acquired an ambiguous reputation. There is a report on one “Emmade Brakkele, a harlot,” living in Fetter Lane. A keeper of a house harbouring “prostitutes and sodomites” was noted as living in “fayters lane.” Yet it must already have been a “mixed” neighbourhood in a thoroughly medieval spirit, since there is a tradition of an “Inne or Court” in “Fewter Lane” and the fact that Clifford’s Inn was established here in 1345 suggests that some original foundations may have been maintained here even before Fetter Lane appeared in the public records. The religious establishments in the immediate vicinity will also have provided some measure of extra-mural control with St. Dunstan’s to the south, St. Andrew’s and Ely Place to the north. In 1349, John Blakwell, “Cetizen of London,” purchased with his wife property in “Faytourslane,” and Henry VI is recorded as collecting rents from the dwellings there. This in itself is not necessarily a guarantee of respectability, but these bare records suggest that throughout the medieval period it was a well-known and well-documented “subarbe” of London. By the early fifteenth century there was a famous tavern on the corner of Fetter Lane with Holborn, known as Le Swan on Le Hope, which contained rooms for travellers. There were complaints about its overhanging roof, and some “barriers which had been erected outside the inn and so distracted the roadway,” but it survived until the middle of the eighteenth century under the revised name of the Black Swan. A few yards down the lane there now stands the Mucky Duck as a plaintive reminder of a more graceful presence.
On a mid-sixteenth-century map Fetter Lane is clearly marked with fifteen houses down its eastern side and twelve down its western; the topography may not be entirely accurate, but it is in contrast to “Liver Lane” (Leather Lane) to the north which proceeds among gardens and open fields. At the northern end of Fetter Lane Barnard’s Inn can be seen and, down towards Fleet Street, Clifford’s Inn is already visible; a stone archway spanning the lane, almost at its midway point, has also been marked. The map is less than accurate in one respect, however, since it does not convey the continual encroachment of new buildings in and around the lane itself; on land once owned by St. Bartholomew’s “ten tenements with gardens” were erected by 1555 and by 1580 a further thirteen “illegal new houses” had been constructed. Neither does the map reveal the narrow yards and alleys, like Fleur de Lys Alley and Crane Court, which ran off the main thoroughfare and which exist still.
Like other areas of London, it had its share in fires and executions. Both entries to the lane were in fact customary sites for the gallows. There are records of Catholic recusants, in 1590, being hanged and quartered at the Fleet Street end; it is, according to one Catholic history, Catholic London by W.D. Newton, “one of our sacred spots.” The melancholy Catholic composer John Dowland, who died in 1626, had been living in Fetter Lane. In 1643 two plotters against Parliament were hanged at the Holborn end, having arranged their conspiracy in a lodging in the lane, and for two centuries this spot was often a place of execution. It has been the site of death in more than one form, however. There was a distillery on the corner of Fetter Lane and Holborn in the mid-eighteenth century; it was on the site of the Black Swan, formerly Le Swan on Le Hope, and so had a long association with drink. During the most violent days of the Gordon Riots in 1780, with the mob’s cry of “No Popery!” rising through the streets, it was rumoured that the owner of the distillery was a Catholic. So it was ransacked and fired, with fatal results. “The gutters of the street, and every crack and fissure in the stones, ran with scorching spirit, which being dammed up by busy hands, overflowed the road and pavement, and formed a great pool, into which the people dropped down dead by dozens.” This account is written by Charles Dickens, who like many Londoners was obsessed with fiery death, but his version is authenticated by several contemporary sources. So by Fetter Lane “some stooped with their lips to the brink and never raised their heads again, others sprang up from their fiery draught, and danced, half in mad triumph, and half in the agony of suffocation, until they fell, and steeped their corpses in the liquor that had killed them.” Others, leaving the distillery with their clothes on fire, actually rolled in the spirit mistaking it for water until they “became themselves the dust and ashes of the flames they had kindled, and strewed the public streets of London.” They became part of Fetter Lane.
There have been other fires and explosions over the centuries. Curiously enough, one upon 10 April 1679 was believed to be the consequence of a “Papist Plot”; the hanging of the recusants, and the firing of the distillery, then become part of a morbid Catholic trinity. Then again, in 1583, just after the neighbouring church of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, had been “new glazed” to remove all signs of popish superstition, a large explosion of gunpowder in Fetter Lane caused all its windows to shatter and fall. By use of gunpowder, too, the Great Fire was “quenched” in the vicinity. The Fire Court, established to adjudicate claims of ownership, sat in Clifford’s Inn itself. So Fetter Lane became a famous boundary.
With its legal Inns beside its taverns, and it
s churches beside the houses of pimps, it always possessed an intermediary status. The more dubious healers lived here: in the seventeenth century one Bromfield at the Blue Balls in Plow Yard, Fetter Lane, advertised “Pills against all Diseases.” Samuel Johnson’s friend, a poor apothecary named Levett, met “a woman of bad character” by a coal-shed in Fetter Lane and was duped into marrying her. He was then nearly imprisoned for her debts, the whole story according to Johnson being “as marvellous as any page of the Arabian Nights.” The lane was also the haunt of pawn-brokers, to which reference is made in one seventeenth-century drama, Barry’s Ram-Alley:
Take thou these books
Go both to the broker’s in Fetter Lane.
The allusion to books is appropriate in another sense since Fetter Lane has become associated with several London writers. Henry Peacham, the author of The Art of Living in London, dwelled here. Michael Drayton, the author of Poly-Olbion, lived at No. 184. Thomas Hobbes, according to John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, “lived most part in Fetter-lane where he writ, or finished, his book De Porpore, in Latin and then in English.” He preferred his Fetter Lane life to any in the country where “the want of learned conversation was a great inconvenience.” John Dryden lived at the corner of Fetter Lane and Fleur-de-lys Court, in one of the houses newly fashioned after the Fire; he remained here for nine years, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, and for a while his neighbour across the street was another dramatist, Thomas Otway, who died of drink in an adjacent tavern. Charles Lamb attended school in an alley off the lane. Coleridge lectured in the lane and, at different times, Samuel Butler, Lionel Johnson and Virginia Woolf lived in Clifford’s Inn. Lemuel Gulliver, the hero of Swift’s novel, is also recorded as having dwelled in Fetter Lane.
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