by Ian Mortimer
As a result of this, there are really two Londons: the old and the new. The old is largely confined within the ancient city walls and in the areas immediately outside the gates, as well as the suburb of Southwark, on the south side of the river. The new London envelops the old, running from Spitalfields in the north-east across to Hatton Garden – including the new developments to the south of Theobalds Road – and as far as Piccadilly. But the new city is not stopping there: if you walk all the way around the perimeter, you will see a great deal of building work under way. Southampton Square (better known to you as Bloomsbury Square), laid out by the earl of Southampton in 1660, is currently being developed as a piazza of high-quality houses. Although it is still possible to see ‘the Lines of Communication’ – the half-moon defences constructed to defend London during the Civil Wars – these will soon disappear under the new streets. At the south-west extreme of the conurbation, the palaces of Whitehall and Westminster still sprawl in all their medieval angularity, but you cannot help but feel it is only a matter of time before these too are engulfed in the great tide of construction that is lapping at the city walls.
The heavy rain does not abate all day. In his house in Seething Lane, to the north of the Tower, Samuel Pepys looks out at the downpour. He is the Clerk of the Acts, one of the most important positions in the administration of the navy, and a prosperous man with interests in a great many subjects, including scientific innovations. However, having already spent a couple of hours drinking wine and eating anchovies with Ralph Greatorex, a maker of mathematical instruments, he has had enough of discussing the mathematical properties of levers. He is now wishing the rain would stop, so the man could go. But if you come back to call on him the following Thursday, when the weather is fine and warm, you’ll find him in a much better frame of mind, sitting on his roof terrace with his neighbour, Sir William Penn, playing his lute and drinking wine (again). And on that sunny day the old city will give you quite a different experience from the wet Sunday you have just seen.
Although the heat means that there are few domestic fires burning, the many industrial ones around the city make the air acrid with the smell of coal smoke. But it is not just burning coal that will affect your nostrils. You will gag on the noxious fumes coming from the riverside and those parts of the city where tanning and fulling take place. In the main streets, the piles of dung left by the horses also emit an aroma. So do the splashes of urine where men have pissed in alleyways. As the heat of the day intensifies, these smells tend to be overpowered by the stench of the cesspits in the cellars. Pigeons fly out from under the eaves of the old houses, their droppings leaving a white streak on the timberwork. Rats scavenge behind barrels and under and over crates. Kitchen rubbish collectors lead their horse-drawn carts from door to door, collecting rotting matter. Rakers, whose business it is to empty private cesspits, lead their horse-drawn carts filled with dung-pots through the streets. Flocks of sheep and herds of cattle are driven on the hoof to the abattoirs and meat markets, where their dung and their blood add to the stink of the street.
You could say that walking through old London is still the same multi-sensory experience it was in the Middle Ages. In fact, it is even more overwhelming, due to the larger population. Ten times as many people live here these days as did in the late fourteenth century, and that means ten times as many sheep and cattle, and ten times as much human waste. And it is not just the permanent residents who contribute to the sense of overcrowding: hundreds of thousands of people come into town daily for business or pleasure – to go to market, attend a fair, do business in the city or see a play at one of the theatres. As a result, there are crowds of people and animals everywhere you go.
Just listen to the sounds of a London street. More than 3,000 oxen are led into the city and slaughtered here every day, besides a huge number of other animals. The noise they make as they pass by or wait in pens is considerable; their squeals, bleats and bellows as they are being slaughtered are raucous and disturbing. Then there is the sound of the iron-shod wheels of more than 2,000 coaches, and many more thousands of carts and wagons, grinding over the cobbles of the old streets, and the metallic hammering of blacksmiths and candlestick makers. When the traffic grinds to a halt because too many coaches are simultaneously trying to pass the same point, you will hear loud altercations between the drivers. You will hardly be able to avoid the bells and loud clappers of the rakers driving their dung-carts, with which they announce their presence. Nor will you be able to ignore the yelling of those gathering around a cockfight or wrestling match, especially if many bets have been placed. If you then add the hourly chimes of more than a hundred churches, the cries of street vendors pushing their way through the crowds – ‘Mackerel, two a groat and four for sixpence’, ‘Flounders, buy my flounders’, ‘Frying pans mended’ – and the calls of householders leaning out of their upstairs windows, trying to attract the attention of the sellers in the street, you can see that old London is not just so crowded and smelly: it is also so loud that you can barely hear yourself think.
If you are looking to escape the hubbub, there are gardens and parks laid out for recreation. This is a new cultural aspect of the city: a hundred years ago the urban centre was the main and only attraction, and if you needed to renew your connection to nature, you could go for a stroll into the fields. The idea of a horticultural experience was something that only occurred to gentlemen who installed pleasure gardens in their country houses. But these days Londoners increasingly feel the need to leave the congested streets, if only temporarily. Those who can afford it might take a coach to Hyde Park, to wander in the grounds or follow the parade of other fashionable coaches around its perimeter. If you’re on foot, you might saunter over to St James’s Park where you can enjoy a long, straight walk between the lines of mature elms, along the path known as the Mall, and, at the same time, watch the aquatic birds on the nearby ornamental canal. On the north side, beyond St James’s Palace in what will one day become Green Park, you will find a woodland where people come to see deer; and on the southern side of the park is the royal aviary, Birdcage Walk. Another fashionable option is to take a boat to Vauxhall to see the New Spring Gardens. These are a series of covered walks among flowerbeds, where people stroll up and down or stop at huts where they can buy an overpriced glass of wine or beer, for which there are long queues. At this time of year it is very pleasant to wander there gathering roses or pinks and then return to the city by a wherry, trailing your fingers in the water as the waterman guides you to the nearest ‘stairs’ or small dock, from which you can walk home.
At the end of the evening, London undergoes yet another transformation. The commotion dies down, the colour fades from the streets and the traffic dwindles. In the public gardens the decent and self-respecting people withdraw and less-respectable characters make their shadowy appearances. If you go for a walk among the tall elms in St James’s Park by night, you are entering a different world. In the words of the poet John Wilmot, earl of Rochester:8
And nightly now beneath their shade
are buggeries, rapes, and incests made.
Unto this all-sin-sheltering grove
whores of the bulk and the alcove,
great ladies, chambermaids, and drudges,
the ragpicker, and heiress trudges.
Carmen, divines, great lords, and tailors,
’prentices, poets, pimps, and jailers,
footmen, fine fops do here arrive,
and here promiscuously they swive.
Similar things go on in Hyde Park. At the end of the century William III is so anxious about what is going on in the darkness outside his carriage that he has 300 oil lamps installed along what is now Rotten Row, to light his way back to Kensington Palace.9 In the city itself, lanterns are lit and fixed above the doors. Some trading places, like Leadenhall Market, open late, displaying the meat on sale by candlelight. Elsewhere lanterns are carried up and down the streets as the official watchmen perform their night p
atrols, past the closed shops and shuttered houses. Only at midnight are the street lights allowed to burn down. After that, you are unlikely to see any lights except those attached to coaches or ‘links’ – flaming torches carried by boys to illuminate the way of gentlemen who have been carousing late. Apart from at Smithfield, where the market traders gather by torchlight to conduct business from about midnight until daybreak, the city returns to a few hours of silence, darkness and stillness.
All this should give you some idea as to why people’s opinions of London are so wildly divided. For those who were born here, London is not just a city, it’s everything that life promises. It’s a religion, a mythology, a law and a tradition. It’s a great experiment in how to live and, as such, it contains all that is good and bad about life. Ask any Londoner what he thinks of the place and he will tell you that it is the flower of all cities. Richard Newcourt declares in his new map of London (published in 1658) that London is ‘the most magnificent and renowned city in Europe, both for the antiquity of her foundation as also for honour, wealth and beauty’. John Brydall in his Camera Regis (1676) states that London ‘is styled the epitome or breviary of all England, the seat of the British Empire, the king of England’s chamber’.10 Foreigners readily agree with such pronouncements, largely because of the sheer size of the place. The number of ships moored in the Thames always grabs their attention, with estimates ranging from 1,400 to 2,000 vessels at various times. But visitors also pass negative comments. Most agree that sprawling Whitehall is not only the largest palace in Europe but also the ugliest. Lorenzo Magalotti admits that no city in the world has so many fine shops, but is unimpressed by most of London’s public buildings – except for the Tower of London, the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall Palace (designed by Inigo Jones), Westminster Hall and St Paul’s Cathedral. He also cannot reconcile being held up by the heavy traffic on London Bridge with the idea of a Renaissance city. Monsieur Misson, a French gentleman who spends some time in England, declares the houses of old London to be ‘the scurviest things in the world … nothing but wood and plaster and nasty little windows’.11 And, dare it be said, some English writers also voice their complaints about the state of the metropolis. Daniel Defoe describes the Fleet as ‘a nauseous and abominable sink of public nastiness’.12 John Lanyon gives a fuller account of the city’s unsavoury features, declaring:
It is too apparent that notwithstanding many persons and considerable sums of money are employed for cleansing the streets yet they grow daily more offensive with dust and unwholesome stenches in summer and in wet weather with dirt, which occasions a swarm of coaches, to the disturbance of the city and the increase of noisome soil that whereof being by rain washed into the common sewers and passages and thence into the Thames, the sewers are much obstructed, the common passages (particularly Holborn Ditch, formerly of great convenience) now rendered useless and the greatest annoyance in the city, and the river itself, especially above [the] bridge, made daily less navigable. Besides the avenues to the city are almost all day pestered with those carts which only carry away some small part of the soil [i.e. dung] out of the streets and are made exceeding noisome and almost impassable with dirt carelessly spilt by the way to the common laystalls [dung-heaps], which being many and so near the city yield a great and contagious stench, offensive to passengers but especially to the skirts of the town, which else would be the most delightful places, and what wind so ever blows brings those noisome vapours into the city itself, sometimes to increase the beginning of infection.13
You cannot help but feel that what London really needs is a major surgical operation to cut out its old, irregular and decaying heart and replace it with a new, well-designed one.
The Great Fire
In the early hours of Sunday, 2 September 1666, the king’s baker Thomas Farynor wakes up in his house in Pudding Lane to find himself choked by smoke. He sees flames rising rapidly up his staircase. Rousing his son, daughter and maidservant, he tells them to climb through an upstairs window. The maidservant refuses, too scared of heights, and remains in the house. He therefore leads just his children along the edge of the roof to the safety of their neighbour’s house. The maidservant becomes the first victim of the Great Fire of London.
Three hours later, in Seething Lane on the other side of the city, Samuel Pepys and his wife are woken by their maidservant, Jane Birch, who tells them of a large fire she has seen from her chamber window. Pepys puts on his nightgown and goes to her room to look for himself, but thinks the fire of little consequence and goes back to bed. When he gets up again at 7 a.m., Jane tells him that more than 300 houses have been destroyed overnight. That gets his attention. Pepys leaves the house and walks to the river, from which he looks out towards the bridge from an elevated spot. He sees ‘an infinite great fire’ in the streets around the northern side of the bridge.14 As he watches, flames race along the riverbank as far as the Steelyard. People are struggling to remove their goods from their houses, dragging them to the river and hurling them down into boats. As Pepys walks back through the streets he sees other men and women hurriedly carrying their valuables to the nearest parish church, confident that such stone buildings will not burn. The poor, he notices, endeavour to remain in their homes for as long as possible, until the fire reaches them; then they run for the nearest waterside stairs and try to clamber into boats. Pepys notes that the pigeons are similarly loath to leave the houses, but hover about the windows and balconies until their wings are burnt and they drop to the ground.
Londoners are used to fires – Pepys mentions another fifteen incidents in his diary – but they have never seen anything like this. The combination of the dry weather, the strong easterly wind, the firewood stored in cellars and back yards against the forthcoming winter, and the fact that the fire takes hold in the dead of night (and so has progressed considerably before people wake up) all contribute to the difficulty of containing it. The complacency of the authorities does not help. The lord mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bludworth, is too slow to order the destruction of houses with gunpowder. But the fundamental problem is the fabric of the buildings themselves. There are too many old, wooden houses packed closely together, leaning towards one another across streets and alleyways. Moreover, when wooden houses burn, they fall outwards, spilling fire in all directions. By the riverside there are wooden warehouses full of oil, pitch, tar, resin, hemp, cordage, brandy and similarly combustible materials, all in close proximity to one another. The result is a rapidly expanding sheet of flame that engulfs many streets at once. The Reverend Thomas Vincent recalls:
Rattle, rattle, rattle was the noise which the fire struck upon the ear round about, as if there had been a thousand iron chariots beating upon the stones; and if you opened your eyes to the opening of the streets, where the fire was come, you might see in some places whole streets at once in flames, that issued forth as if they had been so many great forges from the opposite windows, which folding together, were united together in one great flame throughout the whole street, and then you might see the houses tumble, tumble, tumble from one end of the street to the other with a great crash, leaving the foundations open to the view of the heavens.15
At dusk on the evening of 2 September, Pepys boards a small boat to observe the fire from the river, but is driven back by the heat and the burning material floating in the hot air. He ties up on the safe side of the river and heads to an alehouse, from where he stares across at the burning city. As he later puts it:
As it grew darker, [the fire] appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the city, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire … We stayed till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side of the bridge, and in a bow up the hill, for an arch of about a mile long. It made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once, and a horrid noise the flames made, and the c
racking of houses at their ruin.16
The following day, Monday, 3 September, John Evelyn too looks out from the south bank of the river to observe the city’s destruction. In his words:
All the sky was of a fiery aspect, like the top of a burning oven … God grant mine eyes may never behold the like, who now saw above ten thousand houses all in one flame! The noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames, the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses and churches, was like a hideous storm.17
If you join Pepys or Evelyn on the riverbank you too will see the river strewn with prized possessions, flung into the water to save them, and boats filled with people, clinging on to their furniture, musical instruments, rugs, chests of money and silverware. All over the city, the towers and steeples of dozens of parish churches are silhouetted by a colossal flame, which fills the sky with burning debris and consumes everything in its path. In places, the temperature is approaching 1,700°C.18 And in the middle of it all stands the greatest building in the city, St Paul’s Cathedral, which has withstood every calamity to befall London for nearly 600 years. Now the lead is melting from its roof and flowing down the walls and spilling over the tombs of the great men. The stones of its immense pillars are cracking in the intense heat. The monuments of London’s ancient glory are crumbling to dust.
