London: The greatest city
Plague and fire
London had been decimated by the Black Death in the 14th century, but by the 1550s, the population was back to pre-plague levels. The city had always been a magnet for immigrants, and soon it was 15 times larger than the largest provincial city in England and one of the top five cities in Europe. James I complained: 'Soon London will be all of England.'
A new north–south divide opened up in the city. On the north bank of the Thames were the sober, hard-working citizens of the commercial district (the 'City' with an upper-case 'C'), while the south bank was a hotbed of vice and a crucible of the greatest cultural flowering England has ever known.
Southwark
Newcomers flocked to places such as Southwark, on the south side of the river. Here a dynamic artistic community produced a unique fusion of high art and popular culture. According to actor and lecturer Callum Coates, 'The literature, the reinvention of the English language and the connection with the common man was all happening in that one, densely packed little area, about a quarter of a mile square. That's why Southwark is arguably one of the most important places in England.'
Southwark was outside the control of the city fathers and, since the Middle Ages, had been a refuge for debtors, criminals and other dodgy characters. 'Southwark was the place where it happened,' says Simon Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage. 'It was unregulated and there was a flourishing alternative lifestyle. You had the things that you weren't allowed to do inside the City walls: the entertainment zone, the brothels, the theatres, the bear baiting, the bear gardens. And all that happened outside the restrictive jurisdiction of the City itself.'
Southwark was well known for its many brothels, known as 'stews'. Its women were notorious for their free and easy ways, as one 16th-century Italian visitor noticed:
They kiss each other a lot. If a stranger enters the house and does not first of all kiss the mistress on the lips, they think him badly brought up. At the dances, men hold women in their arms and hug them very tightly. And before each dance, they kiss them in a very lustful way.
Thomas Dekker
The street life of early 17th-century Southwark was recorded by a regular on the thriving pub scene, the playwright and journalist Thomas Dekker. He wrote best-selling satirical guides to the seamy side of London:
There are more ale houses than there are taverns in all of Spain and France, the rooms as full of company as in jail. The harlots in their taffeta gowns, like two painted posts outside those doors, being better to the house than a double sideboard.
Dekker's friends included some of the theatre's biggest stars. For instance, of the more than 40 plays that Dekker churned out, several were the result of a collaboration with the dramatist Ben Jonson. According to Callum Coates, 'Much like modern-day sitcom writers, Dekker was better in a team. When he worked on his own, he wrote good stuff, but when he wrote with two people or more, he wrote brilliant stuff.
'Unfortunately he was a bit of a character and couldn't control his own finances, so he was constantly ending up in prison. He would be paid roughly £6 for each of his plays, which for the man in the street was a year's income. And yet he ended up in debtor's prison countless times. He was churning out plays to make money but was quite clearly spending it all on drink and gambling and everything else.'
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare, the greatest writer in the English language and the man who gave us hundreds of words and phrases still used today, was part of Dekker's crowd. The son of a wealthy glover from Stratford, he left his wife and children in the country to make his fortune in London as a playwright and actor. Many of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including King Lear, Hamlet and Othello, were written during the ten years he spent in seething Southwark.
'It was a lively, somewhat hedonistic place,' says Callum Coates, 'where people were all great individuals and rather proud of the fact that they were on the fringes of society. This was the place to which William Shakespeare and his brother moved and spent a lot of their time living and working. Shakespeare is now put on this enormous intellectual pedestal, and yet at the time, he was writing for a populace who were going to theatres in London's red light district, full of small-time criminals and others.'
Purpose-built theatres
Unlike poor old Dekker, Shakespeare was an astute businessman. He made enough money to invest in a new theatre in Southwark, the Globe. When it opened in 1599, it was part of a new kind of entertainment, exclusive to London. 'Six purpose-built theatres were a city phenomenon,' says historian Professor Lisa Jardine. 'There were travelling players who would go from end to end of England, but to have a theatre with a stage, dressing rooms and perhaps some rudimentary lighting, that was a London thing.'
The audience for the new theatres came from all walks of life. Noblemen and thieves, students and prostitutes, and vast crowds of ordinary working people thronged to the Globe. 'The experience of going to the theatre was somewhere between football and clubbing,' says Professor Jardine. 'It was mass popular entertainment. It was slightly disreputable. It would have been noisy, and you wonder how much of the play most people got to see.'
It was perfectly acceptable to drink, eat, gamble and smoke during performances. As there were no public toilets, nobody bothered to leave the theatre if they were caught short. And if the audience didn't like the show, they made their feelings obvious.
The Puritans
The wild, anarchic scene in the southern suburbs was deeply troubling to the sober citizens on the other side of the Thames. And no one disapproved more of Southwark and all it stood for than the Puritans. They were extreme Protestants, some might say killjoys. Their preachers harangued the public about the evils of drink, sport, dancing and, above all, theatres.
'The stage, with its cross-dressing, lasciviousness, romantic plots and outlandishness, was a million miles away from anything that the Puritans could approve of,' says Professor Jardine. 'But they did bundle the plays in with all kinds of other things they disapproved of, such as women's dress and women's ways in general. They were opposed to anything that you might like to do to enjoy yourself.'
The Puritans, led by Oliver Cromwell, were also opponents of the king and supporters of a bigger role for Parliament. As relations between the two sides deteriorated, the authorities were worried that the theatres could become a hotbed of social unrest.
Civil war
'The concern of the Puritans regarding political intrigue via the theatres became so strong that, when the English Civil Wars began in 1642, the Parliamentarians (as the political Puritans called themselves) shut every single theatre in England,' says Callum Coates. 'They knew that they were dangerous. The vast majority of the English did not want a civil war, and if you had actors telling them that, you could force the idea further. So the theatres were shut, and they stayed shut for 18 years.'
The talent scene of south London had produced some of the greatest literature ever written. In the space of just five years, William Shakespeare alone had premiered six of his most famous plays there. But the turmoil of the English Civil Wars of the 1640s brought this vibrant, creative culture to an abrupt end.
London was plunged into an era of savage religious fundamentalism and passionate political debate between supporters of the king versus Parliament, a battle that culminated in the triumph of the Puritans and the bloody demise of the king. For 11 years, Britain was a republic – the 'Commonwealth' – headed by Oliver Cromwell. Under his rule, London was a very dreary place. Southwark's empty theatres were destroyed, Sunday sports banned, the celebration of Christmas abolished.
Restoration
When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, Londoners looked forward to a return to the good times. They had high hopes that, under the 'merry monarch', they would enjoy a period of peace and prosperity.
Twenty years had passed since the turmoil of the civil wars. It was 300 years since the ravages of the Black Death. But in the space of two years London would be hit once again by disaster. First by disease, then by a cataclysm that would alter the shape of the city for ever.
We have a unique record of London before and after its transformation, thanks to a little-known engraver, Wenceslaus Hollar. Much of what we know about the London we have lost we owe to him. Hollar arrived in London in 1637, a refugee from Bohemia, the modern Czech Republic. From the top of a bell tower on the south bank in Southwark, Hollar set about recording his new home in minute detail.
On the river, he saw hundreds of ships carrying goods to and from Europe and, to the east, the medieval London Bridge, crammed with shops and houses. Hollar didn't realise as he drew the ancient overcrowded city that he was mapping the cause of London's imminent devastation by disease and fire. His sketches were source material for his great masterpiece, a massive 2.4-metre (8 foot) panorama of London called the Long View.
Hollar's view
In the foreground of the Long View, we see leafy Southwark, with the bishop's residence cheek by jowl with taverns, brothels and workshops. Across the river is the densely populated City of London, backed by open countryside. To the east, the Thames stretches as far as the eye can see.
'What is so good about this view is that it shows all of the city with a fidelity to detail that is incredible,' says Mark Bills of the Museum of London. 'We have nothing else like it. It's quite idiosyncratic in many ways. Some of the unusual things are the spellings of some of the names – for example, we have 'Beere Bayting' rather than 'Bear Baiting' – because English wasn't Hollar's first language. But he was wonderful draughtsman, with an eye for detail – the houses, the small figures walking through the streets, the gardens. It's an amazing record.
To modern eyes, 17th-century London looks rather charming, but the vast scale of Hollar's print disguises the fact that much of the city was falling apart. 'London was well and truly run down,' says Professor Jardine. 'Compared with Paris, which was being rebuilt as a great, grand city, compared with Italy with its classical buildings, London's buildings had been allowed to deteriorate, first in the civil war, then during the Commonwealth. For instance, troops and horses had been stationed inside old St Paul's, and because it had been struck by lightning in 1564, it had a tumbledown spire, so it was a mess.' In fact, Hollar's engravings of St Paul's are one of the few records we have of the old medieval structure.
The proposed map
Hollar's detailed drawings took years to complete, and he was often short of money. Desperate for a commission, in 1660 he wrote to the new king, Charles II, proposing a vast scale map of London:
The map is to contain ten foot in breadth and five foot upwards, therein shall be expressed not only the streets, lanes, alleys, etc, proportionately measured, but also the buildings, as much resembling the likeness of them as the convenience of the room will permit.
He sent the king a sample of the proposed map, which offers a unique glimpse into the lives of Londoners of the period. There is the rich parade through the fashionable district of Covent Garden. In the vast green expanses of St Giles's Fields, labourers plough furrows. There are even merry makers dancing around a maypole, marking the reintroduction of May Day celebrations, banned during the civil wars and the Commonwealth. But the king couldn't afford to fund such a huge project, to Hollar's bitter disappointment.
The Great Plague
Little did the artist realise that the densely populated city was about to disappear. In 1665, London was revisited by its worst nightmare – plague. The disease spread like wildfire through the filthy, overcrowded streets.
Records show that this outbreak was the worst since the Black Death, 300 years earlier. It began slowly in May, killing 31 people in St Giles, one of the poorest districts. In July it gathered momentum, killing over 1,000 a week. By August, the death toll was over 2,000 Londoners a week. In September, it peaked at over 7,000. By winter, the plague had wiped out 100,000 people, one fifth of the city's entire population.
Two of the victims were Hollar's 22-year-old son James and his print publisher. His business was badly hit during the plague year, as rich patrons deserted the disease-ridden city in droves. And the worst was yet to come.
Doom-mongers
The next year was 1666, a date which filled Londoners with foreboding. 'Late 17th-century London was a very superstitious place,' says Simon Thurley. 'In a sense, people looked at these disasters in a very pragmatic way. They saw them as a punishment from God for wickedness.'
Doom-mongers stood on every street corner issuing dire warnings of impending disaster. The Quaker Solomon Eagle walked naked through the streets of London carrying an urn of flaming fire and intoning: 'Oh London, London, sinful as Sodom and Gomorrah. The decree is gone out: repent or burn.'
In the autumn, it seemed that all these dreadful prophecies were fulfilled – London reaped the whirlwind. In the early hours of Sunday, 2 September, a fire broke out in the king's bakery in Pudding Lane, in the heart of the medieval city.
The Great Fire
Small fires like this were common, and at first the locals weren't too worried. When the lord mayor of London visited the scene, he remarked, 'A woman might piss it out!' How wrong he was. '1666 was a hot year, very dry, not much rain,' says Simon Thurley. 'The actual day of the fire, there was a hot, warm wind that blew the fire westwards. There was no way that anyone was going to be able to put it out.'
Londoners had never experienced a disaster on this scale before. Within 24 hours, the fire was raging out of control, leaping from street to street, greedily consuming the close-knit timber-and-pitch houses. As night fell on 2 September, the heart of the old city was ablaze. People who had thought they were safe now fled. The navy official Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary Londoners' pathetic attempts to save their property:
Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods and flinging them into the river. Poor people staying in their houses till the very fire touched them, and then running into the boats. And among them, the poor pigeons who were loath to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies till some of them burned their wings and fell down.
Divine anger
By Monday, 3 September, the flames were destroying 100 properties an hour. The God-fearing saw the fire as an expression of divine anger on the sinful and pleasure-loving city. As the Puritan Thomas Vincent put it:
Now the fire gets mastery and burns dreadfully, and God with his great bellows blows upon it, which makes it spread quickly and go on with such force and rage, overturning all so furiously that the whole city is brought into jeopardy of desolation.
The third day of the fire was the worst. Businessmen desperately tried to save stock by moving it to where they thought it would be safe. The City's booksellers and stationers piled the crypts of churches with paper, thereby creating tinder boxes. When London's principal church, St Paul's cathedral, caught fire, hundreds of books, including 300 copies of Hollar's History of St Paul's, went up in flames. In total, books worth £150 million in today's money were destroyed.
Video: The
Great Fire.
Hollar's personal losses were huge. There was horror and devastation all around him. But he realised that he was witnessing a defining moment in the history of the city he knew so well. Like a photo-journalist, he set to work recording the death of medieval London. With his forensic eye for detail, he sketched the fire's terrible path across the city.
Compensation
By Wednesday morning the wind had dropped and the fire had lost its intensity. Thirty-six hours later, the final flames were extinguished.
Hollar's beloved London was now a sea of rubble, dotted with blackened ruins. The familiar view from the south bank was now unrecognisable. In four days, 87 churches, 13,000 houses and many major buildings had been destroyed and 100,000 people had been made homeless. As they surveyed the scene of utter devastation, Londoners tried to come to terms with their losses – and almost immediately began clamouring for compensation.
'Thousands of properties were destroyed,' says Professor Jardine. 'Each piece of property had an owner and sometimes multiple owners, and some were shops and some were domestic residences and some were commercial operations with many partners and shareholders. Every one of those owners, it was decided, would get their interest back, and every one of them stood hawk-eyed, checking that each of them gets back exactly what they had had and that their neighbour doesn't encroach on a little bit of their yard.'
The definitive record
Hollar's lifelike renderings of the fire made him an invaluable source of information for the king and the City authorities as they tried to sort out a mass of property disputes and claims. So in the wake of the fire, Hollar finally got his major commission. The city officials instructed him to make 'an exact survey of the City as it now stands after the calamity of the late fire'.
Hollar's maps, executed with his usual precision, stand as the definitive record of the Great Fire of London and a sobering reminder of just how total the devastation had been – the white spaces represent the areas where once buildings has stood.
But even this map could not make Hollar a rich man. One contemporary wrote: 'The sickness time and the fire of London happening the year after so stagnated all affairs of print and books and reduced him to such difficulties as he could never overcome.' Wenceslaus Hollar died in poverty in 1677, at the age of 69. However, the engraver's contribution to the history of London is immeasurable.
On the cusp of old and new
Hollar was on the cusp of the old world and the new. The 436 acres of the medieval city he had so lovingly mapped had gone, but the fire was an opportunity to create a grand, planned city with better amenities for its citizens. Modern London would rise from the ashes and become the biggest city in the world, the capital of a great empire whose power and influence would radiate across the globe.
The Great Fire of London of September 1666 had ripped through the City. How would it recover from this near-mortal blow? According to Professor Jardine, 'You can't regard the fire as anything but a calamity – a conflagration that destroyed the entire heart of a major city, even if it was run down. But it was a void that could be filled with promise, with opportunity. Anything could be put back into that heart of London.'
As it turned out, a new London would rise from the ashes, but not quite as the planners had hoped.
In the immediate aftermath of the fire, the first concern was the 100,000 people who had been made homeless, about 25% of the city's population. Many of them were living in makeshift camps in the rubble or in fields outside the City. Charles II, only recently restored to the throne, had taken personal charge during the fire. He now appeared in public to reassure Londoners that every effort would be made to rehouse them.
But an even greater priority was London itself. 'The whole prosperity of England relied on the prosperity of the City,' says Simon Thurley, 'on its effectiveness as a trading place. And everyone's concern after the fire, the over-riding concern, was getting London up and trading again.'
A brand new London
Charles was torn. On the one hand, he needed the money generated by the City. On the other, he harboured ambitions to reside in a capital fit for a king. He had spent his youth as an exile in Europe, a penniless guest in the splendid capitals of his Continental relations. 'Charles II had moved from centre to centre of grand architectural design,' says Professor Jardine. 'For him, London was, above all, a degenerate city when he returned, and he was deeply distressed at what he encountered. He wasn't going to live in a city like the London that he inherited.' Now the dilapidated medieval city had gone, Charles had a chance to create a magnificent, planned city that would be fit London's status as the capital of a great trading nation.
Within days of the fire, five candidates came up with plans for a brand new London and rushed them to the king. The scientist Robert Hook proposed a modern grid layout. Richard Newcourt wanted to rebuild each parish as a single block. Valentine Knight ringed the city with canals. And the courtier and diarist John Evelyn designed a series of elegant boulevards. But the most ambitious design came from the king's childhood companion, the astronomer and architect Christopher Wren. He shared Charles' vision of a European-style capital with grand piazzas, long straight avenues and magnificent vistas.
Retaining the medieval plan
But the pressure on Charles and the City authorities to make a decision quickly was intense. Trade was suffering and people were desperate to rebuild their homes and businesses. 'London was, at heart, a city about private enterprise and free trade,' says Simon Thurley. 'It was very difficult for the state or for the City to buy out all the people who owned the little plots of land, but that's what had to happen if the City was going to be replanned. They were going to make the streets wider; they were going to create squares and boulevards and vistas. They had to buy land from the individual land owners, but there wasn't the time or the money or, quite frankly, the inclination to do it.'
All the grand plans were rejected. Individual landowners would be allowed to rebuild their own houses, and the old medieval street plan would be retained. But Charles was determined that Londoners would not simply re-create a tinder box of narrow alleys and wooden houses. So he asked his favourite, Christopher Wren, and the scientist Robert Hook to oversee the rebuilding of the city.
A modern city
They ordered the main thoroughfares such as Fleet Street to be widened, to make it impossible for a fire to leap from one side to the other. And they laid down strict rules that all new houses had to be made of stone, brick and tile.
'British buildings from then on were structurally sound,' says Professor Jardine. 'All right, they were spec buildings, but the buildings from that time that we still have today were built under the supervision of Wren and Hook, who were interested in brick quality, how deep foundations had to be laid and the structural qualities of earth against masonry. All of this was modern, and the City of London was ultimately a modern city.'
In 1677, the Monument to the Great Fire of London was unveiled – a huge pillar, 61.6 metres (202 feet) high topped by a flaming urn. Just a stone's throw from the site where the Great Fire started, it served both as a reminder of the calamity and a symbol of the birth of the new London from the ashes of the old.
Pleasing three clients
Wren failed in his dream to redesign London completely, but there was a consolation prize. He was commissioned to rebuild the City's parish churches that had been destroyed in the fire, a task that would enshrine him as the man who created the skyline of modern London.
'Sir Christopher Wren rose to the challenge and left an indelible mark on the skyline of London that remained until the Blitz in the Second World War,' says Professor Maxwell Hutchinson. 'And all his churches were so richly different. He gathered around him a talented group of young architects who knew the architecture of Europe, and they fed that into Wren as their great leader. Tiny churches, big churches, spires, great, small, large – all different.'
The focus of Wren's rebuilding work was London's most important church, St Paul's cathedral, which had been badly damaged in the fire.
'Of all the monuments that were lost, the greatest loss must have been St Paul's cathedral,' says Simon Thurley. 'It had always been the great symbol of London and its economic virility. Its tremendous spire had come off in the Elizabethan period, but it was still the largest cathedral in England by a very long way. After the fire, there was a big question: what do we do now? We have to have a cathedral. We have to have a big building in the centre of the city. So what do we do?'
Christopher Wren was asked to design a new cathedral. Even before the fire, he had set his heart on building the first European-style Renaissance dome in England. But now he had to please three different clients: the king, who shared Wren's desire for a modern European church; the Church of England who couldn't bear anything that reeked of Roman Catholicism; and the conservative souls of the Corporation of London who simply wanted a huge status symbol, ideally with a spire.
Building for eternity
'The designs that Wren drew consistently fudged between spire and dome,' says Professor Jardine. 'But the piers that he put in the foundations of St Paul's were always the piers for a dome. Whatever the Corporation thought, Wren was always going to build a dome.'
Wren always said he wanted to build for eternity, and for seven years, he doggedly produced a series of designs. To sell his favourite, he spent a year building a 5.5m (18ft) scale model. It was rejected by the clergy as 'too foreign'. Finally, in 1675, Wren came up with a compromise acceptable to all parties. He put a spire on top of the dome, and the foundation stone was laid.
St Paul's took 35 years to finish, but Wren lived to see his masterwork completed. Over the south door, he installed a carving of a phoenix rising from the flames and the motto 'Resurgam' – 'I shall rise again.'
'This extraordinary dome stands high above London, 850 tons worth of masonry on top of it, a cross on top of that so that it can be seen from Epsom,' says Professor Jardine. 'It was a feat to take your breath away in 1711. It was a radical cathedral, the first truly Anglican cathedral.'
Thanks to the fire and the pioneering work of Christopher Wren and his colleagues, modern London had been born. Wren's skyline – his 51 churches dominated by the massive dome of St Paul's – would survive for over 200 years … until the arrival of Hitler's bombers.
