Strand Jam
http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/travel/jamcams/camloco/546590.shtml
Watch as they form, grow, split, reform and deform
Temptations of the unknown
Swarm within one’s
Blackest deepest thoughts
Resentment pending
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Final Burn
Wednesday
The winds of the last 2 days (both in London today and back in 1666) start to ease.
[I was blown along Strand yesterday by a massive gust- very exciting]
The wind dropped on Tuesday evening, allowing the firebreaks created by the garrison to finally begin to take effect on Wednesday, 5 September. Pepys walked all over the smouldering city, getting his feet hot, and climbed the steeple of Barking Church, from which he viewed the destroyed City, "the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw."
There were many individual fires still burning themselves out, but the Great Fire was over. Pepys visited Moorfields, a large public park immediately north of the City, and saw a great encampment of homeless refugees, "poor wretches carrying their good there, and every body keeping his goods together by themselves", and noted that the price of bread in the environs of the park had doubled. Evelyn also went out to Moorfields, which was turning into the main point of assembly for the homeless, and was horrified at the numbers of distressed people filling it, some under tents, others in makeshift shacks:
"Many [were] without a rag or any necessary utensils, bed or board... reduced to extremest misery and poverty."
Fears of foreign terrorists and of a French and Dutch invasion were as high as ever among the traumatised fire victims, and on Wednesday night there was an outbreak of general panic at the encampments at Moorfields and Islington. A light in the sky over Fleet Street started a story that 50,000 French and Dutch immigrants, widely rumoured to have started the fire, had risen and were marching towards Moorfields to finish what the fire had begun: to cut the men's throats, rape the women, and steal their few possessions.
Surging into the streets, the frightened mob fell on any foreigners they happened to encounter, and were, according to Evelyn, only "with infinite pains and great difficulty" appeased and pushed back into the fields by the Trained Bands, troops of Life Guards, and members of the court. The mood was now so volatile that Charles feared a full-scale London rebellion against the monarchy.
Food production and distribution had been disrupted to the point of non-existence, and Charles announced that supplies of bread would be brought into the City every day, and safe markets set up round the perimeter. These markets were for buying and selling; there was no question of distributing emergency aid.
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Day 2 Burn baby burn
Monday
Monday, 3 September, the fire was principally expanding north and west, the turbulence of the firestorm pushing the flames both more to the south and more to the north than the day before. The push to the south was in the main halted by the river itself, but had torched the houses on London Bridge, and was threatening to cross the bridge and endanger the borough of Southwark on the south riverbank. Southwark was preserved by a pre-existent firebreak on the bridge, a long gap between the buildings which had saved the south side of the Thames in the fire of 1632 and now did so againThe corresponding push to the north drove the flames into the heart of the City. Several observers emphasise the despair and helplessness which seemed to seize the Londoners on this second day, and the lack of efforts to save the wealthy, fashionable districts which were now menaced by the flames, such as the Royal Exchange—combined bourse and shopping mall—and the opulent consumer goods shops in Cheapside. The Royal Exchange caught fire in the late afternoon, and was a smoking shell within a few hours. John Evelyn, courtier and diarist, wrote:The conflagration was so universal, and the people so astonished, that from the beginning, I know not by what despondency or fate, they hardly stirred to quench it, so that there was nothing heard or seen but crying out and lamentation, running about like distracted creatures without at all attempting to save even their goods, such a strange consternation there was upon them.
Evelyn lived four miles outside the City, in Deptford, and so did not see the early stages of the disaster. On Monday, joining many other upper-class people, he went by coach to Southwark to watch the view that Pepys had seen the day before, of the burning City across the river. The conflagration was much larger now:
"the whole City in dreadful flames near the water-side; all the houses from the Bridge, all Thames-street, and upwards towards Cheapside, down to the Three Cranes, were now consumed."
In the evening, Evelyn reported that the river was covered with barges and boats making their escape piled with goods. He observed a great exodus of carts and pedestrians through the bottleneck City gates, making for the open fields to the north and east, "which for many miles were strewed with movables of all sorts, and tents erecting to shelter both people and what goods they could get away. Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle!" Suspicion soon arose in the threatened city that the fire was no accident. The swirling winds carried sparks and burning flakes long distances to lodge on thatched roofs and in wooden gutters, causing seemingly unrelated house fires to break out far from their source and giving rise to rumours that fresh fires were being set on purpose. Foreigners were immediately suspect due to the ongoing Second Anglo-Dutch War. As fear and suspicion hardened into certainty on the Monday, reports circulated of imminent invasion, and of foreign undercover agents seen casting "fireballs" into houses, or caught with hand grenades or matches. There was a wave of street violenceWilliam Taswell saw a mob loot the shop of a French painter and level it to the ground, and watched in horror as a blacksmith walked up to a Frenchman in the street and hit him over the head with an iron bar. The fears of terrorism received an extra boost from the disruption of communications and news as vital facilities were devoured by the fire. The General Letter Office in Threadneedle Street, through which post for the entire country passed, burned down early on Monday morning. The London Gazette just managed to put out its Monday issue before the printer's premises went up in flames (this issue contained mainly society gossip, with a small note about a fire that had broken out on Sunday morning and "which continues still with great violence"
. The whole nation depended on these communications, and the void they left filled up with rumours. There were also religious alarms of renewed Gunpowder Plots. As suspicions rose to panic and collective paranoia on the Monday, both the Trained Bands and the Coldstream Guards focused less on firefighting and more on rounding up foreigners, Catholics, and any odd-looking people, arresting them, rescuing them from mobs, or both together.
Even as order in the streets broke down, especially at the gates, and the fire raged unchecked, Monday marked the beginning of organised action. Bloodworth, who as Lord Mayor was responsible for coordinating the fire-fighting, had apparently left the City; his name is not mentioned in any contemporary accounts of the Monday events.[40] In this state of emergency, Charles again overrode the City authorities and put his brother James, Duke of York, in charge of operations. James set up command posts round the perimeter of the fire, press-ganging any men of the lower classes found in the streets into teams of well-paid and well-fed firefighters. Three courtiers were put in charge of each post, with authority from Charles himself to order demolitions. This visible gesture of solidarity from the Crown was intended to cut through the citizens' misgivings about being held financially responsible for pulling down houses. James and his life guards rode up and down the streets all Monday, rescuing foreigners from the mob and attempting to keep order. "The Duke of York hath won the hearts of the people with his continual and indefatigable pains day and night in helping to quench the Fire", wrote a witness in a letter on September 8.
SM
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It made me weep to see it.
The Great fire of London
Day One, Sunday 2nd September
"It made me weep to see it." Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) painted by John Hayls in 1666, the year of the Great Fire.
A fire broke out at Thomas Farriner's bakery in Pudding Lane a little after midnight on Sunday, 2 September.
The family was trapped upstairs, but managed to climb from an upstairs window to the house next door, except for a maidservant who was too frightened to try, and became the first victim. The neighbours tried to help douse the fire; after an hour the parish constables arrived and judged that the adjoining houses had better be demolished to prevent further spread.
The householders protested, and the Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth, who alone had the authority to override their wishes, was summoned. When Bloodworth arrived, the flames were consuming the adjoining houses and creeping towards the paper warehouses and flammable stores on the riverfront. The more experienced firefighters were clamoring for demolition, but Bloodworth refused, on the argument that most premises were rented and the owners could not be found. Bloodworth is generally thought to have been appointed to the office of Lord Mayor as a yes man, rather than for any of the needful capabilities for the job; he panicked when faced with a sudden emergency.
Pressed, he made the often-quoted remark:
"A woman could piss it out", and left.
After the City had been destroyed, Samuel Pepys, looking back on the events, wrote in his diary on 7 September 1666: "People do all the world over cry out of the simplicity [the stupidity] of my Lord Mayor in generall; and more particularly in this business of the fire, laying it all upon him."
Around 7 a.m. on Sunday morning, Pepys, who was a significant official in the Navy Office, climbed the Tower of London to get an aerial view of the fire, and recorded in his diary that the eastern gale had turned it into a conflagration.
It had burned down several churches and, he estimated, 300 houses, and reached the riverfront. The houses on London Bridge were burning. Taking a boat to inspect the destruction around Pudding Lane at close range, Pepys describes a "lamentable" fire, "everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another."
Pepys continued westward on the river to the court at Whitehall, "where people come about me, and did give them an account dismayed them all, and word was carried in to the King. So I was called for, and did tell the King and Duke of Yorke what I saw, and that unless his Majesty did command houses to be pulled down nothing could stop the fire. They seemed much troubled, and the King commanded me to go to my Lord Mayor from him, and command him to spare no houses, but to pull down before the fire every way." Charles' brother James, Duke of York, offered the use of the Royal Life Guards to help fight the fire.
A mile west of Pudding Lane, by Westminster Stairs, young William Taswell, a schoolboy who had bolted from the early morning service in Westminster Abbey, saw some refugees arrive in for-hire lighter boats, unclothed and covered only with blankets. The services of the lightermen had suddenly become extremely expensive, and only the luckiest refugees secured a place in a boat.
The fire spread quickly in the high wind. By mid-morning on Sunday, people abandoned attempts at extinguishing the fire and fled; their moving human mass and their bundles and carts made the lanes impassable for firefighters and carriages. Pepys took a coach back into the city from Whitehall, but only reached St. Paul's Cathedral before he had to get out and walk.
Handcarts with goods and pedestrians were still on the move, away from the fire, heavily weighed down. The parish churches not directly threatened were filling up with furniture and valuables, which would soon have to be moved further afield. Pepys found Mayor Bloodworth trying to coordinate the firefighting efforts and near collapse, "like a fainting woman", crying out plaintively in response to the King's message that he was pulling down houses. "But the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it."
Holding on to his civic dignity, he refused James' offer of soldiers and then went home to bed. Charles sailed down from Whitehall in the Royal barge to inspect the scene. He found that houses still were not being pulled down in spite of Bloodworth's assurances to Pepys, and daringly overrode the authority of Bloodworth to order wholesale demolitions west of the fire zone. The delay rendered these measures largely futile, as the fire was already out of control.
By Sunday afternoon, 18 hours after the alarm was raised in Pudding Lane, the fire had become a raging firestorm which created its own weather. A tremendous uprush of hot air above the flames was driven by the chimney effect wherever constrictions such as jettied buildings narrowed the air current and left a vacuum at ground level. The resulting strong inward winds did not tend to put the fire
out, as might be thought; instead, they added fresh oxygen to the flames, and the turbulence created by the uprush made the wind veer erratically both north and south of the main, easterly, direction of the gale which was still blowing.
In the early evening, with his wife and some friends, Pepys went again on the river "and to the fire up and down, it still encreasing." They ordered the boatman to go "so near the fire as we could for smoke; and all over the Thames, with one's face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops."
When the "firedrops" became unbearable, the party went on to an alehouse on the south bank and stayed there till darkness came and they could see the fire on London Bridge and across the river, "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 above a mile long: it made me weep to see it."
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London's Burning
London's burning! London's burning!
All across the town, all across the night
Everybody's driving with full headlights
Black or white turn it on, face the new religion
Everybody's sitting 'round watching television!
London's burning dial 99999
The Clash. London. The sound of the city, in and out the west way it's so bright....Fire changed London and Strand and Fleet St for ever. This week I shall be looking at those changes and their result today. So let us begin with:
The Great Fire of London - 1666
On Sunday morning, the 2nd September 1666, the destruction of medieval London began. Within 5 days the city which Shakespeare had known was destroyed by fire. An area of one and a half miles by half a mile lay in ashes; 373 acres inside the city walls and 63 acres outside, 87 churches destroyed (including St. Paul's Cathedral) and 13,200 houses. In all this destruction, it is amazing that only 6 people are definitely known to have been killed. However, it seems likely that the actual death toll was much higher. In destroying the close packed houses and other buildings it is also likely that the fire finally put an end to the Great Plague that had devastated the city in the previous year - killing 17,440 out of the population of 93,000. The fire started in the house and shop of Thomas Farynor, baker to King Charles II in Pudding Lane (the site of Farynor's house is marked today by the Monument). Farynor forgot to douse the fire in his oven on the previous night and embers set light to the nearby stacked firewood. By one o'clock in the morning, three hours after Farynor had gone to bed, the house and shop were well alight. Farynor's assistant woke finding the house full of smoke and the roused the household. Farynor, his wife and daughter and one servant escaped by climbing through an upstairs window and along the roof tops. The maid was too frightened to climb along the roof and stayed in the house - becoming the first victim of the fire.
Sparks from the burning house fell on hay and straw in the yard of the Star Inn at Fish Street Hill. The London of 1666 was a city of half timbered and pitch covered medieval buildings, mostly with thatched rooves. These buildings were extreme fire risks and ignited very easily. In the strong winds that blew that morning, the sparks spread rapidly, setting fire to rooves and houses as they fell. From the Star Inn, the fire engulfed St. Margaret's church and then entered Thames Street. Here there were warehouses and wharves packed with flammable materials - oil, spirits, tallow, hemp, straw, coal etc. By now the fire was far too fierce to be fought with the crude hand operated devices that were all that was available. By 8.00am, seven hours after the fire had started, the flames were half way across old London Bridge. Only the gap left by a previous fire in 1633 prevented the flames from crossing the bridge and starting new fires in Southwark on the south bank of the river.
The diarist, Samuel Pepys was called from his home in Seething Lane near the Tower of London. He recorded his impressions of the day:
| Some of our maids sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast today, Jane called up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City. So I rose, and slipped on my night-gown and went to her window, and thought it to be on the back side of Mark Lane at the farthest; but, being unused to such fires as followed, I thought it far enough off, and so went to bed again, and to sleep. . . . By and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down tonight by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish Street, by London Bridge. So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower; and there got up upon one of the high places, . . .and there I did see the houses at the end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side . . . of the bridge. . . . So down, with my heart full of trouble, to the Lieutenant of the Tower, who tells me that it began this morning in the King's baker's house in Pudding Lane, and that it hath burned St. Magnus's Church and most part of Fish Street already. So I rode down to the waterside, . . . and there saw a lamentable fire. . . . Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the waterside to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies, till they some of them burned their wings and fell down. Having stayed, and in an hour's time seen the fire rage every way, and nobody to my sight endeavouring to quench it, . . . I to Whitehall (with a gentleman with me, who desired to go off from the Tower to see the fire in my boat); and there up to the King's closet in the Chapel, where people came about me, and I did give them an account [that]dismayed them all, and the word was carried into the King. so I was called for, and did tell the King and Duke of York what I saw; and that unless His Majesty did command houses to be pulled down, nothing could stop the fire. They seemed much troubled, and the King commanded me to go to my Lord Mayor from him, and command him to spare no houses. . . . To St Paul's; and there walked along Watling Street, as well as I could, every creature coming away laden with goods to save and, here and there, sick people carried away in beds. Extraordinary goods carried in carts and on backs. At last met my Lord Mayor in Cannon Street, like a man spent, with a handkerchief about his neck. To the King's message he cried, like a fainting woman, 'Lord, what can I do? I am spent: people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses, but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it.' . . . So he left me, and I him, and walked home; seeing people all distracted, and no manner of means used to quench the fire. The houses, too, so very thick thereabouts, and full of matter for burning, as pitch and tar, in Thames Street; and warehouses of oil and wines and brandy and other things. |
There was little that could be done to stop the spread of the fire. Various laws had been enacted, obliging the parishes to provide buckets, ladders, squirts and fire hooks, but much of the equipment was rotten through neglect and water supplies, away from the banks of the river, were scarce.
By now, with little other alternatives, thoughts turned to demolishing houses to create fire breaks. Lord Mayor Bludworth was rather concerned as to who would foot the bill for rebuilding houses that the corporation ordered to be pulled down. Bludworth was over-ruled on the orders of the King. The 'trained bands' were called out to assist with the demolotion but they began too close to the advancing fires and were unable to clear the sites before the ruins became added fuel for the flames.
In desperation now, gunpowder was used to blow up houses - and often with excessive success! For three more days the fire raged through the City - before finally burning out at Temple Church near Holborn Bridge.
As relief began to set in after the previous days panic, the dying fire flared up again and began to creep onwards towards Whitehall. The Duke of York ordered the destruction of more buildings and the fire was finally brought under control.
By the end of the fire some four fifths of the City had been destroyed, approximately 13,200 houses, 87 churches and 50 Livery Halls over an area of 436 acres. Although the fire only claimed a few lives it may actually have saved many more - the rats that had helped to transmit the bubonic plague (Black Death) the previous year mostly died in the fire. The number of plague victims dropped rapidly after the fire.
For those who had lost everything, life was a sudden descent into abject poverty. The population of the City was dispersed around St. George's Fields and Moorfields and out as far as Highgate. Some were provided with tents, others made what shelter they could and build huts and hovels. Thousands of people were ruined and deAngliaCampusors prisons became overcrowded.
The Great Fire of London set in motion changes in the capital which laid the foundations for organised firefighting in the future. Wooden houses and designs dating back to the medieval period were replaced with brick and stone buildings and owners began to insure their properties against fire damage. The new insurance companies quickly realised that their losses could be minimised by employing men to put out fires. Christopher Wren, the great 17th Century architect began the reconstruction of London and built 49 new churches together with the great cathedral of St. Paul's that we know today. After the fire of 1666, the face of London had changed forever.
