Great Fire of London

At least at the time it seemed like a misfortune, but really it was a good thing.

This was the great fire, which caused much of the city to be burned to the ground.

Many of the dirty houses and narrow streets were destroyed, and with them the last remnants of the dreadful plague were also burned away.

When the houses were built again, they were made better, and the streets were made wider, so that the great fire was not altogether a misfortune.

The fire first broke out in a baker's shop, as most of the houses were built of wood, and the summer had been unusually hot and dry.

The flames spread very fast.

So the roar and crackle of the flames ceased, and the great cloud of smoke rolled away.

But London, from the Tower to Temple Bar, was left a smouldering, blackened ruin, and two hundred thousand people were homeless.

The booths where goods were exposed to sail projected far into the streets, and were overhung by the upper stories.

Few specimens of this architecture may still be seen in those districts which were not reached by the great fire.

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Dr. John Radcliffe, who, in the year 1685, rose to the largest practice in London, came daily at the hour when the exchange was full, from his house in Bow Street, then a fashionable part of the capital, to Garroway's, and was to be found surrounded by surgeons and apothecaries at a particular table.

There were Puritan coffee-houses, where no oath was heard, and where lank-haired men discussed election and reprobation through their noses.

Jew coffee-houses, where dark-eyed money-changers from Venice and Amsterdam greeted each other, and Popish coffee-houses, where, as good Protestants believed, Jesuits planned over their cups another great fire and cast silver bullets to shoot the king.

These gregarious habits had no small sharing forming the character of the Londoner of that age.

That's an old reference.

It was in 1667, and I'm guessing a lot of people had died in the Great Fire of London, so they had to bring in teenagers.

I guess that's why.

Yeah, no, the bar's low when young people get elected.

Let's just remind ourselves that's one of the most historic buildings in all of Christianity.

After the Great Fire of London, it was rebuilt by the designer Sir Christopher Wren.

That glorious structure has been standing.

It is one of the most monumental buildings in, in church history, and it's there for all to see, and it is still an ongoing Anglican cathedral.

Um, so Samuel Pepys, very famous now, not just for slightly, slightly naughty diaries, but also diaries that he wrote at the time of, uh, some great upheaval in London.

So he gives, gives us these really vivid firsthand accounts of the Great Fire of London, and I grew up a 10-minute walk from where Pepys lived and worked, and I actually have an office next door to where his offices were.

So I'm very interested in Pepys.

He's a completely fascinating figure, and as I say, he is better known now for these really compelling and vivid firsthand accounts of the Great Fire of London and for, as I say, some, some quite X-rated bits in his diaries.

But as a figure at that time, he is incredibly important, and in 1677, after a series of quite bad naval defeats to the Dutch, Pepys introduces oral exams for Royal Navy lieutenants, because he is concerned about the fact that lieutenants are often well-bred gentlemen with good connections, but they don't really know much about running a ship, and actually running a ship is really quite hard.

And at that time, there's a, at that point, there's a lot of naval innovation going on, and it's not something you can really just bluff your way through.