Heidi Palermo
Field Geology
September 1, 2006
Final Paper
The Great Fire of London and the
Reconstruction
In the wee hours of Sunday morning September 2, 1666 a small fire broke out in a bakery while its owners and
tenants were fast asleep. The bakery was located on Pudding Lane, adjacent to the London
Bridge in the heart of London
City. A strong Easterly wind carried the blaze down Thames Street, while at the same time it expanded in the North past Fenchurch Street and into Lothbury. “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,” (angliacampus.com). Damage on this
grand of a scale called for an entire rebuilding of London
City, this time using brick and stone instead of wood and
thatch. For this reason a very attractive stone was quarried off the Isle of
Portland called the Portland limestone. The famous architect Christopher Wren used it
to build many famous buildings and churches, many of which can still be seen in
London today, the most famous being St. Paul’s Cathedral.
At the time of the fire there was no
organized form of firefighting in London. Accidental fires broke out all the time, and yet still
nothing was done to develop an effective way of containing or putting out
fires. So when the great fire started that September night, Londoners
helplessly watched their houses and shops burn to ash. Men were seen carrying
buckets of water from the Thames
River and splashing it onto the blazing houses, but this was
most certainly not effective in stopping the blitz. The most common way the
locals tried to stop a fire was to tear down a house in the path of the fire in
order to create a “fire break,” or a gap large enough that the fire could not
leap across to the next house (channel4.com). Fire breaks were ordered by the
government for the sake of the greater good, and so the expectation was that
public funds would be used to rebuild those houses selected for demolition in
the event of a fire. Unfortunately during the Fire of 1666, government
officials were so concerned with the costs of rebuilding the houses ordered to
be destroyed, that bureaucratic hesitation allowed the fire to escape out of
control. By the time that fire breaks were eventually ordered, the remaining
rubble could not be cleared out of the way in time and instead acted as a
catalyst for the fire to leap onward to the next house.
While red-tape administration played
a role in increasing the devastation of the fire, the most injurious factor was
that the majority of London houses and shops were constructed of wood and thatch,
which are rapidly burning materials. Moreover, the houses were all lined up in
a row, touching on each side, the way you would imagine a crowded residential
street in San Fransico, California to look. The fire literally swallowed one house and
moved on to its neighbor in no time. Additionally, warehouses along the Thames
were “filled with food for the flames: hemp, oil, tallow, hay, timber, coal and
spirits along with other combustibles,” (luminarium.com). Both of these factors
contributed to the rapidity at which the fire blazed on, and made the task of
stopping the fire a seemingly impossible one.
Eventually though, the Eastward
spread of the fire came to a stop in the area near Fleet Street when the Duke
of York ordered the demolition of the Paper House with the purpose of creating
a fire break (luminarium.com). Fortunately, the fire was naturally stopped from
moving southward by the Thames River, and could not jump to Southwark over the
London Bridge due to a large gap in the middle caused by a previous fire in
1633. The severity of both of those fires forced Londoners to realize that when
rebuilding their beloved city this time around, they must find a safer, more
resistant material to rebuild with. It was here that a great conversion was
made to stone building, and the market for Portland limestone thrived.
But before we explore the
architectural impact that the Fire had on the City of London, it is also important to examine how the fire affected
the people who lived in that area. Sometimes in history it is easy to become so
removed by time and space that we tend to forget that real people and their
lives were critically impacted by certain events. When those 13,200 houses
burnt to the ground, the people that were living inside them had nowhere to go.
Records indicate that somewhere around 200,000 people were left homeless by the
fire. Families salvaged as many personal belongings as possible, and fled the
path of the fire as quickly as they could. The wealthy inhabitants packed their
belongings and actually fled the City to another one of their residences or
distant family. Unfortunately for the middle class and poor, this was not an
option. Not only did they have nowhere else to go, but they did not have the
money to get there. Eventually most people dispersed amongst St. George’s fields, Moorfields, and Highgate, or made temporary
housing out of tents and makeshift shacks. For the many middle class or lower
class inhabitants of London it resulted in an immediate plunge into extreme poverty.
The imminent need to rebuild the once prosperous and magnificent city and give
people their livelihoods back was felt by all.
While the fire caused immense
destruction to the City of London and left hundreds of thousands of people displaced, two
positive consequences arose from the burning down of four-fifths of the city
proper. The first of these is the significant decline in the number of plague
victims following the fire. The prior year, a plague epidemic started out in a
suburb of London and quickly made its way into the city walls. It swept
through the city, rapidly killing thousands of people within days of infection.
The sick were locked, along with their families, into their own houses to die. The
houses were even guarded by resident parish employees to make sure the sick did
not try to escape. The crowdedness of London’s streets aided the disease’s contagiousness, and,
despite people’s attempts to drive the disease away by sniffing herbs and
drinking preventative potions, by the end of July over 1,000 Londoners were
dying each week of the plague (channel4/plague.com).
Although the people of 1666 could
only speculate over the cause, transmission, and prevention of the plague,
today we are able to carefully examine of all these components. With the
scientific information available to us we now know that the plague is caused by
a bacillus called Yersinia pestis,
which is transmitted by the fleas (picture 1) of black rats (picture 2) and
other small rodents. “The plague bacillus is extremely virulent. Laboratory
mice die after being infected with just three bacilli-and fleas can disgorge up
to 24,000 in one bite,” (channel4/plague.com). The most common type of plague spreading
around London in 1665 was the Bubonic plague. Fleas infected with the bacilli would live on
the backs of black rats who were prevalent within the city walls. When the rats
would die, the fleas were forced to find new hosts in human beings. As soon as
the flea bit a person’s skin, the bacilli attacked the lymphatic system,
causing the lymph glands of the groin, armpits, and neck to become inflamed
(channel4/plague). These large and painful swellings were known as ‘buboes,’
(picture 3) which is where the disease gets its name. There are also massive
amounts of internal bleeding which leads to large bruising on the skin of a
dark purple or black color (picture 4), hence the nickname ‘Black Death.’
Without an awareness or a cure, the
plague spread through London in 1665 faster than the fire did in 1666. There was an exodus of the rich from London out into the more rural areas of England. “By June the roads were clogged with people desperate
to escape London. The Lord Mayor responded by closing the gates to anyone
who did not have a certificate of health,” (britianexpress.com). For the rich
who could afford a doctor’s care, this was no problem. But for the rest of London’s poor this meant a forced enclosure into a
disease-ravaged city with no chance of escape. “The poor were forbidden to
leave London. Seen as carriers of the disease, they were turned back
at the boundaries,” (channel4/plague.com). Forced away at the gates, they had
no choice but to turn around and embrace sickness and death. As aforementioned,
there was much speculation over how the disease was transmitted. “It was
rumored that dogs and cats spread the disease, so the Lord Mayor ordered all
the dogs and cats destroyed…The real effect of this was that there were fewer
natural enemies of the rats who carried the plague fleas, so the germs spread
more rapidly,” (britainexpress.com). By
mid-July the death rate rose to over 1,000 deaths per week and quickly
multiplied to over 6,000 per week in August. Massive plague pits were dug to
bury the dead in one large heap. Fortunately, as the weather turned colder
throughout the winter the number of plague victims started to decline, and the
once fleeing inhabitants returned home.
Although the plague death rate was
steadily declining by September 1666, the Fire of London actually helped to
eliminate the disease by burning down many of the impoverished areas that the
fleas still thrived in. “Indeed the fire probably had the effect of saving many
thousands of lives. The flames destroyed vast areas of unsanitary housing,
killing rats and purging the capital of infection. As a result, London was not revisited by plague in the post-fire years,”
(channel4.com). So while the massive fire caused unimaginable destruction and
even a few deaths (some sources quote six, others claim sixteen), some good did
result from it. An inestimable amount of lives were indeed saved by the fire,
although unknown to the potential victims at the time.
The second positive opportunity that
arose from the unexpected fire was the chance that presented itself to, in
essence, rebuild London. The pre-fire city of London was a classic example of a medieval European city with
its small, winding streets, inefficient and impractical design, and unregulated
layout. A majority of the buildings and houses were constructed of wood and
topped with a thatch roof, with the main exception being the towers of large
cathedrals which were constructed of stone.
London, in fact, emerged as a hodge-podge of buildings thrown
up with complete irregularity and unconformity. And once most of the city was
torn down, the government and architectural ambassadors were thrilled at the
opportunity to start all over and build the more efficient, aesthetically
pleasing London they had envisioned.
Several architects submitted plans
for the rebuild to the King and his Commission. Christopher Wren (picture 5),
the well-known mathematician specializing in geometric spaces, was commissioned
along with five other people to oversee the task at hand. However, shortly thereafter
it became apparent that the hope of doing a major remodel of the city’s layout
was a dream that would never be fully realized. Local property owners were
rightfully insistent upon retaining their lots in the exact size and place as
before. “In a
very careful democracy such as we had in England in 1666, it was out of the
question to evict all the residents and replace them with these grand
boulevards and monuments which did not leave
much room for street widening and civic hall construction,” (Duin). But efforts were made to regulate new
construction and widen eligible streets. Overall, the city was rebuilt in a
swift manner: “By 1671, 9,000 houses and public buildings had been completed,”
(luminarium.com) this time out of the more favorable building material of
stone.
When Wren and his staff were
searching for an aesthetically pleasing, structurally reliable building stone
they found exactly what they were looking for in the limestone that lay in wait
of being quarried off the side of the Isle of Portland in Dorset on
the coast of southern England. This Portland limestone, as it came to be identified, was easily
accessible from the side of the isle and made transporting the stone a
relatively easy task. The quarrymen struck the stone out of its natural
environment and dumped on to ships to be exported to the market capital where
the stone soon became a popular commodity (Davies-Vollum). In addition to being
easily accessible the stone was also easy to work with. The Portland limestone
is classified as a ‘freestone,’ which means that due to its unique composition
it can be cut in any direction without causing huge breaks in the rock, thus it
can be ‘freely’ sculpted (Greengrove). “This feature [freestone], coupled with
hardness, colour and durability, gives the limestone its quality as a building
stone,” (www.es.ucl.ac.uk).
The unique composition of the
Portland stone can be attributed to the geologic environment in which it was
deposited between 142 to 202 million years ago during a period known as the
Late Jurassic. The Jurassic period was a warm marine environment marked by a
constant cyclical sea level change (Davies-Vollum). This constant marine
activity produced tiny balls of calcium carbonate along the shallow sea floor.
As these balls, called ooids, moved around they collected additional particles
and grew in size until they were deposited under sediment and fused to form a
type of sedimentary rock known as an oolite (sculptureconversation.com). As the
calcium carbonate is precipitated from the material over time it cements the
rock together to form oolitic limestone. Because this limestone was formed at
the ocean floor it contains very little fossil remains, which adds to its
favorability as a building stone (Greengrove).
One person who certainly appreciated
the usefulness of the Portland stone was Christopher Wren. He had six million
tons of the white Portland limestone shipped into London to rebuild the city (answers.com). First came the rebuilding of peoples’ houses
and then the widening of the streets, which left very limited space for Wren to
construct grandiose monuments and churches the way the King would have
fashioned. But given the constraints, Wren was still able to oversee the
construction of fifty-one churches and cathedrals in post-fire London, the most
famous being St. Paul’s Cathedral. Wren’s work is marveled for many reasons,
but most often for his ability to take the irregular spaces of land given to
him and produce a cathedral that, when viewed from the inside, looked perfectly
rectangular and symmetrical. According to Lisa Jardine, professor of English and dean of the
Faculty of Arts at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, Wren was a ‘classicising’
architect given horribly odd shaped plots of land that a normal classicist
would want nothing to do with. But the beauty of Wren’s work is that he
accepted the circumstances given to him and managed to create some of the most
beautiful churches in the world by geometrically analyzing the internal spaces
and creating something of an optical illusion once the viewer was inside.
Jardine testifies that most of Wren’s architectural blueprints look impossible
on paper, but once seen in the 3-dimensional space it all makes sense.
As
aforementioned, Wren was a huge fan of the Portland Stone and used it in many
of his buildings during the reconstruction. St. Paul’s Cathedral was originally
built in 604 AD, but the version of the church standing when the fire hit in
1666 was actually the third cathedral on that site (stpauls.co.uk). It was
severely damaged during the fire with only the stone towers remaining somewhat
intact. It was in 1675 that Wren began the construction of what would become
the fourth cathedral dedicated to St. Paul on that site (picture 8), and in
this picture you can see the beautiful white Portland limestone that was used
in abundance. It took thirty-five years to complete and lucky for Wren his
privileged lifestyle brought him good health into his nineties which allowed
him to witness the completion of all of his projects.
In
addition to building St. Paul’s Cathedral, some of the
other famous Wren masterpieces that incorporated the Portland stone include:
St. Clement’s Danes, St. James, St. Mary Le Bow, St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, and
St. Stephen’s Walbrook. Additionally, Wren worked with Robert Hooke to design
what is know today in London as ‘The Monument,’ which at 202 feet is the
largest freestanding stone column in the world. It was erected in 1677 exactly
202 from where the bakery stood in which the Great Fire started that windy
September night (britainexpress.com). The Monument serves as a memorial to the
loss of the fire and a dedication to the tremendous efforts of all who
contributed to the reconstructing of London.
Personally
it has been an amazing journey to actually travel to the Isle of Portland and
stand atop the mass of limestone. Being out on the Isle was not only a
magnificent view, but also showed me firsthand just how accessible the
limestone really was for quarrying. Then to be able to actually go to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and see the perfectly
chiseled limestone in such a famous work of architecture brought the experience
full circle for me. Knowing about the history of the Great Fire and envisioning
the London of 1666 grappling with the plague, the fire, and a war
with the Dutch all at the same time makes me appreciate everything that I have
seen in my travels even more. I feel truly privileged to have had the
opportunity to go to all these important landmarks and become a part of history
in the process.
Appendix
Picture
1
Source: Source:
http://www.insecta-inspecta.com/fleas/bdeath/
Picture
2
Source:
http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/plague/plague.html
Picture
3
Source:
http://www.insecta-inspecta.com/fleas/bdeath/
Picture
4
Source:
http://www.insecta-inspecta.com/fleas/bdeath/
Picture
5
Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/wren_christopher.shtml
Picture
6
Source:
Heidi Palermo
Picture
7
Source:
Heidi Palermo
Picture
8
Source:
http://www.stpauls.co.uk
Picture
9
Source:
http://www.londontown.com/LondonInformation/Business/The_Monument/2c17/
Works Cited
Buildings of London. Retreived August 31, 2006 from http://www.es.ucl.ac.uk/schools/Glossary/limestone.htm
Davies-Vollum,
Sian. Class Lecture, University of Washington. July 25, 2006.
Department
of Earth Sciences, University College London. Geology in the
landscape and buildings of London. Retrieved August 30, 2006 from http://www.es.ucl.ac.uk/schools/Glossary/limestone.htm
Duin, Nancy (ed.) An Interview
with Lisa Jardine. Retrieved August 27, 2006 from http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/i-m/jardine.html
Fire. Retrieved August
25, 2006 from http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/fire/story.html
Greengrove,
Cheryl. Discussion, University of Washington. August 28, 2006.
Jokinen,
Anniina. (2001). The Great Fire of London, 1666. Retrieved August 29, 2006 from Luminarium, http://www.luminarium.org/encyclopedia/greatfire.htm
Milne,
John. About St. Paul’s. Retrieved August 30, 2006 from http://www.stpauls.co.uk
Plague. Retrieved August
25, 2006 from http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/plague/story.html
Ross,
David. The Great Fire of London. Retrieved August 30, 2006 from http://www.britainexpress.com/History/great_fire.htm
Simonson,
Bruce. (2002). A Few Words About Ooids
and Oolites. Retrieved August 31, 2006 from http://www.sculptureconservation.com/oolites.html
The Great Fire of London-1666. Retrieved August 25, 2006 from http://www.angliacampus.com/education/fire/london/history/greatfir.htm
The Monument. Retrieved
August 31, 2006 from http://www.londontown.com/LondonInformation/Business/The_Monument/2c17/
Wikipedia.
Isle of Portland. Retrieved August 28, 2006 from http://www.answers.com/topic/isle-of-portland
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