In the aftermath of the Great Fire emerged a yellow-flowering plant known as London Rocket and, in 1667 and 1668, “it grew very abundantly on the ruins around St. Paul’s”; it was seen again, in 1945, “just outside the City boundary.” It is the true flower of fire. The Monument, erected on the site of the Fire’s first emergence, is also a form of rocket or vehicle of fire; it was first proposed that a statue of the king, or a great phoenix, should be placed upon its summit. But it was eventually agreed that an urn of flames, known as “the Blaze,” should furnish the column. Daniel Defoe deciphered the object as a great candle, with the urn as “handsome gilt flame!”
There were many representations of the events of those five days of fire, not least a series of long poems which can be found in an anthology entitled London in Flames, London in Glory. The burning city is severally compared to Rome, to Carthage, to Sodom and to Troy; the classical gods are depicted as wandering through the burning streets, together with Virgil and Jezebel, as the spectacle of flaming London conjures up images of dead or dying civilisations in past ages of the world. The painted images of the Fire were equally ostentatious, although some of them seem literally to have been sketched at the very time of the blaze itself. There are sober studies, including those of Hollar showing “A True and Exact Prospect of the Famous Citty of London” before the autumn of 1666 together with the same “As It Appeareth Now After the Sad Calamitie And Destruction by Fire”; it was sketched from the south bank of the river, and it is possible to see through the ruins right into Cheapside itself. But most works were in the style of “conflagration painting,” according to London in Paint, which found their inspiration in “biblical or mythic city fires.” Two of the most famous paintings, “after Jan Groffier the Elder,” depict the towers and portcullis of Ludgate in flames as if it were the entrance to Hell itself; there may be another explanation for the appearance of Ludgate, however, since the area beside it was considered an “artists’ quarter” in the middle of the seventeenth century. There are many small scenes and episodes reflected in these paintings: the woman running with wild face and arms outstretched from the encroaching fire, the man carrying a bundle of silver plate upon his head, the carts and horses being driven in a great crowd towards the open fields. But the most striking image is that of a man carrying a child on his shoulders against a backdrop of flame; it was re-employed by Blake, Doré, and other artists as a true representation of the mysteries and sufferings of London.
The Great Fire was not simply the inspiration, therefore, of contemporary artists. For over two hundred years it remained the most arresting image of the seventeenth century. Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, a great scenic designer in the London theatres, painted his own version at the end of the eighteenth century and in the following century the Great Fire was recreated every night at the Surrey Gardens.
But the conflation of the city and fire goes deeper than theatre or spectacle. To Panizzi, in the mid-nineteenth century, London had the appearance of a city that had somehow already been burned. In Night and Day Virginia Woolf describes it as “eternally burnt”; it seemed that “no darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the same spot.” In 1880 a Frenchman believed the entire capital to be “a temple of fire-worshippers”; his companion on this urban pilgrimage, Arthur Machen, went on to describe “all the fires of London reflected dimly in the sky, as if far away awful furnace doors were opened.” Mirbeau talked of London in terms “of mystery, of the conflagration, of the furnace” while Monet, at the end of the nineteenth century, wished to depict the sun “setting in an enormous ball of fire behind Parliament.” In some of that artist’s paintings, in fact, London seems to breathe and live within an atmosphere of fire surrounding all streets and buildings with the same unearthly glow.
By the mid-nineteenth century the sky above London was notable for “the glowing atmosphere that hangs over the capital for miles”; the brick kilns on the perimeter of the city in that period created a ring as if of stage fire, while the great dust mountains inside the capital had the appearance of volcanoes. It was a city “where fires can scarcely be kept under” while, in twentieth-century terms, it is characterised as an “urban heat island.” London was popularly known as the “Great Oven” and, in the 1920s, V.S. Pritchett confessed to the sensation of being “smoked and kippered” in the depths of the city. When the fire does eventually go out the city is forbidding, blackened and relentless, some charred monument of eternity filled with what Keats called “the Burden of Mystery.”
It became clear, after the Great Fire, that fire itself must be controlled. The twin visitations of flame and plague had been interpreted by moralists as the handiwork of a God enraged by the sinfulness and dissipation of London. But there were others, including Christopher Wren and Edmond Halley, who began to question the wisdom of placing all responsibility for its disasters on fate or divine displeasure. The Royal Society had been established in London in 1660, and the two visitations prompted its members to find “scientific” or “objective” causes for such violent events. In the name of “Reason”-what is “simple, solid, sensible”-it was hoped that London consciousness might be changed so that, in future ages, such pestilences and conflagrations might be averted. The greatest effect of the Fire, paradoxically, was to promote the advancement of science. Even before the end of September 1666, according to a quotation in London in Flames, London in Glory, “Men begin now everywhere to recover their spirits again, and think of repairing the old and rebuilding a new City.” Specifically it seemed an opportunity to exorcise “the rebellious Humours, the horrid Sacriledges … and gingling Extravagances” of the previous age. This refers to the civil war, and to the execution of Charles I, but it also suggests that extravagant piety and superstitious practice-precisely the citizens’ responses to the plague, as documented by Defoe-were no longer permitted. It was to be a new city in every sense.
After the Fire
Two plans of a London reconstructed after the Great Fire of 1666, one by Christopher Wren and the other by John Evelyn. Their theoretical and hypothetical city had no chance against the twin forces of tradition and commerce which obstinately recreated London in its former image.
CHAPTER 22. A London Address
The Great Fire had stopped by Fetter Lane which, for most of its existence, has been border territory. It runs from Fleet Street to Holborn, and the ancient route is now lined with twentieth-century air-conditioned office-blocks and some nineteenth-century survivals. In the stretch of Fetter Lane which leads directly out of Fleet Street, with, on the respective corners, a bookshop and a computer supplier, is Clifford’s Inn, the oldest Inn of Chancery and once the most important edifice in the street. Rebuilt now, and partitioned into offices and apartments, it is situated beside a modern restaurant, the Café Rouge, and opposite a new drinking establishment called the Hogshead. The judicial air of the lane has not entirely disappeared, however, since beside Clifford’s Inn is a building which contains the “Technology and Construction Court.” This stretch of the lane is continually busy with traffic, in particular with taxis decanting into Fleet Street.