The lessons of the Great Fire on how to recreate our capital

N THE wake of the Great Fire of London in 1666, the issues that faced the City were not so different from those that have confronted it since: the economics of property and land ownership, the principles on which new building should happen, and the problem of how to ensure affordable housing for a rapidly growing population.

Immediately after the fire, which destroyed 80 per cent of the buildings in the City, the urge from homeowners and businesses to rebuild on their sites was strong, but King Charles II called a halt. He wanted to look at new schemes being prepared by Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, John Evelyn and others for a new layout of the City, inspired by the new models of Paris, with grand boulevards and squares.

But who was to pay for acquiring the l a nd a nd c o mpensati ng pro pe r t y owners? The economics defeated the vision. The plans were abandoned and the City was rebuilt on its old street plan but with far better materials.

Architecture critic Rowan Moore, author of Slow Burn City, argues that was no bad thing: “If you look 50 or 100 years later, London was a bigger, stronger, more beautiful c i t y… [ t h e fire] bequeathed us the London Building Acts, which are one of the most successful pieces of building le gi slation in history.”

Fast-forward 275 years and London was facing its second great crisis — the Blitz of 1940-41. Then too there was great destruction: Wren’s St Paul’s survived but acres around it were destroyed. The City’s response was radically different from after the Great Fire, because this was an era of emerging idealism in city planning.

Local authorities took the lead, and the City of London Corporation eventually took the bold decision to clear the whole north-west of the City, and to build the Barbican Estate as a vision of how urban housing, open spaces, the arts and culture could come together into one.

It was a long and massively expensive project. Barbican resident and design historian Sarah Gaventa says: “What the Great Fire didn’t achieve the Luftwaffe did: it was an opportunit y to take advantage of destruc tion to make something better than it was before.”.

By the time the Barbican opened fully in 1982 its style was deeply unfashionable — yet more than 30 years later it has become lauded as a model of its kind.

What lessons do these twin responses to crisis tell us about city building today, when London’s population is expanding exponentially and house-building is not keeping pace? Ricky Burdett, who runs the LSE Cities programme, says: “I think the pressures of investment, of market forces on one side and the provision of fundamental social services in the city on the other, are ultimately what the great conflict of the 21st-century city is about.

Gaventa believes that after the war “the ambition was that, yes, you wanted to create housing, but you also wanted to create connected communities because people had been shattered emotionally and physically. You wanted to give them not only homes but also hope, to create a more equal and civil society. I think those lessons could well be learnt today.”

L ord Ro gers, who now r uns hi s architec tural prac tice from the Cheesegrater, one of the City’s new tall