A burning issue for London

As a new exhibition opens, Nigel Richardson returns to the scene of the Great Fire of 1666

The man responsible for English history’s most famous conflagration was sitting on a concrete wall and holding up two burnt pies. He wore a baker’s white hat and had soot smudges on his cheeks. “Higher,” said the photographer, and Thomas Farriner – for it was he – lifted his pies to London skies. I came across this impersonator of the bungling baker whilst paying my own homage to the Great Fire of London, which started in Farriner’s shop 350 years ago this summer.

The precise date was September 2 1666 and the Museum of London is marking the anniversary with a major exhibition, entitled Fire! Fire!, which opens today. It’s a cleverly judged show with plenty of atmosphere and interactive elements for children (the fire features prominently in the national curriculum) as well as more meaty scholarship in the form of original letters, maps and poignant artefacts such as pitifully tiny leather fire buckets and someone’s charred Bible.

The museum is also offering guided walks through the streets consumed by the flames and I was enjoying a special preview walk, guided by the curator of the exhibition, Meriel Jeater, when we encountered the Farriner lookalike in Pudding Lane. We had started the walk at the Monument, the classic Doric column designed by Wren and Nick Gill and Tim Brisley help with the restoration of a 17th-century fire engine at the Museum of London Archive, below built in the 1670s to commemorate the fire that, according to the inscription on its base, “…rushed devastating through every quarter with astonishing swiftness and noise…” (though, officially at least, it claimed just a handful of human lives).

The height of the Monument (202ft) and its location are such that if you were to topple it in an easterly direction, and burly giants in hard hats were to lower it gently to the ground, its top would come to rest on the site of Farriner’s bakery, now an expanse of tarmac where Pudding Lane meets Monument Street. The exhibition re-creates Pudding Lane as a sort of three-dimensional 17th-century woodcut, complete with original hanging shop signs, while an audio-visual display illustrates the moment when the fire sparked into life in the early hours of Sunday September 2 1666.

At the site itself, Jeater set the scene: “There was a storm blowing A painting depicting the Great Fire of London, above, and a map of the city dating from 1676, right from the east. London was really dry because there’d been a drought. Pudding Lane was full of warehouses with combustible things so the fire had a strong foothold from the beginning and the weather conditions just exacerbated it.”

During late 20th-century excavations some of those “combustible things” were found in a basement within a few yards of the bakery – 20 barrels of carbonised tar that must have gone up like a bomb. Though people tend to think the fire destroyed everything in its path (including 89 churches) it also