How the Great Fire made modern London
Fire! Fire!
Museum of London
The Great Fire of London, which reduced the old medieval city to ashes 350 years ago this September – started, famously, by a chance spark from a baker’s oven – has been a staple of children’s history books and a key episode in the Story of Britain, almost from the time it happened. Yet this lively, family-orientated exhibition makes it feel peculiarly relevant to today’s circumstances and to the way London is still developing.
If the dimly lit recreation of Pudding Lane, site of the notorious oven, is a bit clean and four-square, it is admittedly difficult to evoke terrifying pot-holes, animal waste and the smells of rotting refuse in a modern museum. The show compensates with an aural barrage of church bells, meowing cats and yowling babies.
The voice of the 17th-century diarist John Evelyn cuts through the hubbub, railing against pre-Fire London architecture with its “buildings as deformed as the confusions and minds of the people”.
On cue, we look up to see four original, vigorously carved wooden brackets looming over us, the kind that would formerly have sat above a doorway. These portray grotesque androgynous figures, and are rare survivals of a vanished period of London’s architecture. Rudimentarily animated, silhouetted figures, glimpsed through gauze windows, allow us to follow the start and progress of the fire, with Thomas Farriner, a baker who couldn’t be bothered to put his oven out before going to bed, woken at 3am by the smell of smoke. Strong winds fanned the flames through the tinder-box warren of wooden houses, and by 10am, that other celebrated diarist of the time, Samuel Pepys, was advising King Charles II to demolish houses to arrest the spread of the blaze.
We soon encounter what looks like a huge loaf of bread, about 8ft long, with a shifting map of London projected on to it that allows us to watch the spread of the fire. The exhibition’s vigorous graphic style, seen in wall-filling, semi-animated illustrations, inspired by popular woodcuts of the time, and a thundering soundtrack of guttering flames and creaking beams, bring a gutsy immediacy to the experience.
The centrepiece is a restored 17thcentury fire engine, an enormous wooden barrel set on wheels. Given that the barrels had to be replenished with buckets, with the contraption moved perilously close to the flames to have any effect, it seems unlikely such devices played much of a role in controlling the inferno. Yet after four days, the fire was over.
Only a quarter of the city was affected and the official death toll stood at just six, but 100,000 perhaps were displaced, and condemned to living for years in tents and sheds outside the city. Indeed, it is in looking at the grim aftermath of the fire that the exhibition is at its most interesting.
We get the chance to sit in a mockup of one of these “refugee camps”, and the descriptions of people who have lost everything feel painfully close in tone to what we’ve been hearing over the refugee crisis of the past year. The ways in which Britain responded to the fire show both the worst and the best of the time. In the rush to find scapegoats, particularly foreign ones, a mentally unbalanced Frenchman was hanged after “confessing” to starting the fire. Yet you can also sense the emergence of a modern Britain to be proud of in the setting up of charities, which raised millions to help the destitute.
There’s a similar conflict in discussions of how the city should be rebuilt: as the new metropolis proposed by Sir Christopher Wren, or as quickly and cheaply as possible on the original street plan? The result was a bodge compromise: the medieval street patterns were retained, but with the buildings now made from far more fireretardant brick, with various of Wren’s splendid churches dotted among them.
That really is the legacy of the fire, not so much the grandeur of Wren’s churches, but an ad-hoc pattern of development that created the messy, aesthetically incoherent, but endlessly dynamic sprawl that is London today.
‘The exhibition’s vigorous graphic style, inspired by woodcuts of the time, has a gutsy immediacy’
Until April 17. Tickets: 020 7001 9844; museumoflondon.org.uk