1666: The Great Fire of London (British Documentary)

and the end of the world was nigh his message was simple repent or burn [Music] fire had a symbolic hold on the 17th century imagination it was not only dreaded on an everyday basis but it was also seen as the principle mechanism for the end of all things as if one spark could set off a chain of disaster bringing Hellfire down on earth itself [Music] king charles ii was so concerned but he wrote to the Lord Mayor warning of the ease with which a conflagration could take hold he gave royal authority to imprison all those who floated building regulations and reiterated the need to be watchful houses should be equipped with buckets and ladders and churches should act as rallying points but although everyone seemed to know that disaster was imminent no one could foretell exactly when how or why an ordinary everyday fire would turn into a conflagration [Music] on Saturday the 1st of September 1666 the king's baker thomas farriner was preparing for the Sabbath his bakery Lane pudding Lane a narrow alley famed for its sellers of sweetmeats pastries and of course putting x' pudding Lane was a fast-food area really there were probably cook houses as well as bakers and other food purveyors and very busy at all times of day particularly at midday when people wanted something to eat but B cook shops which were like open kitchens where you could buy a pie or a piece of roast pork very very cheaply and wander off down the street eating it and you people would be roasting on spits I mean you're not talking about one little spit with a joint on it you're talking about four or five spits with two or three little boys turning them each spit with about six joints on it so you might have you know 15 joints in front of a fire so what you have is an enormous fire and sometimes going up canopies and that were made of wattle and daub sometimes the actual chimneys were not made of brick at all they will hood fireplaces made of the wood covered with nut and sometimes they went to in flames the dangerous place pudding on the night of September the first thomas farriner retired to bed as a contemporary fire account observed leaving his Providence with his slippers it was the last night of old London the fire started between 1:00 and 2:00 in the morning it was first noticed by a journeyman sleeping above the ovens were woke to find his bedroom filling with smoke once it took hold any Londoner knew that the first thing to do would be to evacuate the building as quickly as possible [Music] but by the time the alarm had been raised in the rest of the house the fairness found the stairs impassable [Music] they fled up to the roof space here their maid was too frightened to jump down onto the cobbles below and became the first victim of the fire [Music] it's disorientating a building you may have left in all your life will become unrecognizable in the smoke you cannot see your eyes are streaming they'll be pain in your eyes choking you will not even remember the way to the door or even the window of the room you are in in extreme cases it's extremely frightening and extremely dangerous by 3:00 a.m. the fire was visible in the street outside one of the best accounts can be found in the diary of Samuel peeps Clarke of the axe to the Navy board at 3:00 a.m. he was woken by his maid Lord's Day some of our maids sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast today Jane called us up about three in the morning to tell us of a great fire they saw in the city [Music] so I rose and slipped on my nightgown and went to her window and thought it to be on the back side of Mark Lane but being unused to such fires as followed I thought it far enough off and so went to bed again and to sleep [Music] this was apparently just another fire when the Lord Mayor of London Sir Thomas Bloodworth visited the scene he remarked that a woman could piss it out but the heat in the room was now far greater than the flame suggested once in the streets the fire began to spread in three different directions Don fish Street Hill in to temp and into mark Lane on Tower Street any firefighting equipment proved useless and because Londoners work a six-day week resting on a Sunday most people were asleep by the time the alarm was raised the fire was too great to be put out by buckets of water at 7:00 a.m. peeps was woken again and told of the dangers of the fire [Music] by and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down tonight by the fire we saw and that it was now burning down all fish Street Hill by London Bridge the bridge was actually a very densely packed structure it was only 12 or 13-foot wide and of course the houses are so famous that are built along either side of it left a tiny narrow passage in the middle so it was absolutely begging to be pernt down in a way and in fact had been been burnt down in 1633 at a fire that had destroyed really two-thirds of it but had been stopped at the drawbridge at the very defensive thing that kept people out and so the great fire in 1666 behaved in exactly the same way it tore down the bridge but stopped and then in a sense more or less turned back on itself and blast it back into the city the only way to stop the fire now would have been to pull down houses and create fire breaks in advance of the flames but the mayor hesitated who shall pay the charge of rebuilding the houses he insisted on gaining the consent of the owners who seen the flames still far off refused to pull down their homes and to businesses samuel peeps now went to Whitehall to warn the king that this was the only course of action possible so I was called for and detailed the king and Duke of York what I saw and that unless his majesty - command houses to be pulled down nothing could stop the fire on that morning when the fire was discovered it could well have been on top of this building that Charles went to get the view he'd have seen it from the top of here just across the bend of the river he would have seen the smoke and flames he would undoubtedly when he realized the severity of it begun to been a little bit concerned about the fire making its way towards Whitehall and threatening this edifice the embodiment of Stuart rule [Music] returning to the city peeps na met the man who had been so dismissive at the start of the fire at last met my Lord Mayor in Cannon Street like a man spent with a scarf about his neck to the Kings message he cried like a fainting woman Lord what can I do I am spent people will not obey me I have been pulling down houses the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it for the preachers rising early on Sunday morning it was as if everything they had foretold was coming true Thomas Vincent referred to the fire as God's terrible voice in the city never was there the like Sabbath in London some churches were inflamed that they such warm preaching those churches never had such lightning dreadful sermons never were before delivered in London now the fire gets mastery and burns dreadfully and God with his great bellows blows upon it which makes it spread quickly and go on with such force and rage overturning all so furiously that the whole city is brought into jeopardy of desolation [Music] [Music] the fire was now out of control threatening the entire city [Music] Londoners began to worry whether it could ever be put out and if this was indeed the end of the world [Music] [Music] by Sunday night 18 hours after the fire had begun Londoners abandoned hope and began to evacuate the city the price of a car to carry possessions rose during the next three days from three pounds for thirty pounds one of the keenest people to preserve his woods was the diarist samuel peeps [Music] about four o'clock in the morning my lady Batman sent me a car to carry away all my money and plate and best things to Sir William riders of Bethnal Green which I did but riding myself in my nightgown in the cart and Lord to see how the streets and the highways are crowded with people running and riding and the getting of carts at any rate to fetch away things despite the chaos there was little sign of panic and few casualties most Londoners knew that the safest thing to do would be to flee the city but the narrow winding streets made a mass exodus at speed almost impossible having seen evacuations in Africa having seen it in the Balkans some people are extremely methodical about it it's in some ways it helps to calm them that they know they're going to have to go but nonetheless they go through a logical sensible thought process and take things like food with them clothing extra clothing or less clothing depending on the climate water all the necessities of life but they are very much in a minority the majority of people will be wholly irrational with what they take I've seen people carrying decorative bits of furniture on hand carts away from these sorts of difficulties and disasters utterly useless pieces of equipment for which there's no logical views but has a sentimental value rather than anything else samuel peeps noticed that each time people thought they had found a place of safety they were forced to move out further away from the fire and among other things the poor pigeons I perceive were loath to leave their houses but hovered about the windows and balconies till some of them burn their wings and fell down the silversmiths hid their plates deep in the sewers Sir William batten dark an enormous hole for his hogshead of fine wine while samuel peeps buried one of his most secret treasures Parmesan cheese newly imported from Italy as many as a hundred thousand people have left the city walls for more fields Islington and Parliament Hill they slept in open fields with few possessions some tented salmon shacks but most exposed to the sky there were no pre-prepared sites there were no rendevouz there were no sites that had food water or housing ready for them and we know that eventually they set up tents and other forms of temporary accommodation but the worst possible thing would have been people crowding into areas with no sanitation no water supply no food supply [Music] by the time the fire reached Lombard Street the financial future of the Capitol was in jeopardy its entire wealth was made up of gold coins which had to be physically carried out of the city before they melted away this street has been the nerve center of London banking for 700 years and so it was as the flames the great fire started nibbling at the end of the street the bankers who were living here performed a crucial role really in the running of the country and certainly in the life of charles ii it was they were providing the loans both for the financing of the dutch war but also for the royal household and so as their houses started to be consumed they only had one thing in their minds and that was gathering together the coin the gold coin that was so fundamental to London's economy and just getting it out to a square mile by 3:00 p.m. on Monday the second day of the fire Lombard Street had been destroyed although houses were now being pulled down the remains were not cleared this vital failure meant that heavy timber frames lay in open roads allowing the fire to cross whole streets by nine o'clock on Monday evening it had reached Bernards castle on the Waterford [Music] the flames were higher than they had ever been a non locker not known for his mathematical skills vowed that they were 50 miles high the heat travelled so in advance of the flames that it was almost impossible to pull buildings down and the city was covered in a curtain of smoke and heat at daybreak on Tuesday the fourth of September after 55 hours the fire was at its most furious point and Cheapside was in flames if the bankers of Lombard Street were lucky enough to get their gold out the vast majority of shopkeepers here in Cheapside certainly weren't when this was the absolute shopping center of London and it went up in flames in an afternoon It was as if Regent Street Knox that Street just disappeared between the hours of midnight and six o'clock in the evening and there wasn't the hope of the majority of the things being saved and of course by the end of that afternoon you could stand here and you could look over towards the river and you could see it for the first time since Roman times you could see the river from Cheapside this was the third and worst day at the fire it was knobbed ten times the size it had been on Sunday night rattle rattle rattle was the noise which the fire struck upon the ear roundabout as if there had been a thousand iron chariots beating upon the stones and then you might see the houses tumble tumble tumble from one end of the street to the other with a great crash leaving the foundations open to the view of the heavens if you were downwind then you'd see nothing you just see a great pool of smoke with flames licking up inside it which in some ways would it be even more sinister but I think if you could see if you're off to it to a side or or upwind of the fire wonderful buildings churches other institutions suddenly with the flames licking round them reflected on the billowing smoke and indeed possibly that nighttime even more spectacular suddenly those buildings collapsing has been desperately demoralized when you have a fire of the intensity of the Great Fire of London the effects on the environment are felt way beyond the confines of the city itself so that three days after the outbreak of the fire sixty miles away in Oxford an astronomer mr. Locke became aware that the sunbeams shining through the clouds were tinged with a curious pink or red because of the smoke and ash that had drifted all the way from the seat of the fire scorched silk was found in the River Thames at Henley and burning papers were seen in the woods of Windsor lady Carteret out walking by the thames stooped to pick up a burnt fragment of a book the words read time is it is done back in the city the great medieval icons of London such as son Paul's Cathedral and the guild hall were now under threat the guild hall together with London Bridge and Paul's Cathedral was one of the great Civic symbols of the pride and economic prosperity of the city and so as the flames reached that I think there was a sort of double blow really first of all this was one of the other great icons falling but also for the city government it was an incredible humiliation not only had they failed to stop the start of the fire here was the seat of all the civic pride pomp and pageantry of London going up in flames by Tuesday night after 72 hours the fire reached sand Paul's Cathedral Burl's and paul's meant a great deal as a presence because the houses were very small and this enormous building loomed over everything else and paul's larger than the cathedral we have now so you have the physical evidence early in 1666 of this enormous cultural revolution which had actually occurred over the course of the previous century and old london shakespeare's london this insanitary vibrant overcrowded london was also a London dominated by the moldering and decayed shrines of a great ecclesiastical church culture amazing leaves and Paul's Cathedral was covered in wooden scaffolding awaiting its restoration by Sir Christopher Wren after the spire had been struck by lightning Wren had even suggested only months before that the best thing to do would be to pull down the building and start again from scratch on Tuesday night the roof began to melt it's spewed out molten lead crashing down into the masonry and statues below now the lid melts and runs down as if it had been snow before the Sun and great flakes of stone scale and pilaf strangely from the sides of all boards an old lady taking shelter became the next victim of the fire near the walls of sant paul's a human body presented itself to me parched as it were with flames whole as to the skin meager as to flesh yellow as to color her clothes were burned and every limb reduced to a cold [Music] the King now rode through the fire he carried a hundred gold pans in a pouch swung from his shoulder and scattered coins among the workmen in encouragement the king's bowl in the fire and the rebuilding afterwards is almost the most interesting thing about the Great Fire of London he got his hands dirty here was somebody who was the restored King of England really presiding over one of the most magnificent lavish gay courts in Europe there he was going out and personally taking control of this hideous calamity the King now gave orders to move the Exchequer to sorry while his brother James the Duke of York called in the Navy to fetch gunpowder [Music] pulling down buildings was to no avail sailors from the fleet and workers from the dockyards at Wooley gin Deptford were now ordered to blow up buildings in order to create firebreaks it was the only way to save what remained at London at last on Wednesday morning after four days there were signs of hope the wind was stilled and the firebreaks seemed to be working by the Wednesday the fire finally hits something that it couldn't burn and that was the temple the great brick and stone complex of lawyers lodgings which clustered around the temple Church the Duke of York came down he was actually a bencher of the inner temple and he came and presided over the last series of explosions last its demolition which finally stopped the fire dead in its tracks although sporadic small fires still raged by midday on Wednesday September the 6th 1666 the general conflagration had at last been put out samuel peeps climbed to the top of barking steeple to survey the damage there saw the saddest sight of desolation that i ever saw everywhere great fires oil cellars and brimstone the fire being spread as far as i could see it he goes to see where his school was my school had been so important his formation of the school which mean milsim school the school from which he'd gone to see Charles the first executed school which really formed pizzas mind and made him into the very able man he was so his whole childhood has scenery has gone and for peeps the pattern of your life the shape of the life of your life is very very important and I think for him to see let just gone was powerful and depressing [Music] despite the devastation there were only six official deaths during the fire of London amongst them the Baker's made the old woman sheltering instant pause and an 80 year old watchmaker who had been too frightened to leave his own home but as those who survived looked out over their ruined City It was as if there was only one question to ask who have done this [Music] my [Music] [Applause] after the fire a ballad was sold on the streets commemorating the destruction it was called London mourns in ashes [Music] it's fun a space inside [Music] people had lost their homes and their livelihoods a printer who had labored for years over his 12 volumes of poetry in honor of Charles the first saw the entire edition burnt alderman John Jeffries of bread Street Ward lost 20,000 pounds worth of tobacco Joseph Curtin peeps bookseller was made bankrupt moving from 8,000 pounds in profit to 3,000 pounds in debt a year later peeps brought I hear Curtin my bookseller poor man is dead I believe of grief for his losses by the fire thousands were ruined the eradication of items in this inventory of linen and plates owned by the Turner's company is a graphic indication of the scale of the losses all burnt at the time the annual income of the city was twelve thousand palms the estimated cost of the fire was over ten million up to 200,000 Londoners were made destitute they became a gypsy population some raising shelters in the ruins others seeking refuge in nearby towns and villages a Royal Proclamation insisted that people in the countryside took in the homeless the king made very effective use of proclamations during the whole issue of the fire its immediate aftermath mainly because it took Parliament then just as today an awful long time to decide things it was incredibly important that fast decisive action was taken and the king achieved that through these proclamations for essentially and the king saying right this shall be done and it was and thank goodness he did and it's really very much his use of proclamations that won him so many plaudits through his management of the fire the appearance of the king would have been crucial here was firm smack of leadership giving firm and clear orders to those surrounding in the in the uneffective bits of countryside that the people the refugees had to be supported I think would have been hugely helpful but this was far from a permanent solution people had to be encouraged to go back rebuild their homes and restart their businesses if the city was to have any financial future the first steps are reassurance the whole business of managing information and telling people look it is safe to go back now we know in this case that there were fires burning for several days inside possibly even weeks afterwards but a lot of the buildings that remain such as they were were unsafe and a lot of the ground was was dangerous to walk upon because of rubble in modern circumstances the evacuations that I have seen people have got to be persuaded that it is safe to go back once you've managed information you have persuaded them that there are no more threats then you've got to guide them back in and show them where their houses were because an area that has been raised either naturally or by other men is very difficult to recognize and once they're back in the area of their general house or business or whatever it is it's hard to understand well this pile of bricks and rubble and timber used to be my shop this was my livelihood this was my home but those who returned were faced with a desperate situation houses that had been available 440 pounds per annum rose to 150 pounds overnight there were continual fears of new fire-starting of falling walls and collapsed roofs thieves and looters searched the vaults and cellars of buildings for valuables that had been hidden and mugged those who stood in their way an apothecary's man returning to survey his master's shop was caught whipped into a vault stripped beaten and left for dead in the dark more rapacious landlords insisted that people paid rent on the land even after their houses had been destroyed one of the worst offenders was the Bishop of London my Peter says a Humphrey henchman a beard wearing clergymen as far as I can judge from the little that survived off him he was not vastly imaginative and certainly in common with a lot of the other authorities in the City of London the fire was a devastating blow not to his personal income but to the way in which the whole church ran for instance in Bartholomew's Hospital depended upon the rents of over a hundred tenements in the City of London although the hospital was spared by the fire his economic base was not so that was in crisis even though it hadn't been touched by the flames and the bishop had worked locked churches and a lot of clergy to maintain and rather injudiciously he attempted to charge the booksellers in particular who'd suffered very heavy losses by storing all their goods to the value of perhaps one hundred fifty thousand pounds which in today's money is millions in the Critias and poles where they had burned merrily for several days this obscure six page pamphlet published by a man with the pen name of philanthropist Villa gothis chronicles a nine-year battle to receive compensation for the fire he appeals on behalf of the miserably singed citizens asking Parliament for a special contribution in order to stop the merciless fury of their creditors upon them for new debtors prisons had been built by 1672 increasingly filled by those who could not and would not pay for the devastation [Music] a series of fire courts were established to hear Appeals for compensation but before any monies were paid the question of blame had to be resolved whose fault was it for a staunchly Christian nation God clearly had much to do with it [Music] it's incredibly difficult for us in our godless age to put ourselves back into the mindset of people living in restoration London to us there is always someone to blame someone to sue there is always if that fails the government to blame is always a minister who has to resign in those days it simply wasn't like that people had a much wider view of why catastrophes happened and things were very much ordained by God and if something really ghastly happened like behold the city burned down there must have been some divine reason behind it there must have been some god-given reason for it to happen actually was one nonconformist divine who was even clearer about what the farm meant in theological terms in preaching on the anniversary of the fire a couple of years after 1666 this nonconformist Devine said when it couldn't possibly have been a punishment for the blasphemy of Londoners because if it had been it would have started in the Billingsgate fish market where the porters use very ripe language it couldn't have been for degeneracy and sexual immorality because it would have started in Drury Lane and it couldn't have been a punishment for lying because it would have started in Westminster Hall where all the lawyers met we know for sure that it was a punishment for gluttony because it started in pudding Lane and ended a pie Corner despite this divine explanation there was also a need for a more worldly investigation into the causes of the fire the prime suspect was clearly the baker thomas farriner the most obvious place for a fire to start is a bakery the very mechanism of baking bread in those Tudor basically designed ovens was highly highly dangerous and everybody recognized that this wasn't this wasn't rocket science everybody knew that bakeries were dangerous and the king himself had his royal bakeries seperated by a considerable distance from the royal houses themselves and at Hampton Court for instance the bakery was put a hundred yards away from the main Palace because bakeries always burned down in fact the Hampton Court bakery burned down in Queen Elizabeth's reign so bakeries were essentially dangerous places under close questioning farriner insisted all fires had been put out that the coals will raked up in the chimney and that a number of baked meats had been found untouched in his oven several days later [Music] he was adamant that the fire had begun remote from chimney and oven and was caused by arson but if he was to avoid blame a scapegoat was needed and in 17th century England there were two main candidates foreigners and Catholics this strange broadside gives a bizarre insight into the way in which Roman Catholics were demonized in the center eight of them are seen throwing hand grenades against the great globe of the world in the upper corner London burns while two groups of men whisper and rejoice below the Pope sits on the right fanning the flames from Rome with a pair of giant bellows in the climate of paranoia after the fire Catholics and foreigners were continually stopped in the streets a Frenchman with tennis balls was attacked when people assume them to be grenades a Portuguese merchant was suspected after picking up a piece of bread in a suspicious manner [Music] and then miraculously a scapegoat presented himself a group of foreigners were stopped on the coast of Essex when questioned as to their whereabouts on the night the fire began one of their number immediately confessed to having started it rovaire Huber was a 26 year old watchmaker from Rouen a foreigner who conveniently claimed that he was also a Roman Catholic he told all who were willing to listen that he had arrived only a few days before the fire on a Swedish ship and had visited the bakery on the night of September the 2nd with a friend they had carried three fireballs one of which Huber claimed to have thrown through the bakery window in order to start the fire but when he was brought to trial it became clear that the facts did not add up thomas farriner admitted that his bakery had no window through which a fireball could have been thrown the ship's captain claimed that Huber had not disembarked until two days after the fire had begun and Huber himself was so crippled that he could hardly walk as the defense noticed for he had a dead palsy on one side one arm useless and much adieu to trail one leg after him it seemed an almost willful act of confession yet such a state of mind is familiar to modern firefighters people do make false confessions sometimes at a high-profile incident it's sometimes a means of seeking to be the center of attention or gaining some notoriety it may be just blatant obvious mental illness and that's sad but it can be dealt with but if confession is remotely plausible it has to be investigated thoroughly and guilty persons may have a vested interest in that in extreme cases if crimes such as this obviously carries the death penalty could be a suicide attempt Huber never explained why he had started the fire but he was a highly convenient figure for thomas farriner who was keen to encourage the prosecution [Music] and so huber was found guilty by confession and hanged at Tyburn becoming the fires seventh official victim but if he wasn't responsible who was [Music] how did the fire actually begin [Music] [Music] by reconstructing the pudding lane bakery with original materials and building techniques and by recreating the climate the temperature and the wind pattern on September the second 1666 it's now possible to conduct a detailed investigation into the progress of the fire [Music] although ferony may well have raked up the upper oven the ashpit in the lower oven and the floor of the bakery may well have contained smoldering embers leftover from a busy day's work it's very easy to overlook something like an ember at the end of the day a baker would clean up ready for the next day he would scrape down his table he might put some flour near the oven which was still warm to get it nice and warm he's making a batch of Man chat or French rolls the next morning and he'd probably cover it with muzzling gauze or a cloth and of course something like that could catch fire very very readily [Music] on that night in September there were a number of highly combustible materials present the most overlooked of which is flour fire is explosive in hot environments and confined spaces particles of flour can cluster together and spontaneously ignite dust explosions have been well-known since the 19th century but nobody has yet suggested that this could have contributed to the fire of London at the time white bread was a delicacy a sign of wealth and status and all the flour delivered to bakeries in this period was unrefined wholemeal it needed to be sifted to separate the white flour this process called bolting was often done late at night in preparation for baking the next day the clouds of dust created by the bolting could easily have created a highly flammable haze in the bakery could farriner have disturbed an ember when he left the room starting the fire by igniting dust on the floor or flier in the atmosphere we know that flour now in the atmosphere can spontaneously combust there's no evidence at all in any of the literature that they knew this but intuitively I think they must have done because they always cited the flour preparation area in a separate room in a in a fair or a clean bolting house which was kept scrupulously clean because they often sifted onto the floor and you get an extraordinary amount of dust in the air it was always kept away from the ovens because a the flour would get contaminated by the extraordinary dust and soot that's created by one of these structures but I feel they probably knew that there must have been some occasions when flour did ignite these dust tests show how suspended particles can spontaneously ignite and that it doesn't take a large amount of flour or flame to create a disaster [Music] [Laughter] there is one reported dust explosion every week in the United Kingdom the presence of fly together with smouldering embers made this fire particularly dangerous but what makes it unique is a combination of factors for the fire was made even more hazardous by the proximity of a large number of combustible materials in a shop near the bakery in pudding Lane materials recently unearthed by the archaeologist Gustave melon these were all discovered in a huge dump of debris in a building in pudding Lane just around the corner from the bake house where the fire started now the debris on the upper levels of our dump show that it must have been a shop because we've got 30 identical pots which were on sale in the shop presumably and all sorts of other little things like these hooks and eyes which are fused together in the heat so that's what's being sold upstairs but what interests us is what's in the basement in the basement itself on the cellar floor was a great can do wood black mass and you can see the tide line of that congealed back mass here on this tin glazed tile this very attractive Tinh glazed tile which fell into the debris when it was still smouldering when it was still hot hence that tide line now what we found in the cellar was the remains of 20 barrels 20 timber barrels you can see a stave carbonized from one of those barrels and these barrels contained the black mass that filled the cellar and that black mass we had analyzed and we discovered was wood pitch which is used as a waterproofing agent in the 17th century but also is unfortunately very flammable now this had spread out all over the floor and here is one of the bricks from the floor which as you can see has got some of that pitch still burnt on it now if you've got a building with pitch barrels in it next to where a fire starter you can imagine what happened the building went up like a bomb we took samples from Gustav Milne's archeological dig to the building research establishment at Gaston in Hartford sure here we resubmitted surviving pitch pottery and calcined brick from the pudding Lane Fire of 1666 to intense heat remelting the objects in order to find out the actual temperatures present during the great fire as the pitch in pottery melts scientists are able to assess the heat flux on the surface of the object subjected to radiated heat at 3 joules per second the pitch begins to smolder as the temperature rises from 600 to 900 degrees centigrade the pitch blisters by subjecting materials present in the fire to such extreme heat and by creating similar climactic conditions it's now possible to estimate the speed of the fire the average wind speed for September 1666 was seven knots per hour now by exposing a section of thatch to temperatures of 900 degrees centigrade and a wind of 7 knots per hour it's possible to time the speed of the fire over a small area this data could then be combined both with contemporary accounts of the fire and with the spread in our reconstructed bakery it measures five square meters this is the fire after one minute after two minutes after five minutes and after 20 minutes the heat increases exponentially reaching a spread of up to 20 square meters an hour that's a rate of destruction of one terraced Street every four hours [Music] the heat is so intense and travels so in advance of the flames that buildings combust almost spontaneously this was what peeps noticed the fire seemed to jump [Music] all over the Thames with one's face in the wind you were almost burned with a shower of fire drops this is very true so as houses were burned by these drops and flakes of fire three or four nay five or six houses one from another [Music] when we could endure no more upon the water we to a little Ale House on the bank side and there stayed till it was dark almost and saw the fire grow and as it grew darker appeared more and more and in corners and upon steeples and between churches and houses as far as we could see up the hill of the city in a most horrid bloody malicious flame [Music] it made me weep to see it [Music] it's clear from our tests that a number of factors were involved hot embers in a tinder dry room filled with flour and other highly flammable materials creating a fire that must have reached temperatures of over 900 degrees centigrade spreading so fast that at its height whole streets could burn in under 4 hours faced with such destruction Londoners were confronted with what seemed like an insurmountable task how would the city ever be rebuilt London's fires have left a permanent mark on the city archaeologists working today can still find fire dumps and fire layers in their dibs what we're looking at is the successive attempts of Londoners to to keep their City going as buildings either fall down with age or are destroyed most the buildings are built of wattle build clay and timber and they caught fire incredibly easily and with monotonous regularity and burnt to the ground as burning material falls on that that actually fires that bakes hard then over that you get the very characteristic red orange debris from where the clay and Timberwolves have as they're burning the clay in that fires that goes this bright orange color the whole thing collapses into and onto the floor of the building so at this very very colorful sequence yellow black red orange and then London has stopped all over again instead of sweeping this away then rebuild directly on top of it so you get a new bright yellow floor right on top of the the sequence of of firing and destruction and the whole thing starts all over again until that building also in due time is destroyed the fire of course was a catastrophe but on the other hand it was the most sensational opportunity never before on a European scale had a fire like this happened have been little pyres laver in Milan and elsewhere but this was virtually the destruction of one of the biggest cities in Europe and so for people who were interested in these matters for the architects and people who were interested in town planning it was a fabulous opportunity and for the king for the king most of all this was something his father or his grandfather would have dreamt of suddenly in 1666 charles ii and his advisors had an opportunity to make a truly great modern european city and for them it was a gift from god trade had to begin immediately if London was to regain any financial stability by the 9th of October owners of houses were given 14 days notice to clear their foundations of rubbish so that an exact survey could be made several plans were submitted by hook even and captain Valentine night all suggesting a simplified grid system to replace the narrow winding lanes that had in part contributed to the spread of the fire hook suggested clearing all the old streets away creating a prototype of a modern American city [Music] evylyn imagined a stately waterfront and a city with piazzas around the most prominent buildings [Music] Valentine night proposed a 30-foot wide canal to provide extra revenue for the king who was so horrified by the idea that he should profit from the fire that he had night in prison [Music] but the rebuilding of London is almost entirely associated with the work of Christopher Wren a professional astronomer and amateur architect who had already designed the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford and planned the reconstruction of some poles all of those plans propose raising and obliterating the old city and replacing it with some grandiose new scheme some of them are grid-like Rennes has focal points and then raised of streets coming out from these focal points very grand down to the river and the king evidently liked it just over a year before the great fire charles ii had sent sir Christopher Wren to Paris and he'd sent into Paris to look at the Louvre because what Charles wanted to do was imitate what was going on in France and he wanted to build a great metropolitan palace he wanted to tear down old medieval Whitehall and build something on a European scale and that's why Wren went to France Ren spent nine months in France he looked closely at all the buildings that were going up there but most importantly he watched the way in which something like the Louvre was constructed the way in which huge teams of workmen who were semi skilled themselves were put together and harnessed by very able overseers to put up these extraordinarily dramatic buildings [Music] you Ren's design was a spectacular attempt five Londoners were the beautifully designed an integrated City the capital could have rivaled Paris Venice or Rome but it just didn't looking at the plans produced by Sir Christopher Wren even and others immediately after the fire ones often tempted to ask well why weren't they built wouldn't it been so much better for London if we'd had one of these idealized layouts well the answer really is very simple property rights it was essential for the people who owned these houses to get them rebuilt and start trading immediately and that is why above all other reasons post-fire London was built on a plan that was almost indistinguishable from that of the medieval city London became a building site as surveyors marked plots and staked out foundations although some people moved the stakes by dead of night in order to increase the size of their property by the beginning of 1668 1200 houses had been built although Ren could not influence their design or layout there was one area in which his ideals could possibly be met the city churches [Music] the project to rebuild London's burned churches was one which was arrived at late in the day in terms of rebuilding the city so that the householders had got their houses back up on the plots they had occupied roads had been widened but now the sites for the churches were they highly constrained sites on which the old churches which would now be demolished had stood this means that in so many of Reims churches they encapsulate the medieval ground plan as well as a lot of the medieval stonework and in some churches like for example some Vedas just around the corner from sand Paul's they've actually encapsulated some of the upstanding Mason we've actually got a whole slab of upstanding room from one of the medieval churches so wrens churches are not just remarkable Baroque architecture they're also medieval architecture as well so we get two monuments the price of one Renne above all wanted the internal space to look like a pure space with right angles cubes hemispherical arches and he achieved that by a kind of optical illusion his plans look very curious it's only in the three dimensions when you actually stand in a wrench earch that you feel the sense of a perfect space despite with the grandiosity the magnificence of the promised new cathedral and all the loving care that went into making this model a year's worth of work on the part of the model makers was worth every moment of that time if the King would gasp at this interior and the perfectly crafted little altar at the end and imagine himself as I stand at this level looking upwards at the Great Dome this would be a cathedral rising from the flames wizard am the phoenix rising the king would agree and give wren his charter his warrant to build the cathedral Renne finally secured approval for his royal warrant design in 1675 but problems remained in deciding how the building should be topped out even though London skyline has changed unrecognizably from Renz time the docent Paul still in some way dominates in some way is the focus of our view of London but of course in 1666 no one had ever seen the dome before it was a completely new architectural feature and this is one of the reasons why the city was so keen that it should be enormous they wanted this vast new state symbol but this did give Wren a problem because the size outside and the size inside simply couldn't be the same it we far too large inside the Cathedral if they had this massive dominating feature on the skyline and surrender very simple solution a very clever solution which is essentially to build two domes a small one inside and a large one outside in a gap between the two and that's what we've got there today a double domed structure with salt attention between the city's desire for a huge silhouette and wrens imperative to have something that worked from the inside [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] when you look at some pores on the skyline you have a sense of its beauty what you get here between the cone and the outer dome is the immensity of the scale the scale as you feel it in here is beyond anything imaginable and in terms of pre-fire London it is truly unimaginable the broken spire of old st. Paul's stood for that ambition failed on the old cathedral but here it stands all those centuries later it succeeded here and this space shows you why it succeeded it was structure it was engineering it's a void like no other [Music] almost unique in cathedral architecture some polls had been built under one architect over a period of 35 years for the painter william Hogarth it was the epitome of beauty there you may see the utmost variety without confusion simplicity without nakedness richness without tawdriness distinctness without hardness and quantity without excess he called Wren the prince of architecture [Music] the fire is commemorated by the monument designed by hook and built by renn it serves as a permanent reminder of the way in which the city was changed by fire from the medieval into the modern world [Music] there is however one final irony before the basket was placed around its top the monument had become a popular destination for suicides its first victims threw himself off in 1788 he was a baker [Music] [Music] the channel for burka century of troubles is available now priced 1899 to order your copy call Oh 8 seven oh one two three four three double four you can also explore the 17th century further at channel 4 comma forward slash history next tonight how a chemical cloud killed thousands in Bhopal in 1984 going critical is next on 4 [Music]

Channel: Brian M

Views: 285,430

Rating: 4.6747165 out of 5

Keywords: 1666, London, Fire, Great Fire of London, Samuel Pepys, Charles II, Thomas Farriner, Pudding Lane, Monument, Christopher Wren, St Paul's Cathedral

Id: ycTRAJJexd4

Length: 67min 14sec (4034 seconds)

Published: Tue May 08 2018