“Oh the miserable and calamitous spectacle!” wrote John Evelyn in 1666, “mine eyes … now saw above 10,000 houses all in one flame.” The conflagration he witnessed from 2-5 September destroyed much of the medieval metropolis, swallowing 400 streets, 13,200 houses, 87 churches, and 44 livery halls.
Many of the City of London’s most iconic buildings were consumed: St Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Exchange, Newgate Prison, Christ’s Hospital, even Whittington’s Longhouse, one of the biggest public toilets in Europe, in the Vintry. Evelyn was aghast at the destruction of so much of the medieval centre: “London was, but is no more”.
Yet this wasn’t exactly true. By the time of the fire, only a quarter of London’s population actually lived in the walled city, compared to three-quarters a century earlier. The growing eastern suburbs like Wapping and Stepney were left unscathed – as were much of Holborn, the Temple, western Fleet Street, the Strand, and the emergent squares of the West End.
Nor, as contemporary scorch maps reveal, did the fire even decimate the whole of the walled city: around four-fifths of it was destroyed (an area of 373 acres), leaving the north-eastern and some eastern parts (including the Tower of London) unaffected thanks to the gusty east wind.
It was here, outside the fire’s trail of destruction, that many extraordinary buildings survived only to be destroyed later on – whether by demolition works, other fires, or bombs. As we reach the 350th anniversary of the fire, it is fitting to commemorate not just the buildings destroyed in those four hellish days in September, but also some of those that survived, only to vanish later on.
Landmark buildings destroyed in the Great Fire ...
Castle Baynard
This riverside castle was built in the late 13th century, inheriting the name of a destroyed castle further to the west – the Tower of London’s lost twin – that had been built by the Norman Ralph Baynard after the Conquest. Many of Henry VIII’s wives lived here and, according to tradition, Richard of Gloucester was offered the crown here in 1483.
After several rebuilds, it appeared on the eve of the fire as a big, brooding stone structure with gabled projecting towers soaring from the Thames, a dock, thick curtain walls, central courtyard, and meaty turrets. The scene of lavish banquets and coronations, the castle was destroyed save for one round tower, later converted into a house, now vanished. Today, part of the site is occupied by a brutalist office block and commemorated by a blue plaque on Castle Baynard Street, just south of St Paul’s Cathedral.
Bridewell Palace
Built in 1515-20 on the western bank of the River Fleet near Blackfriars, this lost inner-city palace was one of Henry VIII’s favourites. It was a large, rambling brick structure set around three courtyards with gardens and a private wharf. An imposing feature of the riverfront, it was probably the scene of Catherine of Aragon’s final meeting with the king in 1529 (over a quarrelsome dinner).
Under Henry’s son Edward VI, it became a poorhouse but was decimated on the third day of the Great Fire. The Fleet, contrary to expectations, proved no firebreak at all even though attempts were made to pull down the riverside houses. Something of the palace’s stateliness lives on in the Ionic columns of Unilever House, the art deco building that occupies the site today.
The Great Conduit
Advantageously located next to St Paul’s Cathedral and considerably grander and more spacious than the rest of the City’s labyrinthine streets, Cheapside – from the old English chepe (market) – was the undisputed high street of London before the fire. One of its most distinctive features, at the eastern end of the street, was the Great Conduit fountain, pictured here to the right of the Cheapside Cross.
From the 1230s to 1666, the Great Conduit channelled free water from the River Tyburn to Cheapside in lead pipes via the Strand and Fleet Street. Illegal siphoning was rife, reducing the water pressure – in Henry VI Part II, Shakespeare describes it as a “pissing-conduit” – and on the occasion of military victories, royal births and coronations, it sometimes ran with wine. As the fire spread, people dug desperately into the earth to puncture the conduit’s water supply, hoping the water might quench the flames – in vain – and the Great Conduit itself was razed to the ground along with Cheapside on Tuesday 4 September.
Gothic St Paul’s
Old St Paul’s was the wonder of medieval London. It was the fourth cathedral to stand on the site, built from Caen stone after the Norman Conquest, and finished in 1314. It was its monumental timber-and-lead spire that visitors noticed first (until it was struck by lightning in 1561), rising to 489 feet. Not until the BT Tower was built in 1964 would another building soar so high in London.
The remorselessly gothic exterior was much sterner than Christopher Wren’s neoclassical successor, with flying buttresses, pointed windows, and sharp turrets. As one of the biggest covered public spaces in London, a bazaar-like atmosphere prevailed inside, with lawyers tossing coins in the baptismal font, farmers’ wives selling fruit and ale, and apprentices shooting arrows at the jackdaws and pigeons in the rafters, smashing the holy windows. Riding high in the eastern wall was the famous rose window, bathing the high altar in kaleidoscopic light.
When St Paul’s burned down on the third day of the fire, a local thunderstorm broke out with forks of apocalyptic lightning radiating from the blazing building. Eventually, the roof melted, sending streams of molten lead pouring down Ludgate Hill “glowing with fiery redness” as people ran for their lives.
The Steelyard
“Foreigners are ill-regarded, not to say detested in London,” observed a Venetian visitor to the capital in 1617 – one reason, no doubt, the 400 German merchants of the Hanseatic League (an economic alliance of German cities) lived a sequestered life in the Steelyard. This motley collection of wharves, storehouses, a tavern, guildhall, mint, chapel, and lodgings – all engirdled by a stone wall – amounted to a mini city-within-a-city.
Since the early 13th century, successive kings allowed the foreign merchants to trade freely in England, immune from rent and taxation in exchange for surrendering their vessels in wartime. Their complex was razed to the ground in 1666, by which point they had lost most of their privileges after the jealous city guilds expressed anger regarding them towards Queen Elizabeth I. Today, its memory is effaced by Cannon Street Station.
The Royal Exchange
This vast, open-air trading piazza was the brainchild of the merchant Thomas Gresham. Christened the Royal Exchange by Queen Elizabeth I in 1571, it became the epicentre of England’s burgeoning trading empire, emitting onto Cornhill “an incessant buzz, like the murmurs of a distant ocean”. Along its colonnaded walks and finely pebbled courtyard, merchants from all over the world, customers and suppliers would meet twice a day to seal deals that would send ships to the four corners of the world.
It was a broad, four-storey building with fine shops in its upper galleries, and a bell tower surmounted by a large grasshopper, the emblem of the Gresham family. Watching from niches above the colonnade were statues of all the English kings and queens since William the Conqueror.
The Great Fire swept through the Exchange on 3 September, filling the courtyard with “sheets of fire” and sending the kings and queens plummeting from their niches, smashing to pieces below. As a totem of England’s commercial prowess, the Exchange was swiftly rebuilt after the fire, opening in 1669. But this, too, was destroyed by fire in 1838, and the site is currently occupied by a third exchange.
... and classic buildings that survived, only to be destroyed later
Nonsuch House
This wildly eccentric, gaudily painted, meticulously carved Renaissance palace was the jewel in the crown of London Bridge. Made entirely from wood it was prefabricated in Holland and erected in 1577-79, replacing the medieval drawbridge gate. At four storeys it was the biggest building on the bridge, straddling the whole street and lurching over the Thames, affording its illustrious occupants spectacular views of the metropolis. Its tulip-bulb cupolas were admired from miles around and there was truly nonsuch like this architectural mongrel anywhere else in London.
The fire only consumed a modern block of houses at the northern end of London Bridge, separated from the rest by a gap, and so Nonsuch House, built on the 7th and 8th arches from the Southwark end, happily survived – only to be dismantled with the rest of the houses a hundred years later.
The White Hart pub
This old inn is a sad – and relatively recent – loss. Originally a 14th-century tavern harangued by the cries of the insane from the hospital of Bethlem next door, it was rebuilt in 1480 as one of Bishopsgate’s galleried coaching inns catering for a transient population of travellers, traders, actors, prostitutes and pilgrims. It had bulging bay windows, a profusion of tiny window panes, and central archway leading into the courtyard with “1480” proudly inscribed above.
Escaping the fire, it was completely rebuilt in a mellower Georgian style in 1829, all stucco and sash windows, only to be demolished in recent years to make way for a brash, nine-storey cylindrical block of offices and shops, set to open in December 2016. Rather absurdly, the old pub’s facade will be preserved and grafted onto the new building, rubbing Londoners’ faces in their loss.
Northumberland House
Built in 1605, this lion-topped Jacobean palace was once an imposing feature of Charing Cross, by the equestrian statues of Charles I from 1675. It belonged to the illustrious earls and dukes of Northumberland, perfectly located to attend court and parliament. It was originally one of a parade of gilded medieval and Tudor riverside palaces, of which only Somerset House survives today, albeit rebuilt, but giving a sense of their former grandeur. The westernmost point of the fire’s trail of destruction was Fetter Lane, saving Northumberland House – but, shamefully, it was demolished in 1874 after the Metropolitan Board of Works paid its final duke a small fortune to move out so they could build Northumberland Avenue.
Paul Pindar’s House
Around 1600, the wealthy merchant and diplomat Paul Pindar returned from Italy and built “a very commodious mansion” on Bishopsgate Street Without, a pleasant stretch just beyond the City walls. It had a richly carved oak facade, with gradually protruding bays meeting in a turret-like shape at the front, and tiny panes of glass with fine patterning. Lying in the north-east corner of the City, it emerged unscathed in the fire and, sub-divided, part of it became a tavern in the 18th century, the Sir Paul Pindar’s Head. It fell victim to the expansion of the Great Eastern Railway in 1890 – but part of the façade is preserved today in all its meticulously-carved glory in the V&A Museum.
The crooked townhouse on Fleet Street
On the north side of Fleet Street, the fire didn’t manage to vault Fetter Lane. If it had, then this wonderfully overwrought four-storey townhouse bulging over the corner of Chancery Lane and Fleet Street, depicted by the antiquarian engraver John Thomas Smith in 1789, would almost certainly have been lost. “Antiquity Smith” had a keen eye for the vanishing city – the house was removed 10 years later. Today a tasteful, but less characterful, auburn Victorian building occupies the site.
The Cock and Magpie Tavern
One of a cluster of old houses in Drury Lane – which was far west enough not to be threatened by the fire – this beguiling gabled building wasn’t destroyed until 1882. For most of its life, it housed the Cock and Magpie pub which, according to the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London in 1880, was nearly 400 years old (though this is questionable). In its twilight years, it became a bookshop.
The Savoy hospital
From 1512, this was a grand hospital within the stout, battlemented walls of the ruined Savoy Palace, magnificently built by Peter of Savoy but burned down in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. At sunset each night, poor pilgrims, strangers and children would stream in to pray, wash, sleep and perhaps consult a physician or surgeon. An initiative of Henry VII, the hospital was re-founded by Mary I, and enlarged by Queen Elizabeth I.
It survived the Great Fire, but had ceased to be an operative paupers’ hospital by that stage (serving mainly as a military barracks), and was in ruins by 1800 following a fire. The site was cleared in 1816-20 and, since the 1880s, has been a theatre and uber-exclusive hotel, retaining something of the Savoy Palace’s earlier hauteur. Today, only the hospital’s stone chapel survives, adrift in a sea of office blocks.
Pre-fire houses in Nevill’s Court
Nevill’s Court was a narrow alley off the east side of Fetter Lane, named after Ralph Neville, the Bishop of Chichester who had a London mansion here in the 1220s. The court once contained one of London’s best-kept secrets: a cluster of houses with picturesque overhanging storeys and plastered walls, replete with small, fenced-off gardens. These houses escaped the fire by the skin of their teeth – but were then destroyed in the early 20th century. Photographs survive thanks to the London Topographical Society who, spurred on by the “practical rebuilding” of London from the mid-Victorian period, captured old buildings on the brink of oblivion.
The glass and gargoyle mansion
Fashionable glazed windows were something of a luxury in Elizabethan London, and at a time when so many dwellings had only a cloth or greased paper behind a lattice to let light in, this timber-framed mansion in Crutched Friars, to the north of the Tower of London was a work of almost criminal ostentation. It was made almost entirely from glass, with the load-bearing beams adorned with particularly hideous gargoyles as a foil to the beauty of the glass. Just three streets separated it from the limits of Fire’s trail of destruction to the east. It was dismantled at the end of the 18th century, having become an antiquated curiosity.
Shaftesbury House
Constructed to the designs of Inigo Jones in the 1640s, Shaftesbury House on Aldersgate Street was “built in brick, and ornamented with stone in a most noble and elegant manner.” Its eight Ionic pilasters and very large windows added gravitas, making it a fitting residence for the Earl of Shaftesbury, who lends the building its name.
In later years it was a tavern, lying-in hospital, general dispensary, and finally shops. It owed its Great Fire survival to the city walls at Aldersgate – but it was unceremoniously ripped down in 1882. Now a barren, unlovely stretch pounded by traffic, 17th-century Aldersgate was once reckoned the most Italianate street in London, with harmonious buildings and a graceful width.
Dr Matthew Green is the author of London: A Travel Guide Through Time. He lectures on the history of London and leads tours through the city
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