The summer of 1666 was long, hot and dry. In retrospect it is easy to see how it must of reduced a city of wooden buildings to the condition of a tinderbox.
For the last several weeks I have been picking my way through London - A Traveller's History. The book is a solid general history of London as it has developed over the past 2,000 years. Perhaps the biggest lesson I have discovered is that changes in how a city is laid out come from catastrophes, often man made ones, which allow those those who have ideas to partially reshape the future when most people are busy trying to deal with the uncertainties and contingencies of the present. In recent centuries, the two biggest tragedies which have shaped modern day London are the visits which the Luftwaffe paid London during WWII and the fire of 1666.
The idea that a fire might sweep through London and reduce the city to ashes had been an issue which had worried the Crown for several generations and some attempts had been made to pass building regulations which would reduce the probability that a fire induced catastrophe would engulf the city. Alas, none of them passed.
The fire of 1666, which had its start in an neglected fire in a royal baker located off of Pudding Lane, ended up consuming over 13,000 houses and left scores of thousands of people homeless. Firefighting in those days largely consisted of attempting to create firebreaks in order to stop the spread of blazes. Unfortunately, the Lord Mayor hesitated in ordering such breaks and the narrowness of the streets inhibited escaping the inferno and fire fighting efforts.
Mr. Tames falls into the camp which believes that a beneficial side effect of the fire was that London was never touched by the Plague again. However a competing view on this matter is that the fire itself might not have been the reason for this. Other historians and epidemiologists have noted that the Plague was beginning to disappear from other European cities around this time as well.
In the aftermath of the fire, Tames notes that a rebuilding along long straight wide streets and avenues and creating a new order to the city ran into the issue of property rights, a concept which had already been rooted in centuries of English common law. This would have led to long and very costly negotiations over property ownership and property values. The Crown, which had only recently regained its place in English society in the aftermath of the English Civil War, probably did not have enough money to compensate all of the owners for their losses and was only recently reestablished in the minds and hearts of the public. A wholesale reworking of the city would have probably been much resented. The Crown itself, fearful of another potential rebellion from a restless public, was having to reassure the English people that foreigners or terrorists were not the ones responsible for the disaster. King Charles II did send out for rebuilding plans anyway and indeed was bombed with new plans, but these ideas largely came to naught. People were too much in a hurry to rebuild anyway.
Still, in the decades that followed, London did rebuilt itself with a real face lift. The old city of the Middle Ages was gone forever. Over 100 streets were rebuilt to be at least 14 feet wide. The first raised pavements for pedestrians were introduced. Walls of buildings were mandated to be built of brick or stone. Parliament passed new rules in 1707 and 1709 stipulating that houses which fronted onto main thoroughfares were required to be four stories high, while lanes of note were to have buildings of at least three stories high. Back streets, which often were organized into mews type development, were to be two stories in height. If you walk around London today, you cannot help but notice that most of the city is organized around these stipulations. Curiously, I have also noticed that many structures are built to the four story standard and rise no higher than that. Those buildings fronting major streets that do rise higher than four stories rarely rise more than 1-2 stories above that. Gentle readers of this blog might ask themselves why is that?
The other main lesson is that many people seem to admire this kind of urban development today, but it seems that London's development was largely in response to the safety concerns from 300+ years ago and not because of some master plan. The fact that the London has stuck with this kind of development since that time has led to many of the problems which the city faces today, including apartment type housing (flats) that sometimes is not equipped with all mod cons, traffic speeds (from all forms of transportation) which move along at an average speed of 10-15 miles per hour and having to stipulate that on street parking be charged to non-resident permit holders at a rate of 20 pence every 5 minutes (2.40 pounds per hour) in order to try to deter any further rises in motor vehicle use. These parking charges come with a caveat that vehicles have to move every 4 hours and that they are not allowed to come back to the same parking space within one hour.
Enough for now. Ever since I first came to London on holiday 5 years ago, I have wondered why it is that London looks the way it does. I would not be surprised if many other European cities have similar rules in place, at least for their inner cities (their suburbs might well be a different story). Now I know the answer.
Wizard
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at April 20, 2007 06:51 PM