The Fire of London
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Great Fire of London which destroyed up to a third of the city in 1666. Samuel Pepys described the scene in his diary:”all over the Thames, with one’s face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops…and in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, we saw the fire …It made me weep to see it.”The London that rose from the ashes was a visible manifestation of ideas; of the politics, religion, economics and science of the heady Restoration period. Christopher Wren, of course, but also Robert Hooke, The Royal Society, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Restoration court of Charles II and, inevitably, building regulations.
Guests
- Lisa Jardine
8 episodes
Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London -
Vanessa Harding No other episodes
Reader in London History at Birkbeck, University of London - Jonathan Sawday
6 episodes
Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde
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Programme ID: b00ft63q
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ft63q
Auto-category: 942.106 (History of London during the Restoration period)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello, on a balmy evening in September 1666, Samuel Pepys sat in a pub by the River Thames and watched London burning.