Tinniswood - By permission of heaven: the story of the Great Fire of London

Contents

There had, of course, been other fires. Four hundred and fifty years before, the city had almost burned to the ground. Yet the signs from the heavens in 1666 were ominous: comets, pyramids of flames, monsters born in city slums. Then in the early hours on September, a small fire broke out on the ground floor of a bakers house in Pudding Lane. In five days that small fire would devastate the third largest city in the Western world.

Adrian Tinniswoods magnificent new account of the Great Fire of London explores the history of a cataclysm and its consequences. It pieces together the untold human story of the Fire and its aftermath the panic, the search for scapegoats, the rebirth of a city. Above all, it provides an unsurpassable recreation of what happened to schoolchildren and servants, courtiers and clergymen when the streets of London ran with fire.

Adrian Tinniswood is a historian and educationalist. He lectures regularly in Britain and the USA, and was for many years consultant to the National Trust on heritage education. He is the author of eleven previous books on social and architectural history, including The Polite Tourist: A History of Country House Visiting, Visions of Power: Ambition and Architecture, and, most recently, His Invention So Fertile, his acclaimed biography of Sir Christopher Wren, also published in Pimlico.

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Epub ISBN: 9781446402719

Version 1.0

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published by Pimlico 2004

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Copyright Adrian Tinniswood 2003

Adrian Tinniswood has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents act 1988 to be indentified as the author of this work

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 2003

Pimlico edition 2004

Pimlico

Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

London SW1V 2SA

Random House UK Limited Reg. No. 954009

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780712668477

For Kevin

Many people have helped me with this book. I owe a particular and personal debt of gratitude to my agents Felicity Bryan and Irene Skolnick, who between them have managed to shield me from harm and enrich my life (a combination which is hard to beat); to Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape, who first suggested that I might like to write about the Great Fire of London; to Tristan Jones, whose editorial skills with a manuscript are positively alchemical; to Tricia Lankester, whose comments and suggestions have, as always, been more helpful and encouraging than I can say; to Kevin Simpson, who understands the psychology of the Fire so well, and understands his old friend even better; and to Martin Sparkes, without whom my working life would have been a lot more painful.

Id like to pay tribute to the students and friends who did so much to clarify my thoughts on the seventeenth century during a series of seminars at Merton College, Oxford, in the summer of 2002; to Barry Gillions of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation; to map-maker Reginald Piggott and indexer Douglas Matthews; and to the staff at the many libraries Ive haunted in the course of my research, including the Bodleian, the British Library, the Guildhall Library and the London Library. I am especially grateful to the library staff at Bristol University, who have borne the brunt of my enquiries over the last couple of years; time after time, their calm efficiency, unfailing kindness and superhuman patience have left me lost in wonder and admiration. I must also acknowledge a debt to past historians of the Fire, who have made my work so much easier than it might have been; and particularly to the late Walter George Bell, whose works on Restoration London created a standard of lucidity by which all historians of the period will be judged.

Last, first, always, thanks to Helen.

Bath, June 2003