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.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

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)