History With The TARDIS - The Visitation

A Doctor Who story with a conclusion set in London, 1666? It can only mean the Great Fire.
The bulk of this story sees the Fifth Doctor, with companions Tegan, Nyssa and Adric, encountering the survivors from a crashed alien escape ship. These reptilian Terileptils do not want to be rescued, however, as they are escaped convicts. They would rather take over the Earth as their new home - getting rid of the human inhabitants using a genetically engineered variant of the plague. This takes place in 17th Century Middlesex - round about where Heathrow Airport will be built in a few centuries time.
The Doctor must track the Terileptils to their secondary base which has been set up in London. The plague-infected rats are being stored in a bakery here awaiting release. In a struggle, a burning brazier is knocked over and one of the alien handguns falls into the flames. The aliens use a highly flammable gas to compensate for Earth's atmosphere - and when the gun explodes it starts a major conflagration. The Doctor works out what this means for history - saying this fire should be allowed to run its course. When the TARDIS dematerialises, we see the name of the street where the bakery is situated - Pudding Lane...

One of those occasions when the Doctor is responsible for a major historical event - one that he is unable to alter.
The real Great Fire did indeed begin in a bakery - that of a Thomas Farriner (or Farynor) - in Pudding Lane. It started in the chimney of the shop just after midnight on September 2nd. Apart from the big civic buildings, this was a city of wood, with houses crammed together on narrow streets. The fire quickly spread to adjoining properties.
There wasn't any fire brigade in these times, just the watchmen who patrolled the streets plus local militia known as the Trained Bands. Each parish church had to hold equipment for fire-fighting - ladders and long fire-hooks. The latter were to help pull down building that were already ablaze or at risk of fire. This would create fire-breaks, that a fire would not be able to cross.
When the Lord Mayor of London - Sir Thomas Bloodworth - was informed of the fire, he is supposed to have exclaimed: "Pish! A woman could piss it out." Diarist Samuel Pepys was woken by a maid at about 3am. He took a look, considered it not much of a threat, and then went back to bed. By morning, the full extent of that threat was becoming apparent.
The Mayor's failure to take the fire seriously and create fire-breaks in the first few hours had meant that it had spread over a wide area of the City. The previous month had been extremely dry, and there was now a strong easterly wind. Once the fire reached the river side, it met with a number of highly flammable materials being stored in the numerous wharves and warehouses. Pepys went to the Tower to observe the fire from on high, then set off by boat to Whitehall Palace to report to King Charles (II) and his brother the Duke of York. Later, Pepys settled himself at an inn on Bankside, in Southwark, to watch the progress of the fire from there. When his own home was threatened, he buried his most prized possessions in the garden - including his cheese.
People whose homes had burned were forced to move further and further away - some having to transport their belongings four or five times in a day, as the fire continued to spread wider and wider. The various city gates became congested with people fleeing the city. Finsbury Fields would eventually become a tented town for those made homeless.
The fire did not abate until September 5th.
It had destroyed more than 13,000 houses, 87 churches, 44 Company Halls, and three City Gates, as well as major buildings such as the Royal Exchange and the Guildhall. Its most famous casualty would be the medieval St Paul's Cathedral. The lead from its roof melted and ran down the streets.
The official death toll was only 6, but this is widely believed to be a gross underestimate. There would have been many people living in the affected areas who were not properly registered with the authorities. The heat from the fire would have totally cremated bodies - leaving little sign.

One thing the Doctor might have found ironic is that aliens were blamed for starting the fire. These aliens were foreigners - especially Catholic ones. One Frenchman did actually admit to starting the fire deliberately, and he was hung for it. However, it was then discovered that he did not arrive in the City until after the fire had been raging for two days. He was at sea when it began.
Some lynchings and other attacks were reported on foreign tradesmen, though many thought these merely used the fire as an excuse to get rid of business competitors.
Plans to totally redesign the layout of the city came to nothing, due to the complexity of the land ownership. This means that the narrow winding street named Pudding Lane can still be visited today.
"Pudding" does not refer to delicacies cooked up by Thomas Farriner's bakery. "Puddings" were piles of stinking offal from slaughtered animals which dropped to the ground as they were transported down this street to be dumped in the Thames.

There are two monuments to the Fire to be seen in London today. One is the golden cherub statue at Pye Corner, Smithfield (subject of an earlier post), and of course The Monument.
Until 1830, the plaque at the base of the Monument continued to explicitly blame Catholics for causing the fire. The height of the Monument is the same as the distance from its base to where Farriner's bakery stood. At the top is a golden urn with flames. Sir Christopher Wren wanted to place a statue of King Charles on top, but he refused, saying "It wasn't me who started the fire...".

Bow Bells and Cockneys

There lies to the east of the City of London an area called Bow, out near Stratford, but this isn't the place referred to by Cockneys when they say that, to qualify to be one of them, you have to be born within the sound of Bow Bells. Those Bow Bells belong to the church of St. Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside.
The earliest written mention of the name "Cockney" is from 1521. It comes from cockeney - a word for an egg. Country folk used to think that their city-dwelling cousins were all weak and deformed from living in the metropolis, away from all that fresh air and proper hard work. They therefore called city folk cock's eggs - an egg which is small or misshapen, so useless that it must have been laid by the cockerel rather than the hen. It was, in other words, a derogatory term.

The first church on this site was built around 1080. The land was very marshy, and so it had to be constructed on bowed, or arched, foundations - hence the name. In 1196 a preacher named William Longbeard sought sanctuary in the church after speaking out against new taxation intended to pay the ransom for Richard I (locked up in Germany on his way home from the Third Crusade). The authorities threatened to burn down the church to force him out. When he did emerge he was killed, and his body hung up at Smithfield to deter further protestations.
The church as we see it today has the shell and tower as built by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire. The interior was destroyed in the Blitz. The famous bells were damaged, but were melted down and recast from the same metal.
The statue of the Elizabethan fellow in the little square opposite the main doors is of Captain John Smith - he of Pocahontas fame. Looks nothing like Colin Farrell, does he.

Statue of Dick Whittington (and cat) outside the Guildhall Art Gallery.

Bow Bells are associated with another of London's legends - namely thrice-time Mayor Richard Whittington (1350 - 1423). Young Dick had come to London to make his fortune - believing the streets were paved with gold. After a number of menial jobs, he decided to pack it in and head back home to Gloucester. Resting on Highgate Hill, he heard Bow Bells apparently summoning him back and promising he would be mayor three times. Which indeed he was - twice in his own right and once when he had to step in to replace someone else mid-term. The whole story of his impoverished background is made up, however. And he probably didn't have a cat - at least not on his journey.
An experiment was conducted in the 1990's which proved that you could have heard Bow Bells as far away as Highgate - so most Londoners were true Cockneys, not just Eastenders. That was at least up until noise pollution levels increased with the advent of the combustion engine.

You might be interested to see this rare piece of archive material - an anthropological study of the Cockneys...

Pye Corner and Cock Lane

Walk northwards up Giltspur Street towards Smithfield and you will come to Pye Corner. It sits at the junction with Cock Lane. High up on the wall is the small statue a plump, golden cherub. This marks the furthest westward extent of the Great Fire of 1666. Popular feeling at the time attributed the fire to Catholics and foreigners - usually Catholic foreigners - but the fact that the conflagration began in Pudding Lane, and ended at Pye Corner, led some to believe that it was all a judgement from God for the city's sin of gluttony - hence the fat little cherub.
An inscription on the wall beneath sets out this information, but goes further to state that here at this corner once stood a tavern called the Fortune of War. This was demolished in 1910. The landlord would show interested customers a room containing benches where dead bodies used to be laid out - each neatly labelled for the individual doctor from St. Bartholomew's Hospital (just across the road) for whom it was intended, to come and inspect it - all courtesy of the body-snatchers. Look to your right as you stand looking up at the statue and you will see a small guard post where a watchman used to keep an eye on the graveyard of the nearby church of St Sepulchre's - to deter the 'Resurrectionists' from raiding that for more cadavers.

You will see the street sign for Cock Lane in the photo at the top of the post - taken by yours truly at Easter, 2015. (No, I'm not quite old enough to have done the cartoon that is immediately above...).
In 1762 this became the scene for one of London's most notorious hauntings - the colourfully titled Scratching Fanny of Cock Lane. The no-longer-there house at No.33 was the setting for this macabre event, which attracted the interest of Dr Samuel Johnson and the Prince of Wales as well as hundreds of intrigued on-lookers.
In a nutshell, a couple moved into the house of a Mr William Parsons - William Kent and his lover Fanny Lynes. They outwardly appeared to be a respectable couple but she was actually the sister of Kent's deceased wife. Kent and Parsons had a falling out over money. Scratching sounds soon started to be heard in the room which Fanny was sharing with Parson's 12 year-old daughter, Elizabeth, whilst Kent was away on business. These were alleged to be from the dead sister - warning Fanny that she would soon also die at Kent's hands. Kent and Fanny moved out, and she did die soon after - from smallpox. The scratching continued - but this time it was the ghost of Fanny herself accusing Kent. Parsons claimed this, and charged visitors to see the room and witness the scratching sounds for themselves. The ghost would answer questions put to it - one knock for Yes, two for No.
Everything changed when the ghost claimed that it would manifest itself at Fanny's burial place - the crypt of St John's in Clerkenwell - on a specified date. Nothing happened. Elizabeth Parsons was found to have been making the noises at Cock Lane with a wooden clapper hidden under her dress. Parsons ended up in jail for the fraud. Many years later, an artist sketching in the crypt of St John's was shown Fanny's coffin. When opened, the body was found to be in a remarkable state of preservation - something that arsenic poisoning can do. Was Kent possibly guilty of murdering his wife and his lover after all?
Two other items of note about Cock Lane:

• John Bunyan - author of The Pilgrim's Progress - died here in 1688, after catching a chill in a heavy downpour.
• The street name is nothing to do with chickens. It is as insalubrious as it sounds. This street was one of the only places in the City where prostitutes were licensed to trade.