Proms Extra: The Great Fire of London
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 7 September 2016
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this day 350 years ago the capital was in ruins after the Great Fire of London. Historian Adrian Tinniswood describes the massive clearing-up operation, and talks to New Generation Thinker Thomas Charlton of Dr Williams’s Library.
Producer: Katy Hickman
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps |
| 0:21.2 | it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:35.8 | Hello, the great fire of London 350 years ago was an event in the history of the city one wouldn't want to have got too close to. |
| 0:45.0 | The diarist John Evelyn wrote, 10,000 houses, all in one flame, the noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames, the shrieking of women and children, |
| 0:55.4 | the hurry of people, the fall of towers, |
| 0:58.2 | houses and churches, like a hideous storm. |
| 1:01.8 | What started on the 2nd of September 1666 |
| 1:05.0 | as a small bakery fire in Pudding Lane |
| 1:07.7 | went on to rage for three days, |
| 1:10.4 | gutting the old Roman city and its slums, |
| 1:12.9 | destroying homes, the city's commercial centre, churches and totemically, St Paul's Cathedral. |
| 1:19.8 | It was also a fire that unleashed social torrents familiar today, |
| 1:24.6 | a xenophobic outpouring of distrust against foreigners and rent rises as a desperate housing scrabble began in the city. |
| 1:32.1 | But it also spurred an ambitious generation of builders and planners to rethink London. |
| 1:37.9 | John Evelyn wrote of the glorious phoenix emerging from the cinders. |
| 1:42.3 | Well, with me to explore the aftermath of the Great Fire |
| 1:44.7 | are Adrian Tenniswood, historian and author of By Permission of Heaven, the Story of the |
| 1:50.4 | Great Fire of London, and Radio 3's new generation thinker, Tom Charlton, from Dr. Williams' Library |
| 1:56.6 | in London. So, Adrian, set the scene for us, if you could, just as the fire is petering out. |
| 2:04.6 | What is going on? I think chaos is the easiest word. There's complete confusion. We've lost something |
| 2:12.8 | like 13,200 houses, 86 churches, 44 company livery halls, St Paul's Cathedral, which is the spiritual |
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