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Hello, on a barmy evening in September 1666, Samuel Peeps sat in a pub by the river Thames and watched London burning. He wrote in his diary,

all over the Thames with one's face in the wind, you're almost burned with a shower of fire drops. And in corners and on 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 Great Fire of London was a conflagration of barely imaginable proportion up to a third of the city was destroyed. But the burning of London, the interpretation of the fire and the arguments and ideas about what should be rebuilt gave us insight into a city and a period that housed the Royal Society and the restored Stuart Monarchy, a place of religious anxiety and fear of foreign invasion in a country still haunted by the recent civil war.

We're meeting to discuss the Great Fire of London, a John Huntsaw Day, Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathcline, Vanessa Harding, Rita in London History, Birkbeck University of London, and Lisa Jardine, Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London.

Lisa Jardine, can we just start in 1665, the year before the Great Fire, because that doesn't so much set the scene, but it shows that this is an idea of the time rather graphic. The graphic thing there was the plague, can you talk about that?

In 1665, you really do have London in turmoil, it goes beyond London, but London is in turmoil. You have a huge plague outbreak in the summer, you have war with Holland, the second Dutch war.

You also have intellectual ferment, if we're allowed to be a little bit colourful about this, as well as the living and the dying, the terrible horrors of the plague.

Those who left London because of the plague were busy in a ferment of activity around science and discovery, understanding the heavens.

When they looked at the heavens in that year, they saw a major comet, a major astronomical event, which they tracked with their new telescopes, they incidentally being Sir Christopher Ren and his second in command, Robert Hook, who was curator of experiments at the New Royal Society.

So you have both death, devastation, war, and intellectual innovation all in one.

Let's try to get some idea of the scale of the death. London was, let's say, 350 to 400,000 people. Bigger than that.

Bigger than that. Could we just ask for an answer?

You just get the figure right, because it can.

400 to 450.

All right, not 350 to 400, 400 to 450.

Because it's growing in August, I'm not an auctioneer.

Let's settle for 450,000, okay?

And in the plague, at least here we go again, about 70,000.

70,000. So we're okay.

So it gives us some idea of the city of about 4 to 450,000, 70,000 for the dead of the plague and all the things around it.

So we already have a devastated city.

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