Notes and News ............................................ p.2
Obituary: Bernard Nurse .............................. p.2
Out and About;
A visit to the Mercers Company .................... p.3
Changing London: Pedestrian Exploration .... p.3
Lambeth Archives reopened .......................... p.4
A new Atlas of London before the Great Fire
by Vanessa Harding ...................................... p.5
Some notes on the Seventeenth-Century
Topography of the Inns of Court
by India Wright ............................................ p.5
Where is this monument? .................. p.8 & p.17
London’s Great Fire of 1666:
New research and new displays
by Kate Loveman and Meriel Jeater .............. p.8
London Taverns in the 1680s
by Anthea Jones ........................................ p.11
Locating London’s Past – Redivivus
by Tim Hitchcock ........................................ p.12
The Great Map of London at Cockesden
by Rosemary Weinstein .............................. p.14
The Andrews and Drury map of Kent
by Peter Barber .......................................... p.15
Unusual Destination: A discovery in East Sheen
by Clive Beautyman .................................... p.15
Museum Street............................................ p.17
Reviews ...................................................... p.18
Contents
Newsletter
Number 98
May 2024
A view of Cheapside c.1680 (courtesy of the Mercers Company archive) see p.3 for details of a special visit to the Mercers Company’s
exhibition on Cheapside
page 2
Notes and News
The Annual General Meeting of the Society will take
place on Wednesday 3 July at St Lawrence Jewry;
details will be found in the insert included with this
issue.
The Society’s publication for 2024 deals with
London south of the river: the records of the
Southwark Fire Court set up after the fire of 1676.
It will be available for members to collect at the
AGM, and as usual, help in delivering copies to
those members not present will be much
appreciated – see below.
We have been pleased to see favourable notices of
our recent publications: the A-Z of Regency London
was reviewed by Alex Werner in Trans. London &
Middlesex Archaeol Soc., and the volume on
Nicholas Barbon received a long and enthusiastic
review by Elizabeth McKellar in Architectural
History. In order to encourage further research on
London, the Society has also been able to give
grants to assist a variety of projects. One of these is
Locating London’s Past: an account of its improved
website will be found on p.11, while on p.5 there is
a progress report by Vanessa Harding on the
Historic Towns project on Seventeenth Century
London, which we are also supporting.
Now for an innovation. On 7 June you have a
chance to meet other members on a specially
arranged tour of the Mercers’ Hall and exhibition
on Cheapside, see p.3 for details. We look forward
to your comments on the success of this venture.
If you prefer a diversion at home you can watch
Dorian Gerhold’s lively lecture to the Society of
Antiquaries on Old London Bridge, the subject of
our 2019 publication, which is available on
youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcklipYv4kk .
Finally, another change. This will be the last
Newsletter from your current editor, as from July I
plan to hand over the task to India Wright, who will
bring to the role much skill and enthusiasm as well
as her experience from researching seventeenth
century London. I have found the Newsletter a most
enjoyable way of keeping in touch both with
members
and
with
current
research
and
discoveries, and I would like to thank all those who
have offered suggestions and encouragement over
the last sixteen years, especially those who have
provided contributions. Please continue to support
the Newsletter and your new editor.
– Bridget Cherry
Publication delivery
We are really appreciative of our members who
kindly help deliver each year’s publications. This
saves the Society upwards of £4,000 in postage and
packaging costs. It can also be more reliable that
post or courier services.
Our Publications Secretary, Simon Morris, will be
in touch if you helped last year to ask if you are
willing to assist with the 2024 publication.
In the meantime we need help in the following
areas – please let Simon Morris know if you can
cover any of them near to you. They are London
SE4, SE15, SE23, SE26, SW5, SW7, SW18, SW19,
SW20, W6, Sevenoaks and Stevenage SG1, 4, 7 and
8.
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Obituary
Bernard Nurse, F.S.A 1948-2024
Bernard Nurse had a deep interest in London
history, with a long experience of working on
London material – first at the Guildhall Library,
then at the Local Studies departments of Tower
Hamlets and Southwark, before he became
Librarian to the Society of Antiquaries, a post he
occupied from 1986-2008. LTS members will be
familiar with his name as the author of London
Prints and Drawings before 1800, a joint
publication of the LTS and the Bodleian Library,
published in 2017, a task which he undertook after
his retirement. This very appealing volume made
available a fascinating variety of little known
illustrations of London subjects from the collections
of the eighteenth century antiquary Richard Gough,
as well as an account of Gough and a history of his
collection.
In addition to the duties of administering a major
library and guiding it into the digital age, Bernard
found time for research and writing, including
scholarly
contributions
to
the
Society
of
Antiquaries’ Catalogue of Paintings and its
tercentenary publications, as well as entries for the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. London
was followed by another selection of Gough
material which demonstrated the breadth of his
topographical interests: Town: prints and drawings
of Britain before 1800 (Bodleian Library 2020).
Bernard combined deep scholarship with an eye for
detail, coupled with a friendly and helpful
approach to those seeking his help He also found
time to play an active role in the history of his local
area – he and his wife Judith lived in Ruskin Walk,
on the Dulwich Estate, and Bernard made his
knowledge and research skills available to the
Dulwich Society, chairing their Local History Group
for almost 20 years. He also supported the local
history research promoted by the Herne Hill
Society, contributing to their publications, and
discovering the earliest known reference to Herne
Hill – in two fire insurance documents of 1792.
– Bridget Cherry
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15-16 June London Map Sale, Kensington
for details see p.19.
page 3
Out and About
A visit to the Mercers
By kind permission of the Mercers’ Company a
special visit for LTS members to Mercers Hall
has been arranged on Friday 7 June 2024, 10.30-
12pm. The tour, led by Liza Giffen, Heritage
Manager, will include their exhibition: The History
of Cheapside. There is no charge but attendance is
on a ‘first come first served’ basis with a maximum
of thirty. To book your place please email India
Wright: isw28@cam.ac.uk .
Mercers’ Hall lies north of Cheapside. The public
entrance is on Ironmonger Lane, EC2V 8HE. The
nearest underground stations are Bank (Central
Line) and Mansion House (Circle and District Line).
The importance of Cheapside
Cheapside, where the Mercers’ Company has had
its base since the fourteenth century, has always
been a crucial city thoroughfare, bustling with
people and trade (see fig, p.1). It was an important
large open space in early London, and a focus for
many aspects of the City’s life. Here, one of the
largest and earliest markets took place, and the
name, Cheapside, derives from chepe, meaning
market in medieval English. It was the place where
different people, interests and ideas came together,
an area of contrasts with lowly market traders and
hawkers rubbing shoulders with the merchants
selling high-end luxury items and their rich
customers.
Cheapside
was
also
an
early
arena
for
processions and ceremonies, a place where people
could gather to protest as well as to celebrate and
worship. The spiritual life of the City was played
out here and the street becoming the key physical
link between city trade, religion, and political
power. But Cheapside also had a darker side and it
was the scene of crimes and their consequences:
iconoclasm, riots, revolts and the first murder by
handgun in the country.
– Liza Giffen
Guildhall Art Gallery, from 12 April. Anne
Desmet: Kaleidoscope/London.
An exhibition by the wood engraver Anne Desmet.
150 artworks inspired by looking at a fragmented
view of the world through a toy kaleidoscope,
including 41 London-themed prints created for the
exhibition. The display incudes a complex collage,
‘Fires of London’, created using 18 razor-clam
shells to present a theme of the many historic fires
of London over the last 1,500 years.
London Open Gardens 8 and 9 June 2024. Over
100 gardens open: from historic London squares to
new community gardens, see londongardenstrust
.org for details.
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Changing London:
a pedestrian exploration
London may not yet compete with Paris in its
encouragement of pedestrians but exploring parts of
twentyfirst-century London on foot is becoming
increasingly enjoyable. Walk south from the SW
corner of Lincolns Inn Fields and you enter the
informal pedestrian campus that has developed
around the recent tall, jagged buildings of the
London School of Economics. They occupy the sites
of Clement’s Inn and the seventeenth century Clare
Market. Among them is a surprising survival with a
familiar name: ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’. The small
two storey house, formerly weatherboarded, is a
rare survival, thought to be seventeenth century,
and is a reminder of the modest scale of some of the
buildings built at this time on the City fringes, in
The Old Curiosity Shop. © Bridget Cherry
Spectra, by Tod Hanson. © Bridget Cherry
contrast to the well-established Inns of Court (see
p.5) and ambitious new schemes such as Lincoln’s
Inn Fields and Covent Garden. A later nineteenth
century occupant borrowed the name from
Dickens’s novel published in 1841. The building
was acquired by the LSE in 2018; it has been
carefully repaired, and it is planned to find a tenant.
Continue south and you will discover a giant
mural, Spectra by Tod Hanson, 2019, celebrating
the LSE’s 125th anniversary, part of a ten year
programme of public art. The inspiration will be
clear to LTS members: the Booth poverty maps for
the area, (is this a modern version of a wall map? –
on which see also p.14). Here the maps are
arrestingly presented in the form of a trompe l’oeil
pie chart, signifying current methods of research.
When you arrive at Aldwych there is now only a
single road to cross before you reach St Mary le
Strand, where further improvements to the
pedestrian haven between the church and
Somerset House are in progress (See Newsletter no
95, Nov 2022).
– Bridget Cherry
Exploring changing London? Stumblelondon
tours.com is recommended by our member David
Gaylard, who joined a well-informed and thought-
provoking ‘Skyscraper City walk’ led by Mark Cox.
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Lambeth Archives reopened –
and a long lost Clapham plan found
After 133 years at its historic location in the Minet
Library, Lambeth Archives has now reopened in
new premises on the former Olive Morris House site
on Brixton Hill. The original 1970s council office
building was demolished in 2019 and work on the
replacement 7-storey apartment blocks began in
2020. Lambeth Archives now occupies the
basement and half of the ground floor, in spaces
designed by the architects Haworth Tompkins. The
building was completed in mid-2023. The specialist
removal of over 2 linear kilometres of shelved
archives from Minet Library to Brixton Hill started
in October 2023 and was completed in January
2024. Lambeth Archives, closed since the end of
December 2022, reopened on Brixton Hill in
February 2024.
For more information or to book an appointment
to visit, contact archives@lambeth.gov.uk .
– Jon Newman
In Newsletter 93 (November 2021) LTS member
Mike Tuffrey reported on the search for missing
editions of a detailed plan of the village of Clapham
and its inhabitants, dating from 1815, made by
surveyor, Daniel Gould (1769-1843). Several poor
copies have survived, but the originals of two
known versions had disappeared, one misplaced
within the borough archive itself, it transpired. A
number of LTS members offered advice and
suggestions.. The good news is that, in the course
of moving and reorganising the entire collection,
the missing plan has surfaced and is now available
for viewing again.
A single enormous basement strongroom runs the length of the
Brixton Hill building between Hayter Road and Sudbourne Road
and provides storage for the entire collection with sufficient
accrual space for the next 15 years. © Lambeth Archives
The spacious Minet Search Room, so named to commemorate our
original donor and the founder of our collections, where
researchers and visitors can access the archive collections. It is
three times larger than our previous public space at the Minet
Library. © Lambeth Archives
The Olive Morris Room, a combined gallery and education space,
commemorates both the former Olive Morris House on the site
and the fact that we hold the papers of Olive Morris – a community
activist in the 1970s and a member of the Brixton Black Panthers –
which is one of our most heavily consulted collections.
© Lambeth Archives
page 4
A new Atlas of London
before the Great Fire
Vanessa Harding reports on the progress of her
project of an exciting new atlas.
As reported in the last Newsletter, plans for an
Atlas of London on the eve of the Great Fire of 1666
are moving forward. The atlas will be published
jointly by the Historic Towns Trust and the London
Topographical Society. The LTS has offered a very
generous grant toward the costs of production. As
agreed with the Society, the Trust will raise the
balance of funding before the project starts, so
current activity is focused on that.
There are many potential donors from whom we
are seeking support, but one very important
constituency is the City’s Livery Companies. One of
the most visible differences between HTT’s maps of
Medieval London c.1270-1300 and Tudor London
c.1520 is the proliferation of Livery Company halls.
The Atlas will show how this trend continued, with
new Companies coming into existence and many
early halls being rebuilt or refurbished between
1520 and 1666. Over 50 Companies had halls at
the time of the Fire, of which 44 were wholly or
partly destroyed. Almost all of these were rebuilt on
or near the same site, demonstrating the
Companies’ interest and pride in these prominent
symbols of their identity. The new halls are shown
on Ogilby and Morgan’s 1676 map of the City, and
William Morgan’s 1682 map of the metropolis,
published by LTS as The A to Z of Restoration
London (no. 145; 1992) and The A to Z of Charles
II’s London (no. 174; 2013) respectively. Twenty-one
Companies subscribed to the latter, and we are
hoping that their successors will do the same for
our project. The Trust invited representatives of the
pre-Fire Companies to an event at Guildhall Library
in October 2023, and we are following up leads and
contacts generated then, with some kind offers
already made. In addition, we are delighted and
grateful that the City of London Archaeological
Trust has made a grant to the project to cover the
cost of employing a research assistant to review the
published archaeological record for early modern
London, contributing both to the map itself and to
the gazetteer of features shown.
A fuller report on mapmaking progress will be
included in November’s Newsletter.
– Vanessa Harding
Some notes on the Seventeenth-
Century Topography of
the Inns of Court
India Wright explores the evidence for the gardens
and grounds of the Inns of Court.
The Inns of Court are home to societies of lawyers
which originated in the second quarter of the
fourteenth century following the return of the
King’s Court to Westminster from York in 1339.
Regarded as the ‘Third University’ since the Tudor
period,1 these associations of lawyers established
themselves in existing properties on the periphery
of the City replete with amenities such as chapels
and dining halls, replicating the collegiate settings
of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.2
In the sixteenth century Temple was located on
the periphery of the City and Lincoln’s Inn and
Gray’s Inn were surrounded by fields, as depicted
in the so-called Agas Map [Fig. 1]. As London
expanded the Inns faced increasing encroachment
and by the late sixteenth century they had enclosed
their grounds, each creating their own sumptuous
private sanctuaries, complete with tree-lined walks,
plentiful planting, knot gardens and lawns. By the
mid-seventeenth century [Fig. 2], Gray’s Inn and
Inner Temple had become known for their
impressive gardens, such that Sir James Howell,
recorded the following verse in his 1659 book of
Proverbs:
Gray’s Inn for Walks, Lincoln’s Inn for a wall
The Inner Temple for a Garden, the Middle for a
hall3
Examination of the maps divulges that in the late
seventeenth century, besides St James’s Park, the
Fig. 1: The Inns of Court in context: 1561/1633. A crop from the
Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0, edited by Janella
Jenstad, University of Victoria, based on Civitas Londinum 1561,
modified 1633
page 5
The Editor welcomes contributions to the
Newsletter. Can you recommend a favourite
destination – or a useful website?
Or a subject for Circumspice?
See back page for contact details.
The deadline for the November Newsletter
is 1 October.
Charterhouse, Moorfields
and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, it
was only the Inns of Court
and Chancery with tree-
lined
walks
in
their
gardens significant enough
to depict. Grouping the
gardens of the Inns, in
addition to their buildings,
into a typology akin to
their architectural cousins,
the Universities of Oxford
and Cambridge. There are
various factors which led
the gardens of the Inns to
be cultivated with Walks
but
one
of
the
fundamental reasons that
all four of the Inns of Court
and six of the eight Inns of
Chancery were able to
plant Walks, was simply
due to the generous size of
their gardens, land which
they had inherited when
they
took
on
historic
estates in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to
house their societies. It also meant that in 1561, for
example, Lincoln’s Inn were able to dig and fire
hundreds of thousands of bricks on-site and
accommodate large saw pits for the construction of
their own buildings.4 The large grounds held by the
Inns afforded them the space and resources to build,
and to build in brick with relative ease. This is
perhaps why we see the early proliferation of brick
buildings at the Inns from the sixteenth century
when compared with the wider city.
John Stow writing in 1598 lamented the loss of
common ground, not just to the spread of buildings
but also to private enclosure, ‘wherein are built
many fair summerhouses…with towers, turrets and
chimney tops, not so much for use or profit, as for
show and pleasure, betraying that vanity of men's
minds’.5 The Inns were not immune to this trend
and in the early seventeenth century ornate
buildings began to populate their gardens. The
presence of these structures was relatively fleeting
and details within the archives are scant, making
these allusive buildings even more intriguing. But
by piecing together archival records with historic
illustrations and maps, alongside contemporary
references, I have been able to reveal these
forgotten structures and consider them as part of
the architectural tapestry of the Inns.
The most striking of these garden buildings was a
pavilion in the garden at Gray’s Inn built by
Francis Bacon, commonly referred to as Bacon’s
Mount. Francis Bacon was the driving force behind
‘The Walks’ at Gray’s Inn as we know them today.
In 1597 he embarked on an ambitious plan to
create a large new garden for the Inn on its freshly
enclosed former waste ground, commissioning
significant groundworks and planting dozens of elm
Fig. 3: Bird's eye view over Gray's Inn, and its neighbourhood, looking over fields towards Highgate
and Hampstead hills, Gray's Inn Lane on the right, Bacon’s Mount seen left of centre, c.1725 by
Sutton Nicholls
page 6
Fig. 2: The Inns of Court in context: 1658. A crop from Faithorne
and Newcourt’s map of 1658
page 7
trees, along with a huge quantity of quickset and
privet hedges indicating a series of intricate knots
or labyrinths [Fig. 3]. Bacon was made Treasurer of
the Inn in October 1608, and he seized the
opportunity, and power over the purse it gave him,
to
further
his
extensive
garden
scheme.6
Immediately after his appointment he ordered the
making of a mound on the raised western flank of
the garden, which was to be topped by the pavilion.
Other garden features introduced by Bacon
included an arbour, bowling green, crested gates
and a summerhouse. He really went to town
executing his vision for the garden, spending a vast
sum of money. So much so that when his nine-year
Treasurership came to an end in 1617 there was an
edict by the Inn that henceforth all Treasurers
would only serve for a term of one year and that all
their expenditure must be agreed with the Bench.7
Other scholars suggest that Bacon may have taken
inspiration for the walks from his time as a student
at Trinity College, Cambridge (which he attended
from 1573 for three years from the age of just 12).8
However, it is more likely that ambitious Bacon was
influenced by the extensive walks in the renowned
garden at his uncle, Lord Burghley’s house at
Theobalds. Burghley is said to have hosted Elizabeth
I there twelve times and contemporary biographer
Peck noted that the gardens ‘were perfected most
costly, bewtifully and pleasantly, where one might
walk two mile in the walks before he came to their
ends.’9 Burghley and Bacon both took a keen interest
in garden design and the garden at Theobalds is
thought to have been laid out from c.1585 with
reference to Plinean principles,10 just as the garden
at Bacon’s Twickenham had been from 1595.
Bacon’s Mount was a key feature of the new
garden scheme. It was erected in the memory of
former Lecturer of the Inn and Bacon’s mentor,
Jeremy Bettenham. Built in an elevated position,
the structure was a focal point and provided an
excellent platform from which to view the intricate
topiary which surrounded it, the Walks below and
the landscape beyond. It was an open-sided
octagonal pavilion made of painted timber with a
slated ogee-shaped roof, topped with a small cupola
surmounted by a gilded griffin. The interior
incorporated wainscotting, seats and a plastered
ceiling11 and the exterior featured a Latin
inscription, dedicating the structure to Bettenham.
Remarkably, Gray’s Inn managed to maintain a
near uninterrupted view over open fields as far as
the horizon at the hills of Hampstead and Highgate
until c.1756 [Figs. 4 & 5]. The erection of a terrace
on the King’s Road (now known as Theobald’s
Road), just to the north of Gray’s Inn,12 finally
hindered the Inn’s northward view, and coincided
with Bacon’s Mount being pulled down, when it can
be assumed the structure was no longer able to
assist in providing an impressive prospect north.
Notes
1. John H. Baker, The Third Univerity of England: The
Inns of Court and the Common-Law Tradition
(London: Seldon Society, 1990), p.3.
2. John Baker, ‘The First Two Centuries’, in History of
the Middle Temple, ed. by Richard O. Havery (Oxford:
Hart Publishing, 2011), pp. 31–65 (pp. 31-33).
3. James Howell, Paroimiographia Proverbs, or, Old
Sayed Savves & Adages in English (or the Saxon
Toung), Italian, French, and Spanish, Whereunto the
British for Their Great Antiquity and Weight Are Added
(London: Printed by J.G., 1659), p. 21.
4. Walker and Baildon, I 1422-1586, p.337, p. 351.
Accounts for the Inn from 1561-1565 show that
hundreds of thousands of bricks were fired in brick
kilns constructed on-site, and saw pits were dug to
facilitate the sawing of planks and beams from elms
transported to the Inn from wharves.
Fig. 4: John Roque’s Map of London, Westminster & Southwark,
1746, showing a corridor of open ground from Gray’s Inn
northwards
Fig. 5: Benjamin Cole’s A New and Accurate Survey of the
Parishes of St Andrews, Holbourn without the Freedom, St.
George Queen Square, St. James Clerkenwell, St. Luke Old Street,
St. Mary Islington and The Charterhouse Liberty, 1756, showing
kitchen gardens north of Gray’s Inn
5. John Stow, The Survey of London, 2nd edn, II vols
(Citie of London: John Windet, 1603), I, p. 78.
6. Reginald J. Fletcher, The Pension Book of Gray’s Inn
1569-1669 (London: Published by Order of the
Masters of the Bench, 1901), I, p. 184. Fletcher, I, p.
491. At least £251 9s 7d, the equivalent of £34,000 in
2023.
7. Fletcher, I, p. 225.
8. Paula Henderson, ‘The Evolution of the Early
Gardens of the Inns of Court’, in The Intellectual and
Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp.
179–98 (pp. 193–94).
9. William Brenchley Rye, England as Seen by
Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth & James the First
(London: J. R. Smith, 1865), p. 213.
10. Nichola Johnson, ‘Citizens, Gardens and Meanings’,
in London’s Pride: The Glorious History of the
Capital’s Gardens (London: Anaya Pub-lishers Ltd,
1990), pp. 14–29 (p. 17).
11. Mark Girouard, Elizabethan Architecture: Its Rise
and Fall, 1540-1640 (London: Yale University Press
for The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art,
2009), p. 288, p.358. A payment of £5 4s 2d was
made for ‘plastering the mount’ in January 1608/9 is
likely to have been for work to the ceiling of this
open-sided structure. 1608/9 falling well within the
fashionable period for elaborate plasterwork ceilings
(c.1570-1625)
12. ‘Numbers 14-22 and Attached Railings, 14-22
Theobalds Road.’ (National Heritage List for
England, 1951).
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Where is this monument?
And whom does it commemorate?
London’s Great Fire of 1666:
New research and new displays
Professor Kate Loveman and curator Meriel Jeater,
from Museum of London, explain how new research
is influencing the interpretation of the Great Fire in
the London Museum, due to open in 2026.
The story of the Great Fire of London will be 360
years old when the new London Museum opens in
2026. It’s a tale that has been told to countless
schoolchildren over the years and one that has
been exhibited at the former Museum of London
since it first opened in the 1970s. Is there much
more to learn about this infamous disaster? New
research shows there is, and these findings are
being incorporated into the London Museum’s new
Great Fire displays, as Meriel Jeater explains.
A new approach (Meriel Jeater)
I have worked on previous displays and exhibitions
about the Great Fire during my time at Museum of
London and curating the London Museum’s new
Great Fire display was an exciting challenge – how
could we tell the story differently this time?
We decided to focus on our key audience –
primary school children aged five to seven years
and the adults that accompany them. We knew
that they would need an immersive display that
helps them to imagine what it might be like to
experience the Great Fire without being too
frightening. We also wanted to provide something
that children can’t get at school – access to real
objects from the disaster that help them to answer
some fundamental questions: how do we know
what happened? Why did the fire become so huge?
How was it stopped? What was the impact on
London and Londoners?
Two burnt bricks from the cellar floor of a building in Pudding
Lane that was destroyed by the Great Fire of London, excavated in
1979-80. This property was very close to Thomas Farriner’s
Pudding Lane bakery in which the fire started. Though the
buildings in that area were described as ‘almost all of wood,
which by age was grown as dry as a chip’
1, research shows that
there were brick buildings in Pudding Lane
2. © Museum of London
page 8
See p.17
page 9
The display will be immersive and interactive,
populated with real objects and stories about real
people who lived through the fire. In order to make
people’s stories as engaging as possible, we wanted
to learn more about them, such as how old they
were, what their families were like, what their jobs
were, where they lived and so on. One of the most
important groups of people in the Great Fire was
the Farriner household, who lived at the bakery
where the fire first started. I got in touch with
Professor Kate Loveman, to see if she could dig up
some more information about them to help us tell
their story. Kate has been working with the
museum as part of the Reimagining the Restoration
project, funded by the Arts and Humanities
Research Council, researching lesser-known people
from Samuel Pepys’s diary to present new
perspectives on life in the seventeenth century. She
is an expert in tracking down records that reveal
information on previously obscure Londoners. Kate
outlines her research below.
Uncovering the Farriner household
(Kate Loveman)
I looked first at previous research on the fire,
including from the museum. Researchers had
established that Thomas Farriner had three adult
children: Mary, Thomas, and Hanna. His wife, also
called Hanna, had apparently died in 1665. But
who was there on the night of the fire?
Contemporary accounts weren’t comprehensive,
and historians had identified various people as
present: combinations of Farriner, his wife, his son
Thomas, Hanna, a maid, and an apprentice had all
been suggested.4 The names of the two servants
were unknown.
Clues to establishing who was there on 2
September
1666
come
from
the
several
investigations into whether the fire was an accident
or a conspiracy. I set about piecing these together.
In 1666, evidence was collected by the House of
Commons Committee and by officials involved in
the prosecution of Robert Hubert, a Frenchman
who had falsely confessed to starting the fire. These
statements survive as summaries and second-hand
reports. Extracts from the Commons’ enquiry were
surreptitiously printed as A True and Faithful
Account of Several Informations … into the Late
Dreadful Burning of the City of London (1667). The
pamphlet refers only to Thomas Farriner’s
presence. A more detailed report comes from Sir
Edward Harley MP who, while not part of the
Commons’ committee himself, had the latest news.
He wrote to his wife that Farriner swore all fires
had been extinguished when the household went to
bed:
that his daughter was in the Bakehous at 12 of
the clock, that between one and two His man was
waked with the choak of the Smoke, the fire begun
remote from the chimney and Oven, His mayd was
burnt in the Hous not adventuring to Escape as He,
his daughter who was much scorched, and his man
did out of the Windore [window] and Gutter.5
Farriner’s ‘man’ means a servant, apprentice, or
journeyman. Farriner’s son is not mentioned by
Harley, but other sources say he was in the house.
Samuel Pepys was told by Robert Vyner that: ‘the
Baker, son and his daughter did all swear again
and again that their Oven was drawn [i.e. empty] by
10 a-clock at night.’ (Vyner was the incoming
sheriff of London at the time of the fire, and so
close to investigations). According to the writer of
Englands Warning (1667), who claimed to have
been in the street to see the fire spread from the
bakery, Farriner was ‘in his bed with his Son’ when
Melted window glass from a building in Pudding Lane that was
destroyed by the Great Fire of London, excavated in 1979-80.
Samuel Pepys found window glass similar to this on 5 September
1666. He wrote in his diary that it was ‘so melted and buckled with
the heat of the fire’
3. © Museum of London
Remains of a leather fire bucket, painted with the initials ‘SBB’
and the year 1660 or 1666. This was found amongst Great Fire
destruction debris during excavations at Lower Thames Street in
1974. The initials indicate that it belonged to the nearby parish
church of St Botolph Billingsgate. Records from the church show
that the parish maintained 36 leather buckets ‘for danger of fyer’.
© Museum of London
the fire began. Neither of these two sources refers
to the maid or the ‘man’.6
Help in resolving these differing accounts comes
from the indictment of Robert Hubert, which
provides the names (not signatures) of individuals
who could give evidence against him:
Robertus Penny
Johanes Lewman
Franciscus G[?]
Thomas Farriner senior
Hanna Farriner
Thomas Dagger
Thomas Farriner Junio7
These all appear to be people who were either
witnesses to Hubert’s self-incrimination or who
could testify that events in the bakery pointed to
arson. Comparing them with other records helped
identify which were bakery inhabitants. Robert
Penny was a local wine porter, while John
Lowman was Hubert’s jailor. A True and Faithful
Account cited them as witnesses to Hubert’s
ability to identify where the bakery had stood.
Francis’s last name is uncertain: it has been
transcribed by scholars as ‘Gunn’ and ‘Gurne’,
and there are other possibilities. There was a
baker named ‘Francis Gunn’ in Greenwich at this
time, who took an apprentice of the same name in
1660. However, attempts to link them to the
Farriners or Pudding Lane failed. It’s possible that
Francis G is identical with a third witness against
Hubert mentioned in other reports: A True and
Faithful Account calls this merchant ‘Mr Graves’
and Harley ‘Mr Greaves’.
The cluster of remaining names – headed by
Thomas Farriner senior, head of household – were
witnesses to circumstances in the bakery. Of
these, Thomas Dagger had so far not had a place
in the Great Fire story. Bakers’ Company records
confirm he worked for Farriner. He had come to
London from Norton Bavant, Wiltshire, in 1655.
Initially apprenticed to Richard Sapp for a nine-
year term, he had been turned over to Farriner in
1663. At the time of the fire his apprenticeship was
over, but he had evidently chosen to stay on. After
Farriner’s business was destroyed in the fire,
Dagger took his freedom of the Bakers’ Company
and in the 1670s was running his own bakehouse
nearby.8
From combining these reports, we can tell a story
to visitors in the gallery. Sleeping in the bakery on
that terrible night were Thomas Farriner and his
25-year-old son, Thomas. They were probably
sharing a bed, as people often did (to the
puzzlement of today’s schoolchildren). Also asleep
was Farriner’s daughter, Hanna, who would be
‘much scorched’. The Farriner’s maid did not
survive to give evidence, and no one recorded her
name. But we do now have an excellent candidate
for Farriner’s ‘man’ who woke and alerted everyone
to the danger: Thomas Dagger. To him, it seems,
goes the dubious honour of being the first person
to see the Great Fire of London.
Representing more people affected by
the fire (Meriel Jeater)
Kate’s research has been vital to our narrative
about the Farriners, plus other people throughout
the display. We will be including d/Deaf Londoners,
based on signers that Samuel Pepys describes in
his diary. We are also featuring the household of
James Hicks, senior clerk at the post office on
Threadneedle Street. He and his family escaped
from the fire at 1am on 3 September, as it got ever
closer and his ‘wife and childrens patience could
staye noe longer’, fearing having their escape route
blocked.9 Kate revealed that Hicks’ family included
adult and teenage children, a heavily-pregnant
daughter-in-law and a toddler.
Information provided by Kate has also allowed us
to foreground less well-known members of familiar
households. Most children are taught that Samuel
Pepys buried his cheese and wine in the Navy
Office garden to keep them safe from the fire. They
probably haven’t heard of Isay William Mingo, the
young Black man who worked for Pepys’ colleague
Sir William Batten. Batten was there with Pepys,
burying his own valuables and it’s possible that
Isay William Mingo would have assisted. It’s really
important that schoolchildren can see that
seventeenth-century London was a diverse place
and that people from all walks of life experienced
the fire. The new knowledge that has come from the
Reimagining the Restoration project is key to
helping us represent these stories and making the
Great Fire relevant to our visitors.
The Museum of London is relocating to a new
home at Smithfield, where it will occupy historic
market buildings. The new museum will reopen in
2026 under a new name: the London Museum.
New learning resources developed through the
Reimagining the Restoration project are available
online:
www.museumoflondon.org.uk/schools/learning-
resources/great-fire-london
www.museumoflondon.org.uk/schools/learning-
resources/deaf-londoners-1660s
Notes
1. Observations both Historical and Moral Upon the
Burning of London, Sincera, R. (London, 1667)
2. London Plotted. Plans of London Buildings c.1450-
1720 by Gerhold, G. (2016, London Topographical
Society, No. 178), pp. 175.
3. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Robert Latham and
William Matthews (London: 1970-1983), VII, pp. 277
4. Walter George Bell, The Great Fire of London (1923,
repr. London: Bracken, 1994), 22-3; Adrian
Tinniswood, By Permission of Heaven: The Story of
the Great Fire of London (2003, repr. London: Pimlico,
2004), 42-3; Rebecca Rideal, 1666: Plague, War and
Hellfire (London: Murray, 2016), 98,167-8. The most
detailed account of the genealogy is Danielle Evelyn,
‘The Farriner Family of the Great Fire’, Once Upon a
Time in History blogspot, 17 Oct. 2014,
www.cupboardworld.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-
farriner-family-of-great-fire.html .
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