London: The greatest city

The Romans in London

Surprisingly, the first people to grasp the importance of London's
unique location weren't locals at all, but foreigners. In AD 43, the
Romans landed on the south coast of England and marched up the
Thames estuary until they reached the site of modern London.

Boundary between tribes

'When the Romans arrived in the London area in the middle of the
40s AD,' says historian Guy de la Bdoyre, 'they found nothing like a
town, no settlement of tribal people. They found a river valley that
was tidal, swampy, marshy inlets around the river banks, a lot of
forest and, in the distance, smoke rising from scattered native
farmsteads.'

The locals were farmers and fishermen. For them, the river was
simply a boundary between the territories of different tribes. But to
the Romans' acute commercial minds, this stretch of water had great
potential. Their contribution to the history of London would be to
transform a deserted swamp into Britain's premier city.

The mighty Thames

The Thames here was tidal, narrow enough to be bridged and deep
enough for ships to sail all the way up from the coast. A port here
would open up the whole region north of the Thames to trade and
connect Britain to the rest of Rome's global empire.

'If you look at the origins of London as a Roman city on a river, a

trading city,' says writer Robert Elms, 'it almost foretells the next
2,000 years of its history. Because what you've got is a city formed
by outsiders. It's not formed as a seat of government or as a place
with great mineral wealth or agriculture. It's there simply because it's
the best place to trade. This mighty river, the Thames, is a perfect
place of confluence, of coming and going.'

Around AD 50, the first London was born. A visitor from the south
would have seen a modest settlement of wooden buildings clustered
around a bustling waterfront. In the early days, it had no walls or
fortifications and was a sitting target for the Romans' many enemies.

Boudica
The local tribes were seething with resentment against their Roman
oppressors. Their grievances ranged from huge taxes to general
brutality. In AD 60, the Britons rebelled. Their leader was the ruler of
one of the eastern tribes: Queen Boudica.

According to the Roman historian Tacitus, she hated the Romans

because, after the death of her husband, they had stolen her land,
raped her daughters and flogged Boudica herself.

The feisty queen's call to arms was spoken in a Celtic language

similar to modern Welsh:

Consider how many of you are fighting and why, then you will win
this battle or perish. That is what I as a woman plan to do. Let the
men live in slavery if they will.

The rebels' plan was simple: attack and destroy the Romans' most
important settlements. Colchester, in the east, was swiftly wiped out,
and the Britons moved on to London. The timing of the attack
couldn't have been better the Roman army was away, crushing an
uprising in Wales.

Burning London

'When the Boudican revolt burst into London,' says Guy de la

Bdoyre, 'the rebels were bent on annihilating everything they could
find. They burnt every building they could get their hands on, razing
it to the ground. Archaeologists have discovered a thick burnt layer
deep under the ground, marking that first great fire of London.'

The fire that destroyed the town was so fierce that it melted bronze
coins. The entire 40 acres of early London was burnt to the ground.
Every man, woman and child was slaughtered. The desperate Britons
hacked off Roman heads and threw the skulls in the river. Their
brutality was described by the Roman historian Tacitus.

Seventy thousand Romans and their allies were thought to be dead,

for the Britons didn't capture or sell prisoners, or engage in other
wartime exchanges. They cut throats, lynched, burnt and crucified
with ruthless abandon.

But the Britons would pay for their savagery. The vastly superior
Roman army returned from Wales and quickly re-established control.
The rebellion was brutally crushed.

Boudica's fate is unknown. Some writers claim she fell sick and died,
others that she committed suicide to avoid capture. But her legend
survived. Today she is celebrated in a sculpture on the banks of the
Thames as the first great British nationalist.

The Roman London Bridge

As for London, its natural advantages made it too important to

abandon. One of the reasons the Romans had chosen this site in the
first place was that the Thames here was narrow enough to cross.
And some time during the first century AD, they built a wooden
bridge only 25 metres (82 feet) from the present London Bridge. For
1,600 years, this was the site of the only bridge across the Thames.
The Romans had also built a network of major roads, all leading to
London.

Video: The Romans built a bridge across the Thames not far
from the present London Bridge.

After the uprising, the Romans made sure the town was properly
defended. They built a huge wall 2.7m (9ft) wide, 5.5m (18ft) high
and nearly two miles long a wall so strong that sections of it have
survived for 1,700 years.

The golden age

Only 20 years after the Boudican revolt, the town would enter its first
golden age. 'London was commercially important in its unique setting
on the Thames and at the centre of a communications hub,' says Guy
de la Bdoyre. 'So the Romans set about an enormous rebuilding
programme, to restore their pride, if nothing else. This now became a
full-scale miniature Rome.'

At the heart of the city was the forum: shopping mall, administrative
centre and law court rolled into one. Dominating the forum was a
huge basilica, the largest in northern Europe and proof of how
important London had become. Here native Britons mingled with
merchants from all corners of the empire. Even this early in its
history, London unlike the rest of Britain was already a melting
pot.

Video: The Roman forum and basilica.

'It would have been a city full of people from all over what was then
the known world,' says Robert Elms. 'Iberians and Gauls, people from
Africa, Jewish people a little microcosm of the Roman empire. And
that's what it's been ever since: a trading place, a place of arrival,
cosmopolitan, polyglot. A world city.'

The Romans' seduction

After the mistakes of the early years, the Romans had come up with a
new plan for taming the Britons. This time they replaced coercion
with seduction. The natives were to be softened up with magnificent
public buildings, hot baths and lashings of olive oil.

'After the Boudican revolt,' says Guy de la Bdoyre, 'the Roman

policy seems to have been one of integration, making it possible for
quite ordinary people to buy their way into the whole Roman way of
life. That's a little bit like a modern imperial Western power handing
over consumer goods like footballs and video recorders to a Third
World country as a kind of political tool. Almost a kind of commercial
enslavement.'

The Roman plan worked. Rich Londoners took to wearing togas and
learned to read and write in the official language of Latin. On a piece
of Roman tile found on a modern-day London building site, a worker
has scrawled a complaint about a mate who hasn't turned up for
work:

Austalis has been going off by himself every day for 13 days.

'This shows us straight away that this ordinary tile worker didn't just
have Latin, he'd even learned to write in Latin verse,' says Guy de la
Bdoyre. 'The fact that such a worker can write his sneery comment
about a colleague in Latin tells us that the whole Roman ethos has
been assimilated right the way throughout the social spectrum.'

A new wave of invaders

But London's fortunes were linked to the Roman empire's. By the 3rd
century AD, Rome was riven by in-fighting and besieged by its
barbarian enemies. And as Rome declined, so did London. In AD 410,
the city was abandoned by the Romans, and southern England was
over-run by a new wave of invaders from northern Europe.

These Anglo-Saxons had no interest in city life. Like the ancient

Britons before them, they preferred to live in small villages. As the
Dark Ages descended on Europe, the curtain fell on the glory that was
once Roman London. The city would take over 400 years to recover.

Medieval London
By the 12th century, London was once again the largest, wealthiest
city in England. Its population of around 20,000 was double the size
of its nearest rival, York.
It pours out its fame more widely, sends to farther lands its wealth
and trade, lifts its head higher than the rest.
William Fitzstephen, A Description of London, 1173

'London was so successful because it was a good port,' says author

Professor Maxwell Hutchinson. 'That's why the Romans chose it in the
first place. We have this large conurbation with a great deal of
energy, manufacturing energy and financial energy, so we were a
powerhouse of making and selling and trading.'

William conquers

The Norman king, William the Conqueror, had recognised London's

importance when he made sure he was crowned in the newly built
abbey at Westminster, close to the modern Houses of Parliament.
Westminster was where the king resided when he was in London. But
in the Middle Ages, it was a separate town, four miles down the river
from the City of London, the commercial centre in the east.

The Normans made a point of building the hulking fortress of the

Tower of London right on the edge of the city. According to Simon
Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage, 'People look at the Tower
of London and think: "That was built to defend the City from incoming
invaders." Well, that's nonsense. It was built to subjugate and to
dominate the City.'

London as a factory

Medieval London was still largely confined within the walls of the
Roman city. By the 1300s, the same 448-acre site was heaving with
80,000 people. Space was in such short supply that enterprising souls
built houses, and even a church, on the medieval bridge.

Whole streets were devoted to one trade or craft their names

survive today in the modern financial district. The city had become
one of the trading and manufacturing capitals of Europe, producing
everything from woollen cloth to weapons a huge factory sucking in
workers.

'It's difficult for us today to understand the medieval city as a

multitude of simultaneous activities,' says Professor Hutchinson.
'People living, people bringing up families, being educated,
worshipping and, most important of all, making and trading. But all
cheek by jowl. They don't separate industry and living.'

Industrial pollution and bad hygiene

But the tightly packed city would become a victim of its own success.
In its expansion lay the seeds of disaster. Its infrastructure was
primitive, its hygiene poor, its citizens at the mercy of foul diseases.
The seething mass of people was a death trap.

By the 14th century, industrial pollution was endemic. London's public

services were creaking under the strain of its bloated population. 'By
our standards, London would have been a very unpleasant, dirty,
smelly place to live,' says author Philip Ziegler. 'The streets were
always narrow; now they were cramped. The houses grew together.
The streets would have a gutter on each side, and between these a
muddy track that divided the houses. It was a pretty squalid scene.'

'There was a lot of industry in the medieval city, and this produced an
enormous amount of smell,' says historian Benedict Gummer. 'The
tanneries boiling up leather, wool and sheepskin caused the most
disgusting stench.

'And then, of course, there was the simple fact that people did not
wash, so you'd be used to an overwhelming smell of body odour.
People slept in the same bed, if they had a bed at all. People would
wear clothes when they slept; they would very rarely change. Bathing
was taken to be almost profligate, not something you'd normally do.

'So there was an overweening smell of the muck and faeces of both
humans and animals and, most importantly, of the industry that
was going on around you.'

Controlling the filth

The city authorities did make an effort to keep the streets free of
rubbish by employing an army of cleaners, paid for by the local
residents. From 1345, anyone convicted of throwing refuse into the
lanes was fined the huge sum of two shillings and forced to remove it.

'A serious effort was made to control the filth the offal and refuse
that gathered in the streets,' says Philip Ziegler. 'Rakers with carts,
who were attached to each ward, would come round and take away
the larger stuff. There were scavengers who would get rid of the
mess, and those who allowed their streets to become fouled and
foetid were fined quite heavily. It certainly was a strong incentive to
keep the streets in order.

'There was one celebrated case where a peddler tossed an eel skin
into the gutter. The furious citizens descended on him, saying, "Do
you realise that you could get us fined?" and started assaulting him.
And he ended up dead, poor chap.'
Open sewers

But London was so much larger than any other city in Britain, and its
sanitary dilemmas were overwhelming. Its biggest hygiene problem
was the very river on which its prosperity was founded. By the 14th
century, the banks of the Thames had become a dumping ground for
tons of domestic rubbish and noxious industrial waste, from tanners,
dyers and slaughterhouses.

The city's many butchers were some of the worst offenders.

Throughout the 14th century, the authorities tried in vain to stop
them fouling the river and streets with putrid meat, offal and entrails.

For water, Londoners relied mainly on wells, although in the early

13th century, the city fathers had built a pipe to bring water from the
springs in the west to the public pump. Only the very rich had toilets.
The night soil man had the unenviable task of emptying the city
cesspits and removing the contents, much of which found its way into
the river.

'A number of rivers flowed through the city into the river Thames,'
says Benedict Gummer. 'Rivers and ditches that became effectively
open sewers. Not only were people discharging their own human
effluent into these ditches, but industry, too. It seems extraordinary
to us that it was more than likely that people took their drinking
water and certainly the water they were using to wash utensils and
food from the river Thames.'

The king complains

The king, the autocratic Edward III (1312-77), was moved to

complain to the authorities about the foul state of the capital, which
he suspected would lead to disaster:

When passing along the water of Thames, we have beheld dung and
lay stools and other filth accumulated in diverse places within the
city, and have also perceived the fumes and other abominable
stenches arising therefrom, from the corruption of which great peril
to persons dwelling within the said city will, it is feared, ensue.

'Importantly for Edward III,' says Benedict Gummer, 'it was the smell
that was bad. The idea of disease then was entirely different from our
own. For people in the Middle Ages, the actual smell itself was what
was bad for you. They had no idea that you should wash your hands
or bathe regularly or clean food rigorously to make sure that it is
clean for eating. So we know from archaeological studies that
conditions such as amoebic dysentery, tapeworms, boreworms and
whipworms were very common in the population.'
The Black Death

Weakened by so many diseases, Londoners were acutely vulnerable

to a terrible plague that had been sweeping in from Asia the Black
Death. The first wave hit the city in 1348. To the medieval mind, it
was caused by a miasma: a cloud of putrid air. But it's now believed
that the Black Death was spread either on the breath of infected
people or carried in rats' blood and transmitted by the bites of fleas.

'From the point of view of the rat, London was the ideal holiday
camp,' says Philip Ziegler. 'It was warm, there was plenty of food
around, the houses were made of wood and clay, which made
wonderful areas for nesting. It was a rat's paradise. And because they
were there and because Londoners lived in hideously congested
circles, one could almost guarantee that, once somebody in a house
had got the plague, it was very unlikely that anybody else there
would survive.'

The victims were affected by boils or tumours in the armpit or groin,

flu-like symptoms and vomiting. The only cure on offer was lancing
the boils. More often families resorted to praying for the victims, who
usually died within a matter of days, or even hours.

By 1349, the death rate was so high that bodies were thrown into
common pits with nothing more than rough lead crosses. In all, the
Black Death wiped out over a third of London's population of around
80,000, including the king's own daughter the equivalent of four
million people in today's conurbation.

Brimming cemeteries

The city ground to a halt. 'The infrastructure of London's public

services which was never very robust at the best of times
crumbled under the impact of the plague,' says Philip Ziegler. 'And
having to dispose of something like 20,000 corpses, which had to be
transported from the centre of the town to vast new communal
graveyards, put an impossible burden on the city.'

London did not sort out a proper sewage system for another 500
years. Until then, its citizens were haunted by the spectre of disease.
The Black Death returned to London almost every generation for the
rest of the 14th century.

'The cemeteries were brimming,' says Benedict Gummer. 'Whole

trades were wiped out. Some of the guilds had lost all of their
officers. It was as if an atom bomb had been dropped on the city. So
the impact was absolutely cataclysmic.
No family in London was untouched by the Black Death. It would be
another 300 years before the city experienced disease on this scale
again.

Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third party sites.

Plague and fire

London had been decimated by the Black Death in the 14th century,
but by the 1550s, the population was back to pre-plague levels. The
city had always been a magnet for immigrants, and soon it was 15
times larger than the largest provincial city in England and one of the
top five cities in Europe. James I complained: 'Soon London will be all
of England.'

A new northsouth divide opened up in the city. On the north bank of

the Thames were the sober, hard-working citizens of the commercial
district (the 'City' with an upper-case 'C'), while the south bank was a
hotbed of vice and a crucible of the greatest cultural flowering
England has ever known.

Southwark

Newcomers flocked to places such as Southwark, on the south side of

the river. Here a dynamic artistic community produced a unique
fusion of high art and popular culture. According to actor and lecturer
Callum Coates, 'The literature, the reinvention of the English
language and the connection with the common man was all
happening in that one, densely packed little area, about a quarter of
a mile square. That's why Southwark is arguably one of the most
important places in England.'

Southwark was outside the control of the city fathers and, since the
Middle Ages, had been a refuge for debtors, criminals and other
dodgy characters. 'Southwark was the place where it happened,' says
Simon Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage. 'It was
unregulated and there was a flourishing alternative lifestyle. You had
the things that you weren't allowed to do inside the City walls: the
entertainment zone, the brothels, the theatres, the bear baiting, the
bear gardens. And all that happened outside the restrictive
jurisdiction of the City itself.'

Video: In the 16th century, London's narrow streets bustled

with activity.
Southwark was well known for its many brothels, known as 'stews'.
Its women were notorious for their free and easy ways, as one 16th-
century Italian visitor noticed:

They kiss each other a lot. If a stranger enters the house and does
not first of all kiss the mistress on the lips, they think him badly
brought up. At the dances, men hold women in their arms and hug
them very tightly. And before each dance, they kiss them in a very
lustful way.

Thomas Dekker

The street life of early 17th-century Southwark was recorded by a

regular on the thriving pub scene, the playwright and journalist
Thomas Dekker. He wrote best-selling satirical guides to the seamy
side of London:

There are more ale houses than there are taverns in all of Spain and
France, the rooms as full of company as in jail. The harlots in their
taffeta gowns, like two painted posts outside those doors, being
better to the house than a double sideboard.

Dekker's friends included some of the theatre's biggest stars. For

instance, of the more than 40 plays that Dekker churned out, several
were the result of a collaboration with the dramatist Ben Jonson.
According to Callum Coates, 'Much like modern-day sitcom writers,
Dekker was better in a team. When he worked on his own, he wrote
good stuff, but when he wrote with two people or more, he wrote
brilliant stuff.

'Unfortunately he was a bit of a character and couldn't control his own

finances, so he was constantly ending up in prison. He would be paid
roughly 6 for each of his plays, which for the man in the street was
a year's income. And yet he ended up in debtor's prison countless
times. He was churning out plays to make money but was quite
clearly spending it all on drink and gambling and everything else.'

Shakespeare

William Shakespeare, the greatest writer in the English language and

the man who gave us hundreds of words and phrases still used today,
was part of Dekker's crowd. The son of a wealthy glover from
Stratford, he left his wife and children in the country to make his
fortune in London as a playwright and actor. Many of Shakespeare's
most famous plays, including King Lear, Hamlet and Othello, were
written during the ten years he spent in seething Southwark.
'It was a lively, somewhat hedonistic place,' says Callum Coates,
'where people were all great individuals and rather proud of the fact
that they were on the fringes of society. This was the place to which
William Shakespeare and his brother moved and spent a lot of their
time living and working. Shakespeare is now put on this enormous
intellectual pedestal, and yet at the time, he was writing for a
populace who were going to theatres in London's red light district, full
of small-time criminals and others.'

Purpose-built theatres

Unlike poor old Dekker, Shakespeare was an astute businessman. He

made enough money to invest in a new theatre in Southwark, the
Globe. When it opened in 1599, it was part of a new kind of
entertainment, exclusive to London. 'Six purpose-built theatres were
a city phenomenon,' says historian Professor Lisa Jardine. 'There
were travelling players who would go from end to end of England, but
to have a theatre with a stage, dressing rooms and perhaps some
rudimentary lighting, that was a London thing.'

The audience for the new theatres came from all walks of life.
Noblemen and thieves, students and prostitutes, and vast crowds of
ordinary working people thronged to the Globe. 'The experience of
going to the theatre was somewhere between football and clubbing,'
says Professor Jardine. 'It was mass popular entertainment. It was
slightly disreputable. It would have been noisy, and you wonder how
much of the play most people got to see.'

It was perfectly acceptable to drink, eat, gamble and smoke during

performances. As there were no public toilets, nobody bothered to
leave the theatre if they were caught short. And if the audience didn't
like the show, they made their feelings obvious.

The Puritans

The wild, anarchic scene in the southern suburbs was deeply

troubling to the sober citizens on the other side of the Thames. And
no one disapproved more of Southwark and all it stood for than the
Puritans. They were extreme Protestants, some might say killjoys.
Their preachers harangued the public about the evils of drink, sport,
dancing and, above all, theatres.

'The stage, with its cross-dressing, lasciviousness, romantic plots and

outlandishness, was a million miles away from anything that the
Puritans could approve of,' says Professor Jardine. 'But they did
bundle the plays in with all kinds of other things they disapproved of,
such as women's dress and women's ways in general. They were
opposed to anything that you might like to do to enjoy yourself.'
The Puritans, led by Oliver Cromwell, were also opponents of the king
and supporters of a bigger role for Parliament. As relations between
the two sides deteriorated, the authorities were worried that the
theatres could become a hotbed of social unrest.

Civil war

'The concern of the Puritans regarding political intrigue via the

theatres became so strong that, when the English Civil Wars began in
1642, the Parliamentarians (as the political Puritans called
themselves) shut every single theatre in England,' says Callum
Coates. 'They knew that they were dangerous. The vast majority of
the English did not want a civil war, and if you had actors telling them
that, you could force the idea further. So the theatres were shut, and
they stayed shut for 18 years.'

The talent scene of south London had produced some of the greatest
literature ever written. In the space of just five years, William
Shakespeare alone had premiered six of his most famous plays there.
But the turmoil of the English Civil Wars of the 1640s brought this
vibrant, creative culture to an abrupt end.

London was plunged into an era of savage religious fundamentalism

and passionate political debate between supporters of the king versus
Parliament, a battle that culminated in the triumph of the Puritans
and the bloody demise of the king. For 11 years, Britain was a
republic the 'Commonwealth' headed by Oliver Cromwell. Under
his rule, London was a very dreary place. Southwark's empty theatres
were destroyed, Sunday sports banned, the celebration of Christmas
abolished.

Restoration

When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, Londoners

looked forward to a return to the good times. They had high hopes
that, under the 'merry monarch', they would enjoy a period of peace
and prosperity.

Twenty years had passed since the turmoil of the civil wars. It was
300 years since the ravages of the Black Death. But in the space of
two years London would be hit once again by disaster. First by
disease, then by a cataclysm that would alter the shape of the city for
ever.

We have a unique record of London before and after its

transformation, thanks to a little-known engraver, Wenceslaus Hollar.
Much of what we know about the London we have lost we owe to
him. Hollar arrived in London in 1637, a refugee from Bohemia, the
modern Czech Republic. From the top of a bell tower on the south
bank in Southwark, Hollar set about recording his new home in
minute detail.

On the river, he saw hundreds of ships carrying goods to and from

Europe and, to the east, the medieval London Bridge, crammed with
shops and houses. Hollar didn't realise as he drew the ancient
overcrowded city that he was mapping the cause of London's
imminent devastation by disease and fire. His sketches were source
material for his great masterpiece, a massive 2.4-metre (8 foot)
panorama of London called the Long View.

Video: A three-dimensional rendering of Hollar's drawing of

the medieval London Bridge.

Hollar's view

In the foreground of the Long View, we see leafy Southwark, with the
bishop's residence cheek by jowl with taverns, brothels and
workshops. Across the river is the densely populated City of London,
backed by open countryside. To the east, the Thames stretches as far
as the eye can see.

'What is so good about this view is that it shows all of the city with a
fidelity to detail that is incredible,' says Mark Bills of the Museum of
London. 'We have nothing else like it. It's quite idiosyncratic in many
ways. Some of the unusual things are the spellings of some of the
names for example, we have 'Beere Bayting' rather than 'Bear
Baiting' because English wasn't Hollar's first language. But he was
wonderful draughtsman, with an eye for detail the houses, the
small figures walking through the streets, the gardens. It's an
amazing record.

To modern eyes, 17th-century London looks rather charming, but the

vast scale of Hollar's print disguises the fact that much of the city was
falling apart. 'London was well and truly run down,' says Professor
Jardine. 'Compared with Paris, which was being rebuilt as a great,
grand city, compared with Italy with its classical buildings, London's
buildings had been allowed to deteriorate, first in the civil war, then
during the Commonwealth. For instance, troops and horses had been
stationed inside old St Paul's, and because it had been struck by
lightning in 1564, it had a tumbledown spire, so it was a mess.' In
fact, Hollar's engravings of St Paul's are one of the few records we
have of the old medieval structure.

The proposed map

Hollar's detailed drawings took years to complete, and he was often
short of money. Desperate for a commission, in 1660 he wrote to the
new king, Charles II, proposing a vast scale map of London:

The map is to contain ten foot in breadth and five foot upwards,
therein shall be expressed not only the streets, lanes, alleys, etc,
proportionately measured, but also the buildings, as much
resembling the likeness of them as the convenience of the room will
permit.

He sent the king a sample of the proposed map, which offers a

unique glimpse into the lives of Londoners of the period. There is the
rich parade through the fashionable district of Covent Garden. In the
vast green expanses of St Giles's Fields, labourers plough furrows.
There are even merry makers dancing around a maypole, marking
the reintroduction of May Day celebrations, banned during the civil
wars and the Commonwealth. But the king couldn't afford to fund
such a huge project, to Hollar's bitter disappointment.

The Great Plague

Little did the artist realise that the densely populated city was about
to disappear. In 1665, London was revisited by its worst nightmare
plague. The disease spread like wildfire through the filthy,
overcrowded streets.

Records show that this outbreak was the worst since the Black Death,
300 years earlier. It began slowly in May, killing 31 people in St Giles,
one of the poorest districts. In July it gathered momentum, killing
over 1,000 a week. By August, the death toll was over 2,000
Londoners a week. In September, it peaked at over 7,000. By winter,
the plague had wiped out 100,000 people, one fifth of the city's entire
population.

Two of the victims were Hollar's 22-year-old son James and his print
publisher. His business was badly hit during the plague year, as rich
patrons deserted the disease-ridden city in droves. And the worst was
yet to come.

Doom-mongers

The next year was 1666, a date which filled Londoners with
foreboding. 'Late 17th-century London was a very superstitious
place,' says Simon Thurley. 'In a sense, people looked at these
disasters in a very pragmatic way. They saw them as a punishment
from God for wickedness.'
Doom-mongers stood on every street corner issuing dire warnings of
impending disaster. The Quaker Solomon Eagle walked naked through
the streets of London carrying an urn of flaming fire and intoning: 'Oh
London, London, sinful as Sodom and Gomorrah. The decree is gone
out: repent or burn.'

In the autumn, it seemed that all these dreadful prophecies were

fulfilled London reaped the whirlwind. In the early hours of Sunday,
2 September, a fire broke out in the king's bakery in Pudding Lane, in
the heart of the medieval city.

The Great Fire

Small fires like this were common, and at first the locals weren't too
worried. When the lord mayor of London visited the scene, he
remarked, 'A woman might piss it out!' How wrong he was. '1666 was
a hot year, very dry, not much rain,' says Simon Thurley. 'The actual
day of the fire, there was a hot, warm wind that blew the fire
westwards. There was no way that anyone was going to be able to
put it out.'

Londoners had never experienced a disaster on this scale before.

Within 24 hours, the fire was raging out of control, leaping from
street to street, greedily consuming the close-knit timber-and-pitch
houses. As night fell on 2 September, the heart of the old city was
ablaze. People who had thought they were safe now fled. The navy
official Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary Londoners' pathetic
attempts to save their property:

Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods and flinging them

into the river. Poor people staying in their houses till the very fire
touched them, and then running into the boats. And among them,
the poor pigeons who were loath to leave their houses, but hovered
about the windows and balconies till some of them burned their
wings and fell down.

Divine anger

By Monday, 3 September, the flames were destroying 100 properties

an hour. The God-fearing saw the fire as an expression of divine
anger on the sinful and pleasure-loving city. As the Puritan Thomas
Vincent put it:

Now the fire gets mastery and burns dreadfully, and God with his
great bellows blows upon it, which makes it spread quickly and go on
with such force and rage, overturning all so furiously that the whole
city is brought into jeopardy of desolation.
The third day of the fire was the worst. Businessmen desperately
tried to save stock by moving it to where they thought it would be
safe. The City's booksellers and stationers piled the crypts of
churches with paper, thereby creating tinder boxes. When London's
principal church, St Paul's cathedral, caught fire, hundreds of books,
including 300 copies of Hollar's History of St Paul's, went up in
flames. In total, books worth 150 million in today's money were
destroyed.

Video: The Great Fire.

Hollar's personal losses were huge. There was horror and devastation
all around him. But he realised that he was witnessing a defining
moment in the history of the city he knew so well. Like a photo-
journalist, he set to work recording the death of medieval London.
With his forensic eye for detail, he sketched the fire's terrible path
across the city.

Compensation

By Wednesday morning the wind had dropped and the fire had lost its
intensity. Thirty-six hours later, the final flames were extinguished.

Hollar's beloved London was now a sea of rubble, dotted with

blackened ruins. The familiar view from the south bank was now
unrecognisable. In four days, 87 churches, 13,000 houses and many
major buildings had been destroyed and 100,000 people had been
made homeless. As they surveyed the scene of utter devastation,
Londoners tried to come to terms with their losses and almost
immediately began clamouring for compensation.

'Thousands of properties were destroyed,' says Professor Jardine.

'Each piece of property had an owner and sometimes multiple
owners, and some were shops and some were domestic residences
and some were commercial operations with many partners and
shareholders. Every one of those owners, it was decided, would get
their interest back, and every one of them stood hawk-eyed, checking
that each of them gets back exactly what they had had and that their
neighbour doesn't encroach on a little bit of their yard.'

The definitive record

Hollar's lifelike renderings of the fire made him an invaluable source

of information for the king and the City authorities as they tried to
sort out a mass of property disputes and claims. So in the wake of
the fire, Hollar finally got his major commission. The city officials
instructed him to make 'an exact survey of the City as it now stands
after the calamity of the late fire'.
Hollar's maps, executed with his usual precision, stand as the
definitive record of the Great Fire of London and a sobering reminder
of just how total the devastation had been the white spaces
represent the areas where once buildings has stood.

But even this map could not make Hollar a rich man. One
contemporary wrote: 'The sickness time and the fire of London
happening the year after so stagnated all affairs of print and books
and reduced him to such difficulties as he could never overcome.'
Wenceslaus Hollar died in poverty in 1677, at the age of 69. However,
the engraver's contribution to the history of London is immeasurable.

On the cusp of old and new

Hollar was on the cusp of the old world and the new. The 436 acres of
the medieval city he had so lovingly mapped had gone, but the fire
was an opportunity to create a grand, planned city with better
amenities for its citizens. Modern London would rise from the ashes
and become the biggest city in the world, the capital of a great
empire whose power and influence would radiate across the globe.

The Great Fire of London of September 1666 had ripped through the
City. How would it recover from this near-mortal blow? According to
Professor Jardine, 'You can't regard the fire as anything but a
calamity a conflagration that destroyed the entire heart of a major
city, even if it was run down. But it was a void that could be filled with
promise, with opportunity. Anything could be put back into that heart
of London.'

As it turned out, a new London would rise from the ashes, but not
quite as the planners had hoped.

In the immediate aftermath of the fire, the first concern was the
100,000 people who had been made homeless, about 25% of the
city's population. Many of them were living in makeshift camps in the
rubble or in fields outside the City. Charles II, only recently restored
to the throne, had taken personal charge during the fire. He now
appeared in public to reassure Londoners that every effort would be
made to rehouse them.

But an even greater priority was London itself. 'The whole prosperity
of England relied on the prosperity of the City,' says Simon Thurley,
'on its effectiveness as a trading place. And everyone's concern after
the fire, the over-riding concern, was getting London up and trading
again.'

A brand new London

Charles was torn. On the one hand, he needed the money generated
by the City. On the other, he harboured ambitions to reside in a
capital fit for a king. He had spent his youth as an exile in Europe, a
penniless guest in the splendid capitals of his Continental relations.
'Charles II had moved from centre to centre of grand architectural
design,' says Professor Jardine. 'For him, London was, above all, a
degenerate city when he returned, and he was deeply distressed at
what he encountered. He wasn't going to live in a city like the London
that he inherited.' Now the dilapidated medieval city had gone,
Charles had a chance to create a magnificent, planned city that would
be fit London's status as the capital of a great trading nation.

Within days of the fire, five candidates came up with plans for a
brand new London and rushed them to the king. The scientist Robert
Hook proposed a modern grid layout. Richard Newcourt wanted to
rebuild each parish as a single block. Valentine Knight ringed the city
with canals. And the courtier and diarist John Evelyn designed a
series of elegant boulevards. But the most ambitious design came
from the king's childhood companion, the astronomer and architect
Christopher Wren. He shared Charles' vision of a European-style
capital with grand piazzas, long straight avenues and magnificent
vistas.

Video: Wren's plans for London and how they might have
looked.

Retaining the medieval plan

But the pressure on Charles and the City authorities to make a

decision quickly was intense. Trade was suffering and people were
desperate to rebuild their homes and businesses. 'London was, at
heart, a city about private enterprise and free trade,' says Simon
Thurley. 'It was very difficult for the state or for the City to buy out all
the people who owned the little plots of land, but that's what had to
happen if the City was going to be replanned. They were going to
make the streets wider; they were going to create squares and
boulevards and vistas. They had to buy land from the individual land
owners, but there wasn't the time or the money or, quite frankly, the
inclination to do it.'

All the grand plans were rejected. Individual landowners would be

allowed to rebuild their own houses, and the old medieval street plan
would be retained. But Charles was determined that Londoners would
not simply re-create a tinder box of narrow alleys and wooden
houses. So he asked his favourite, Christopher Wren, and the
scientist Robert Hook to oversee the rebuilding of the city.

A modern city
They ordered the main thoroughfares such as Fleet Street to be
widened, to make it impossible for a fire to leap from one side to the
other. And they laid down strict rules that all new houses had to be
made of stone, brick and tile.

'British buildings from then on were structurally sound,' says

Professor Jardine. 'All right, they were spec buildings, but the
buildings from that time that we still have today were built under the
supervision of Wren and Hook, who were interested in brick quality,
how deep foundations had to be laid and the structural qualities of
earth against masonry. All of this was modern, and the City of London
was ultimately a modern city.'

In 1677, the Monument to the Great Fire of London was unveiled a

huge pillar, 61.6 metres (202 feet) high topped by a flaming urn. Just
a stone's throw from the site where the Great Fire started, it served
both as a reminder of the calamity and a symbol of the birth of the
new London from the ashes of the old.

Pleasing three clients

Wren failed in his dream to redesign London completely, but there

was a consolation prize. He was commissioned to rebuild the City's
parish churches that had been destroyed in the fire, a task that would
enshrine him as the man who created the skyline of modern London.

'Sir Christopher Wren rose to the challenge and left an indelible mark
on the skyline of London that remained until the Blitz in the Second
World War,' says Professor Maxwell Hutchinson. 'And all his churches
were so richly different. He gathered around him a talented group of
young architects who knew the architecture of Europe, and they fed
that into Wren as their great leader. Tiny churches, big churches,
spires, great, small, large all different.'

The focus of Wren's rebuilding work was London's most important

church, St Paul's cathedral, which had been badly damaged in the
fire.

'Of all the monuments that were lost, the greatest loss must have
been St Paul's cathedral,' says Simon Thurley. 'It had always been the
great symbol of London and its economic virility. Its tremendous spire
had come off in the Elizabethan period, but it was still the largest
cathedral in England by a very long way. After the fire, there was a
big question: what do we do now? We have to have a cathedral. We
have to have a big building in the centre of the city. So what do we
do?'
Christopher Wren was asked to design a new cathedral. Even before
the fire, he had set his heart on building the first European-style
Renaissance dome in England. But now he had to please three
different clients: the king, who shared Wren's desire for a modern
European church; the Church of England who couldn't bear anything
that reeked of Roman Catholicism; and the conservative souls of the
Corporation of London who simply wanted a huge status symbol,
ideally with a spire.

Building for eternity

'The designs that Wren drew consistently fudged between spire and
dome,' says Professor Jardine. 'But the piers that he put in the
foundations of St Paul's were always the piers for a dome. Whatever
the Corporation thought, Wren was always going to build a dome.'

Wren always said he wanted to build for eternity, and for seven years,
he doggedly produced a series of designs. To sell his favourite, he
spent a year building a 5.5m (18ft) scale model. It was rejected by
the clergy as 'too foreign'. Finally, in 1675, Wren came up with a
compromise acceptable to all parties. He put a spire on top of the
dome, and the foundation stone was laid.

Video: What Wren's earlier designs for St Paul's might have

looked like.

St Paul's took 35 years to finish, but Wren lived to see his

masterwork completed. Over the south door, he installed a carving of
a phoenix rising from the flames and the motto 'Resurgam' 'I shall
rise again.'

'This extraordinary dome stands high above London, 850 tons worth
of masonry on top of it, a cross on top of that so that it can be seen
from Epsom,' says Professor Jardine. 'It was a feat to take your
breath away in 1711. It was a radical cathedral, the first truly
Anglican cathedral.'

Thanks to the fire and the pioneering work of Christopher Wren and
his colleagues, modern London had been born. Wren's skyline his
51 churches dominated by the massive dome of St Paul's would
survive for over 200 years until the arrival of Hitler's bombers.

Georgian and Victorian London

By the beginning of the 18th century, just 50 years after the Great
Fire, London had once again expanded dramatically to become the
largest city in Europe. The geography of the city had also changed,
physically and socially. The super-rich now lived in the west, the
downtrodden poor in the east.

'In the medieval city, the rich and poor lived cheek by jowl,' says
author Professor Maxwell Hutchinson. 'They took it for granted that all
the classes would be mixed together. But after the fire swept away all
of the old London, the rich saw an opportunity to start anew. So they
migrated west, and the poor left in the City tended to migrate
towards the east. So this polarity started that still exists in London
today, between the rich in the west and the poor in the east.'

Nicholas Barbon

The pioneer in the creation of the affluent West End of London was
Nicholas Barbon. The son of a Puritan preacher, Barbon had been to
university in Holland where he picked up new ideas on finance and
money-making. He represented a new breed of aggressively
entrepreneurial Londoners.

According to the author Patrick Dillon, 'Barbon was a money man, a

financial man, a chancer, a risk-taker. At a time, in the late 17th
century, when London was growing beyond imagination into the kind
of city that no one had seen before, he thought about how people
could make money out of rebuilding London.'

In the 1680s and '90s, Barbon bought up plots of land in the west of
London, green-field sites where he built rows of neat flat-fronted
houses in straight streets with open squares. In a drive to cut
building costs, he pioneered a brand new housing design: the terrace
a row of separate homes that looked like one grand building.
Terraces, unique to London, perfectly suited the aspirations of the
capital's upwardly mobile new rich who flocked to these desirable
addresses.

The merchants

By the 1720s, the West End was a playground for those with money
to burn, a vast pleasure palace filled with endless diversions:
glittering ballrooms, theatres, clubs and gaming tables.

'The largest growing class in London in the 18th century was the
merchant class,' says historian Professor David Dabydeen. 'These
were people who had made a lot of money from the trade in colonial
goods, but they didn't have any class or pedigree and the aristocratic
class looked down on them. So what did they do? They bought
themselves into aristocratic values, building grand houses, holding
great banquets, driving elaborate gilded coaches, having fantastic
and lavish parties in other words, their consumption was
conspicuous.'

The City of London in the east was still the financial district. Here
business was done in coffee houses where the all-male patrons
indulged in fashionable stimulants coffee, tea and tobacco. In the
early 18th century, Britain was expanding to become a global power
dominating the world of finance and trade in colonial goods.

'British ships were going further and further across the world,' says
Patrick Dillon, 'and it was London that was at the heart of this. It was
in London that the deals were being done to finance these
expeditions. It was in London that the great merchants and financiers
were putting together the structure of this. It was in London that the
docks were expanding out to the east of the city.'

Gambling

London was a city of speculators. People won and lost fortunes on the
newly formed stock market. They blew their savings on government-
sponsored lotteries. They were obsessed with gambling, risk and,
above all, money. The writer Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) complained:

The luxury of the age will be the ruin of the nation if not prevented.
We leave trade to gain in stocks; we live above ourselves and barter
our ready money for trifles.

London was a jungle of opportunities and, as ever, a magnet for those

hoping to make a better life. 'You could come to London as a servant
or as a poor person,' says Patrick Dillon, 'have a win at cards, get
lucky with your job and make a bit of money, and the next day you'd
buy yourself some fine clothes and you'd be walking down the Strand
as a gentleman. And fortunes could go in the other direction as well.
You could inherit a huge estate, lose it all at cards in the Covent
Garden gaming clubs one day and wake up at dawn bankrupt.'

Poverty and crime

For those who failed, London was unforgiving, and they ended up in
the impoverished ghettos to the east. Just a few minutes' walk away
from what is now the busy shopping district of the modern West End
was one of the vilest slums in London: St Giles. 'The houses at St
Giles were called "rookeries" because that suggested people packed
into nests,' says Professor Dabydeen. 'It was a place of the
marginalised and destitute, of pickpockets, of murders, rapes, illegal
gambling, cockfighting any imaginable human depravity took place
in St Giles.'
The vast gulf between rich and poor fuelled crime rates, and fear of
crime obsessed the rich. Newspapers another new phenomenon
were passed round coffee houses and regaled their readers with
sensational stories about highwaymen, murderers and executions.
And the focus for wealthy Londoners' anxieties about crime was St
Giles. Paranoia about this wretched quarter reached fever pitch in the
early 1700s, when the urban poor seized on a terrifying new vice
gin.

Gin

The gin of the 18th century bore no relation to the respectable

expensive spirit of today. A Dutch import, Madam Geneva (as she was
called) was cheap and lethal. 'This new drink from Holland suddenly
arrived among a people who weren't used to drinking spirits,' says
Patrick Dillon. 'The strongest thing they had drunk before was strong
beer, and suddenly for a penny a dram they could get this fantastic
new drug. Stronger than anything they'd tasted before, it would
instantly get them drunk. There was a famous signboard over gin
shops that said: "Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence, straw
for nothing" of course, you got the straw to crash out on once you
had drunk too much.'

The government fuelled London's gin craze by removing the

restrictions on distilling, and soon the city was awash with gin shops.
If you couldn't afford a glass of the spirit, you could buy a gin-soaked
rag. It was estimated that a quarter of the buildings in St Giles were
drinking dens. Its residents were infamous for guzzling vast
quantities of gin and for a few hours escaping their miserable lives.

'The real villains of this debauchery, drunkenness and destruction of

human life,' says Professor Dabydeen, 'were the landowners who
made tons of money by selling their corn for the purposes of gin
distillation. So there was an economic stranglehold on the poor. They
were encouraged to consume something that would destroy their
lives a kind of a drug, the equivalent of crack cocaine.'

According to Patrick Dillon, 'London was seen as a town spinning out

of control. There was a crime wave, and gin was seen to be
associated with crime and prostitution. In addition, the spread of
syphilis, which was the big health scare at the time, was seen to be
associated with gin because women were thought to be turning to
prostitution to fund their drinking habits.

'Gin was also seen as attacking the economy. At the time, the wealth
of the nation was thought to depend on how much poor people could
make. If poor people, instead of working hard, were lying slumped in
the doorway of a gin shop, then they weren't making anything.'
Backlash against the new drug

Gin was assumed to be a London problem, and in the 1720s, a

backlash against it began, led by Christian reformers. In 1729, the
government took the first official step towards clamping down on this
new urban drug. The first Gin Act increased the duty paid on gin from
five pence to five shillings and forced gin sellers to buy licences. But
Londoners soon found a way around the rules. The law only applied
to flavoured spirits, so distillers simply removed the juniper from the
gin and renamed it 'Parliamentary brandy'.

By the 1730s, tales of gin-induced crime and depravity were again

dominating the papers. One story in particular rekindled gin hysteria
the case of a poor woman, Judith Defor. Her child was cared for by
the parish in a local workhouse. One Sunday she took the infant out
for the day, strangled it and sold its clothes to buy gin.

The artist William Hogarth was so moved by the devastation wreaked

by gin that he produced his most famous engraving set in the slum of
St Giles: Gin Lane. 'One of the most powerful images of social
degradation in all of 18th-century art is in the foreground the
drunken woman with a leg full of syphilitic sores,' says Professor
Dabydeen. 'As she tries to get her snuff, her baby falls from her arms
and topples to its death. It's an extraordinary image because there's
an echo of a Madonna and child. And when the baby falls with its
arms spread wide, it looks like an upside-down crucifixion and the
woman like a drunken Mary. So it's showing how Christian values had
been absolutely depraved and destroyed by this addiction to gin.'

Controlling the gin craze

Over the next 30 years, the government introduced a series of

measures aimed at controlling the gin craze. First, they tried the
radical step of prohibition, which simply drove gin underground.
People set up illegal stills, women sold drams from underneath their
skirts, and there was no let up in gin-fuelled violence. So the
authorities brought in a series of acts that gradually brought distilling
back within the law, and slowly raised the tax on gin.

But the gin craze only finally fizzled out because the world was
changing. In the 1750s, the economic boom came to an end. The
poor couldn't afford a drink that was becoming increasingly
expensive. And, in the second half of the 18th century, there was a
new mood of zealous social reform abroad in the capital.

'People write tracts about how to improve London,' says Patrick

Dillon, 'and express shock that the greatest city in the world, the city
of the world's greatest power, should be full of these terrible sights
of prostitution, of people drinking too much and lying drunk in the
gutters, and all the things that parliamentarians, writers and
reformers say have to be cleaned up.'

Poverty and excess would never leave London. St Giles remained a

notorious slum into the 19th century, until it was finally knocked
down to ease the congestion on London streets caused by the arrival
of the railways.

The exploding city

A new era was dawning, and a revolution in transport would allow

Londoners to escape the inner city for a new life in the suburbs.

By 1811, London had become the first city in the Western world
whose population topped a million. But it was still relatively compact:
a person could cross the City on foot in around two hours. However,
within a century, London's physical shape would be transformed by
the energy and enterprise of the Victorians. From being six miles
across from east to west, Greater London would spread like a stain
across south-east England until, by the early 20th century, it was a
monster city 18 miles wide, spanned by the first mass transport
system in the world.

'It was a megalopolis,' says writer Robert Elms. 'This massively

exploding city happened because of technology, because of railways.
People could get there but live further away from the centre.'

Coming of the railways

London's transformation was driven by Britain's status at the

forefront of the Industrial Revolution. The first public steam railway
was built by George Stephenson in 1825. Twenty-five years later,
Britain had a rail network linking the entire country. The first railway
in London was built in 1836.

The railways stirred the imagination of Londoners, particularly the

middle classes who could afford to use them. One contemporary
wrote: 'The railways are so vast and important that the useless
Egyptian pyramids, all the justly vaunted remnants of old Rome's
magnificence will not be able to endure comparison.'

The train even changed time itself. Before the arrival of the railways,
towns in Britain had their own individual time, as the sun rises at
different times across the country. According to author Christian
Wolmar, 'It was when the railways came that they had to standardise
time, otherwise there would have been total confusion. It was quite
natural that they chose London Greenwich Mean Time as the
standard because London was the capital of Britain and the capital of
a colonial empire. So London became the standard time for both
Britain and the world.'

The Necropolis train

In the space of 40 years, the great stations Euston, King's Cross,

Paddington and St Pancras rose up across the city, temples to
progress. To build the railways, great canyons were carved out in the
city. Slums offered the cheapest land to build on, so the poor were
ruthlessly evicted to make way for the train. 'In the case of St
Pancras, they overturned one of London's oldest churchyards,' says
Robert Elms. '"Dig up the dead and throw them away, it doesn't
matter, we've got trains to build." And that's what was the centre of
Victorian London.'

Having dug up the dead to build railways, Victorians found that the
trains were contributing to the city's chronic overcrowding. More and
more people were moving to London, and by the mid-1800s, the
city's graveyards were overflowing. One woman complained of
coming across four putrefying heads sticking out of the ground in a
south London church.

But the Victorians had a solution to the acute shortage of space for
London's dead. They built a railway line purely to carry coffins out of
the city. Opened in 1854, the Necropolis Railway had a mortuary
station in south London where grieving families brought their loved
ones. Coffins and mourners were then loaded on to the Black Cat
train and taken to Brookwood Cemetery, 25 miles away in the
countryside.

According to Robert Elms, 'a wonderfully Victorian aspect of the

Necropolis train of the dead is that it followed the hierarchies of the
time. You could get first-, second- or third-class tickets on the
Necropolis one-way train. If you were a first-class passenger you
were dead, but you were still first class you would have mutes
walking in front of the train, which would travel very slowly taking
you on your last journey, and there'd be black flags waving. If you
were a third-class passenger, the train would travel to the burial
grounds as quickly as possible and you would be piled up with all the
other dead paupers in the back and just dumped into an unmarked
grave. Such a fantastic world view.'

Marc Brunel

London was still growing at an alarming rate, so the ingenious

Victorians came up with another radical idea for solving London's
acute congestion: building highways under ground. Enter a brilliant
Frenchman, Marc Brunel, who came to London in 1799, destined to
make a major contribution to the creation of the city's transport
network. Brunel devised a scheme to ease the flow of traffic across
the city, tunnelling under the Thames between Wapping on the north
bank and Rotherhithe on the south, to create a road link.

To do this, he had to solve the problem of how to bore deep under

the Thames. 'Marc Brunel watched a wood-boring insect going about
its business,' says Professor Hutchinson, 'and he couldn't work out
why the insect didn't suffocate once it had bored the hole. As a result
of this observation, he invented the tunnelling shield.'

The shield was a giant iron frame that allowed 36 miners to work at
once while protecting them from falling earth. Behind the miners, a
team of bricklayers shored up the tunnel.

Video: Marc Brunel's tunnelling shield.

Brunel's plan was hugely ambitious and dangerous. If he didn't stay

on course, he would hit quicksand below or water above. At the
Thames' deepest point, the tunnel would be just 4.3m (14ft) below
the river bed.

Tunnelling under the Thames

Tunnelling began in 1825. Marc Brunel was assisted by his equally

brilliant son, Isambard Kingdom, who became resident engineer at
the age of just 20. The Brunels predicted that the tunnel would take
three years to finish, but work was painfully slow. 'It was under
constant danger of flood,' says Christian Wolmar. 'The work had to
stop several times, and there were great financial problems. It is a
tribute to the Brunels that it ever happened, for it was considered a
hopeless enterprise.'

As well as the flooding, the air under the Thames was foul and
poisonous gases constantly leaked in. Marc Brunel's health suffered
terribly, as did his workers'. Brunel wrote in his diary:

May 26th

I feel much debility after having been some time below. My sight is
rather dim today. All complain of pain in the eyes.

May 29th

Short reported himself unable to work, afflicted like Huggins and all
the others. Boyer died yesterday. A good man.
In the end, Brunel's tunnel took five times longer to complete than he
had anticipated Londoners nicknamed it 'the great bore'. The tunnel
was finally completed in 1841 and was a landmark engineering
achievement. However, money had run out to build the approach
roads into it and the project was a financial disaster for its investors.
But the tunnel did attract hordes of visitors two million in the first
year. Fairs were held in it, with entertainers and stalls selling
souvenirs.

Underground railways

By the 1860s, the tunnel's novelty as a tourist attraction had worn

off, and it was sold to the East London Railway for 200,000, a third
of what it cost to build. The revolutionary shield was sold for scrap.
Marc Brunel had died in 1849. He never lived to see his vital
contribution to London's transport: today his tunnel is part of the
London underground.

According to Professor Hutchinson, 'Marc Brunel's tunnelling shield

paved the way for the underground system that we know today. It
made deep tunnelling possible.' His idea was picked up by other
engineers, and it is thanks to him that London became the first city in
the world to solve its traffic problems by creating an underground
railway.

The first part of the network was a shallow tunnel linking Paddington
in the west to Farringdon in the east, which was opened in 1863.
Passengers travelled a distance of three miles underground in a
steam train. Newspapers warned their readers that they would
suffocate if they went on it:

I had my first experience of Hades today. The compartment in which

I sat was filled with passengers who were smoking pipes. The
atmosphere was a mixture of sulphur, coal dust and foul fumes from
the gas lamps above, so that by the time we reached Moorgate, I
was near dead of asphyxiation and heat. I should think these
underground railways must soon be discontinued for they are a
menace to health.

Linking the whole of London

But despite the discomfort, the new London underground railway was
a huge hit. People were so fascinated that they rode up and down the
line all day. 'Right from the beginning, this little railway was
amazingly successful and people absolutely flocked on to it,' says
Christian Wolmar. 'It obviously filled a great need. Within a couple of
years, it was making very hefty profits. Eleven million people
travelled on it in the second year, which was three or four times the
population of the whole of London.'

The success of the first underground train encouraged the

government to approve plans for a complete underground circuit
linking the whole of London. But land suitable for shallow tunnels
soon ran out, so the railway companies turned to deep-hole boring
using methods based on Brunel's pioneering shield.

In just 35 years, London had produced the world's first joined up

under and over ground railway network. According to Christian
Wolmar, 'it is a tribute to the inventiveness of the Victorians that it
did come so early, that by 1863 we had an underground railway. Paris
wouldn't get its railway until 1900. It was an amazing feat.'

The suburbs

By the 1900s, the tube was thrusting ever outwards with over-ground
lines bursting out of the earth where the city ended. Houses sprang
up along the tube line. Developers lured Londoners to move out of
town with the promise of an idyllic life in the leafy suburbs. 'The
suburbs were enormously attractive to middle classes,' says Professor
Hutchinson, 'and the idea that the countryside, with all that had to
offer fresh air, open space, places for the children to play was
suddenly accessible to everyone. That was an entirely new concept of
living, a new way of life.'

By the end of the 1930s, the population of Greater London had

reached over eight million, second only to New York. In just over half
a century, London had increased six times in size and was now 34
miles from east to west. One of the largest cities in the world, it was
now poised on the brink of another cataclysm. The Second World War
would subject London to an ordeal that threatened to bring it to its
knees.