[center]BBC - In Our Time - The Great Fire of London(Audio)
BBC | 11 December 2008 | MP3 128kbps | 20,0 MB

On a balmy evening in September 1666, Samuel Pepys sat in a pub by the River Thames and watched London burning. He wrote in his diary: “all over the Thames, with one's face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops…and in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, we saw the fire …It made me weep to see it.”

The Great Fire of London was a conflagration of unimaginable proportions – up to a third of the city was destroyed – but the burning of London, the interpretation of the fire and the arguments and ideas about what should be rebuilt give an insight into a city and a period that housed the Royal Society and the restored Stuart monarchy, a place of religious anxiety and fear of foreign invasion in a country still haunted by the Civil War.

Contributors

Lisa Jardine, Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London

Vanessa Harding, Reader in London History at Birkbeck, University of London

Jonathan Sawday, Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde

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