Nod goes out to Billy Moonshine for this one. The Monument of course marks the conflagration that we know today as the Great Fire of London, which was a bit of a curate’s egg of a disaster. Very bad news if you happened to be one of the hundreds of people whose homes and businesses were destroyed by the 1666 blaze, but many argue that it DID cleanse the capital of the pestilential streets that had been a hotbed for disease. To be fair, historian Roy Porter counter argues that this is nonsense, as the fire left the worst slums unscathed. Whatever, it gave Christopher Wren a chance to remodel the City along European boulevardesque lines. Wren’s model was only partly taken up, but he did leave us with St Paul’s and the Monument.
Why did the City authorities fail to put the fire out for so many days? Complacency, and the lack of decent fire fighting. The inability to get water to the flames (in a city that sits on a river) infuriated many observers, among them Wren and Pepys. Water was transported through a rickety and inefficient system of wooden pipes, and was not only scarce at times, but insanitary. London’s sewage poured into the same water that people were drinking. Nobody realised for years that the constant outbreaks of plague and cholera were connected to dirty water, blaming it instead on a ‘miasma’ (a vague answer as a result of vague thinking one might argue).
The man who eventually pinned cholera to dirty water was John Snow, a physician in Soho who observed the clustering of cases among people who used the Broad Street water pump. Visitors to Soho can see the site of the pump in what is now called Broadwick Street, before nipping across the road to enjoy a pint in the John Snow pub (many’s the drunken evening I’ve spent in there. Happy days). I digress. 28 Broad Street was the birthplace of William Blake - poet, painter, seer of visions and all-round genius. Incidentally, the Beatles and Public Image also come into this story if you think about it … but I’m not telling you that one yet. A shout of respect to anyone who can get back to me with the connection!
