London: A Tale of Two Cities with Dan Cruickshank

This is the story of London in the 17th century,

one of the most dramatic periods in Britain's history,

illuminated through two remarkable surveys.

The first, a labour of love, was produced by a London chronicler.

He created a detailed account,

recording not just London's buildings and businesses,

but its character.

The second, written over 100 years later, took the original work

and updated it.

The changes documented in these surveys reveal

the origins of the phenomenal city London was to become.

The first survey was the work of John Stow, a city merchant

and chronicler, whose work was published

in the very late 16th century.

Stow walked every street, explored all of the great buildings, creating

a detailed account of a medieval city on the brink of change.

Stow's London, still mostly contained within its Roman wall,

was home to just 200,000 people.

The second survey,

an updating of Stow, was published in 1720 by John Strype,

a clergyman and London historian.

Between Stow and Strype, London had suffered a calamitous century -

Sectarianism, Civil War, the execution of the King, plague

and the Great Fire.

London should have been finished, and yet...

The city that Stow had personally recorded street by street

had grown far beyond the capacity of one man to document on foot.

Despite a century of turmoil, London grew from a small medieval city

into a vast, sprawling, wealthy metropolis.

Indeed, one of the greatest trading cities in the world.

By walking in the footsteps of these great chroniclers

and comparing their surveys, I'm going to find out how London

transformed during this remarkable century.

If you had to find a catalyst for the astonishing evolution of London,

where else would you find it but here,

on the shores of one of the most famous rivers in the world?

Stow and Strype's vastly different descriptions

of the same stretch of river showed just how large a part it played

in London's transformation.

The Thames is, of course, integral to the story of London.

Stow and Strype, when they described the Thames,

offer clues to why London survived and thrived.

Stow, on his journey through London,

described the Thames in a very particular way.

"This river openeth indifferently upon France and Flanders,

"our mightiest neighbours.

"And the city standeth thereon in such convenient

"distance from the sea, sufficiently removed from the fear

"of any sudden dangers that may be offered by them."

Stow's description of the Thames reflects the concerns of his age.

For centuries, England has been involved in European wars,

so for Stow, the Thames was largely defensive.

It offered splendid open vistas,

so Londoners could see enemies approaching.

For Strype, the Thames meant something very different.

Moreover, its great trade may be guessed at by the shipping

lying at anchor in the River Thames.

The masts resemble a forest, besides those constantly going out

or coming from foreign parts of the known world.

Strype didn't see the Thames as a barrier to invasion.

He saw it as the lifeblood of the city,

a port that welcomed goods and people from all over the world.

And it was this change into a thriving port that lay at the heart

of London's transformation during the 17th century.

In Stow's time, the extent of London's trade was largely

limited to exporting cloth and wool to Europe.

That's not to say that English ships didn't venture further afield.

Many travelled as far away as the Caribbean.

But these long-haul adventurers weren't primarily

interested in trade.

There's the reconstruction of the Golden Hind,

the ship in which Francis Drake sailed around the world.

But Drake was more than just an adventurer.

Queen Elizabeth had given him official permission to attack

and pillage enemy ships along the route.

Drake liked to call himself a privateer.

The Spaniards preferred to call him a pirate.

Typical of the privateers, Drake preyed upon Spanish vessels trading

in the West Indies, commandeering or stealing their treasure.

It was an incredibly lucrative enterprise.

When the voyage was over,

the booty was shared amongst all involved in the adventure.

Including, of course, the Crown.

And the booty was immense.

It included 20 tonnes of silver,

five crates of gold and a box of pearls.

The crew alone got £6 million in today's money.

But the English privateers saw an opportunity to get richer still.

If they were willing to gamble their new fortunes,

there was real money to be made.

This came not by stealing from traders, but by trading themselves.

They pooled their money to invest in new companies that were

operating along new trade routes.

The profits seemed good, but the risks also were tremendous.

The world was volatile, trade uncertain.

Even King James I didn't want to risk his money.

But the merchants thought it worth the gamble.

One of the first companies created was the East India Company.

Its maiden voyage was organised by

an ambitious merchant called Baining.

In 1601, Baining's one-time pirate ship joined a fleet of three,

setting off to Sumatra,

forging the first English trade route to the Far East.

The venture was a success. Silver paid for Indian spices,

indigo from Sutra, nutmeg from the Spice Islands.

Even English cloth found markets beyond Europe.

But as the money rolled in,

it became clear that the old pirate ships just weren't fit for purpose.

Fast, well armed, small

and manoeuvrable fighting ships like the Golden Hind were

perfect for pillaging enemy merchant ships on the high seas.

But ships like this were really too small to carry

the quantity of booty the merchants needed to make them rich.

What the merchants needed were much larger ships, and quickly.

Flush with cash, the new elite merchants commissioned new ships.

The 17th-century equivalent of giant container carriers.

Cargo vessels that could carry enormous quantities of goods.

And this is where they built them.

East of the city, near the estuary, near the sea.

And the shipyards created here

helped support England for centuries to come.

They also pushed the boundaries of London further and further east.

Goods were still delivered to the heart of the city,

but the new shipyards would transform the East End.

This master shipwrights house in Deptford was

built for one of the shipyards.

Dr John McAleer is a curator at the National Maritime Museum

and an expert on the East India Company.

So, the company starts building its ships in Deptford

and then it spreads its activities down the river bank?

Yes, that's right, within ten years of establishing a shipyard

at Deptford, it's moved across the river too

and expanded into Blackwall.

It's building ships at Blackwall, and building bigger ships.

The scale of the company's activity is growing, and obviously it needs

bigger ships to sustain that trade, that commercial enterprise.

When the first trading ships returned from the Far East,

it became clear just how lucrative this new enterprise could be.

The main point about that fleet is that it actually got back.

It had proven that it could leave London, get to the Far East Indies

and the other side of the world

and return with a very valuable commodity -

mainly pepper and other spices.

And at that time, pepper was very valuable, like black gold.

£1 million in weight of pepper would take something like

3000 camels, we think, to carry that amount of pepper

from Asia back to Europe,

so long-distance trade done on maritime routes using ships,

are absolutely vital to making these commodities available to more people.

So what was the effect of all of this?

The East India Company, once they realised that it had been done

and that it was successful, they realised that they needed to invest,

pumping money into shipbuilding technologies.

The East India Company is having a major impact,

not just on what people are buying or eating or drinking

by virtue of the goods they are bringing back -

they're having a major impact on the fabric of London.

They sort of knit together the different communities that

make up the outlying regions of London.

The East India Company's success inspired James I to grant

licences to a host of other trading companies.

And new trade kick-started new building.

In Stow's survey, he mourns the loss of the open fields to the east.

"But this common field,

"so encroached upon by building of filthy cottages,

"that in some places it scarce remaineth

"a sufficient highway for the meeting of carriages.

"And much less is there any fair, pleasant or wholesome way

"for people to walk on foot, which is no small blemish

"to so famous a city."

But not all the lands around the city were succumbing to new housing.

Large swathes were being swallowed up

by a revolutionary form of agriculture.

For a medieval city surrounded by countryside,

it seems remarkable that London had struggled to feed itself.

It seems hard to believe today, but the farmers who worked

the countryside around London lacked the skills to turn

vegetable production into a profitable business.

Amazingly, it was cheaper to import vegetables from the Netherlands.

But even as Stow's survey was being published, things were changing.

Dutch Protestants fleeing persecution found

a safe haven in London.

They brought with them the secret that allowed Dutch farmers

to produce plentiful, cheap vegetables.

The same principle is used today on this rooftop in Crouch End,

allowing this relatively small area

to produce surprisingly large yields.

The key was the very special use of an ingredient that

could not have been more plentiful.

In fact, you could say London was full of it - manure.

But that introduced hotbeds -

a thick layer of manure was put down,

then covered with soil, into which the fruit and vegetables

were planted.

Now, the manure not only nourished the plants,

but fermented as it did so.

It released waves of heat

so that the plants grew at double their former speed.

Incredible.

From now on, three acres of land could sustain a business

and the trader of market gardening was born.

In 1605, The Gardeners' Company of London

was given its Royal Charter.

It granted market gardeners permission to grow vegetables

in the open fields closer to the city.

For the first time, growing fruit and vegetables

became a seriously profitable business.

Many of the new gardens sprung up

around London's southern suburb - Southwark.

On the bank of the River Thames, there is now a continual building

from the Bridge straight towards the south.

A continual street called Long Southwark,

builded on both sides with diverse lanes and alleys.

The community that Stow describes had become synonymous with

a very different kind of market, trading not in vegetables,

but in forbidden fruits.

This area, the South Bank,

has always played a very individual role in the history of London.

From the 12th century to the mid-16th century,

it was a location of legal stews - that's legal brothels.

And even after the South Bank came under the control of the city,

it remained a place of relative freedom.

Indeed, it became the Las Vegas of Tudor London -

the location of gambling dens of the theatre

and of that stalwart of the entertainment industry -

prostitution.

This part of Southwark that had contained the legal brothels,

was owned by the Bishop of Winchester.

This wall is all that's left of this once vast palace,

part of The Great Hall.

Traditionally, the girls working here became known

as Winchester Geese.

Travellers approaching the city from the south would gather here

in Southwark to enjoy those pleasures with Londoners

largely suppressed across the Thames.

Stow records the ancient rules that govern the profession.

For example, not just any woman could join.

Nuns and wives were excluded.

And they were protected from exploitation by brothel owners.

They couldn't charge the Geese more than 14 pence a week for their room.

And there were rules that protected the clients, too.

Once a man had paid his money, the woman was his for the night.

But as London expanded, prostitution started to follow the trade

and cash was flowing into the East End.

The East India Company made its mark.

Between 1600 and 1650 the increase in trade with the Far East,

the Middle East, and India created an irresistible demand for workers,

and that revolutionised this area.

In 1617, workers at the East India Company demanded extra money

to cover the time it took to travel the large distance

from the city to the wharfs.

The solution was obvious.

Lodgings started to go up next to the new wharfs -

Wapping, Ratcliffe, Shadwell,

Limehouse and Poplar all grew rapidly.

By 1664, these five areas contained nearly 8,000 households

and incredibly, over half the population of East London.

One prostitute took particular advantage

of this ever-growing client base.

Here, just off the Ratcliffe Highway,

an early resident forged a living in this thriving new dockland suburb.

Damaris Page saw an opportunity to make some serious money.

She purchased a tavern, or in fact a brothel, called The Three Tuns.

Damaris provided more than just a service to lusty dockworkers.

She had a very clever business on the side and it made her a fortune.

When the government needed to recruit new sailors,

Damaris Page opened the doors of The Three Tuns,

allowing the press gangs to catch their prey with their trousers down.

Damaris became not only very wealthy, but of course, notorious.

Known as a wandering whore,

she was lampooned by the popular satirist John Garfield.

While the new shipyards gave birth to swathes of humble housing

in East London, to the west the Royal course influence was

to take development down a distinctly grander route.

In Stow's time,

the road that linked the city to the court at Westminster was the Strand.

He describes the road, as you leave the city walls.

"Some small distance without Temple Barr in the High Street

"from a pair of stocks there standing,

"stretcheth one large middle row or troupe of small tenements"

Stow charts the presence of just a few aristocratic buildings

on the south of the Strand.

But the land to the north of here was still very much open country.

In fact, the old Convent Garden off Westminster Abbey didn't even

merit a mention in Stow's survey.

It was until 30 years after Stow's survey that anything would change,

but change it did.

In 1631, the Earl of Bedford saw an opportunity.

He paid the King for a licence allowing him

to build a harmonious little town north of the Strand,

fit for the habitations of gentlemen.

And he chose a pioneering classical architect, Inigo Jones,

to bring his vision not life.

And Jones didn't disappoint.

Jones designed this magnificent arcaded piazza with, at its focus,

this mighty church, looking rather like a Roman temple.

This was London's first uniform classical square

and an inspiration on town planning for centuries to come.

Julia Merritt is a leading expert on 17th-century West London.

The creation of the piazza, of Covent Garden for the Earl -

a lot of speculation that he wanted to make money,

but why do you think such a pioneering, urban plan would work in London?

I suppose one of the things that Bedford had identified

was a real transformation that was taking place in the capital.

Increasing numbers of the gentry and aristocracy wanted to spend

part of the year in London to be able to socialise and increasingly,

rather than just the man of the family coming from

the countryside into the capital, whole families were coming up,

so he knew he was going to provide the accommodation in response

to the needs of those individuals.

And this is a good location, halfway between the city,

money-making financial power and Westminster,

which is Parliament, but also good for shopping.

Oh, it's very good for shopping and one of the other things that Bedford would have been aware of

is that just a stone's throw away in The Strand

was something called the New Exchange

and it's basically a shopping mall which is particularly attuned to

the needs of these new kind of aristocratic consumers.

Full of different kinds of luxury goods, but it's not just about being

full of luxury goods, it's about the fact that it's the place to go shopping, it's a social experience.

It's a shopping mall, isn't it?

I've never thought about it before, but it is, it's a pioneer.

And the Earl's speculation worked, it was a success.

It's immensely popular, it's a hit with the gentry and aristocracy.

It seems to be a social success and the sort of housing people want.

The success of the Covent Garden piazza inspired others to build.

The expansion of London to the west was beginning.

And as London's aristocratic population grew,

their refined palettes created a demand for exotic food,

and London's market gardeners didn't disappoint.

Helen Evans works for the New Covent Garden Market in south London.

Well, we're familiar with the idea of adventure chefs using exotic

and novel vegetables or fruits to liven their dishes,

but that was also the case in the 17th, 18th century?

Oh, very much. I mean, it was a sign of your wealth

and your power to have something new and exotic on your table,

or to have something that was out of season on your table

because it showed that you had a hothouse or some other way of producing that,

and that's still mirrored in London's restaurants today.

People are always looking to new varieties

and even if you take something like the carrot.

What we know of today is a lovely orange carrot,

but actually it started out like this.

Good heavens!

It was purple.

Carrots aren't naturally orange?

The original carrot would have been that colour,

and it was the Dutch who started to develop it.

I mean, this is actually a yellow carrot,

but if you put them together, you end up with an orange carrot.

-Of course you do.

-And of course, the House of Orange.

Good heavens, how fascinating.

So it becomes emblematic, a national statement.

So they gave us the long Dutch carrot

which is the father of all our orange carrots today, and now,

the wheel is turning back and people are displaying interest

in novelty again.

-What, not because it's natural but because it's novel?

-Yeah.

I'm floundering with the carrot not being orange,

it's changed my world view!

As Londoners developed a taste for the unusual,

the market kept expanding.

Certain areas of London became associated with specific vegetables.

For example, Battersea was famed for its asparagus,

known as sparrowgrass in the 17th and 18th century.

Fulham was famed for its parsnips.

And from Hackney came, what else, the turnip.

London's enormous appetite fuelled the market gardens.

The Company Of London Gardeners

that didn't even exist in Stow's time,

now controlled over 10,000 acres of market gardens surrounding London.

The market gardens grew up close to The Thames allowing

easy transportation, not just of fruit and vegetables,

but for the fertiliser, human manure.

Strype writes with relish about the new aptly-named wharf.

"Water Lane cometh out of Fleet Street and runneth down

"to The Thames where there is one of the city laystalls

"for the soil of the streets

"which is taken from thence by barges and dung boats

"and made use of by gardeners and farmers for manuring their grounds."

Dung Wharf gave the market gardeners easy access to

tons of London's precious filth.

It was an environmentalist's dream -

feeding Londoners on food nourished with their own waste.

By 1640 London's population was 20 times larger

than any other English city.

But London was about to face a new challenge.

A revolution that would have horrified the loyal monarchist Stow.

In 1642, the rift between Charles I and Parliament escalated.

Following a botched attempt to arrest five members of Parliament

Charles fled London.

The Civil War broke out.

Suspicious of the King's religious loyalty

and exasperated by his endless taxes,

it is no wonder that most Londoners were staunch Parliamentarians.

They wasted no time in blocking streets with chains and barriers,

building redoubts with guard houses at the main city entrances.

In 1643, the building of one of the largest defensive fortifications

in Europe was underway.

Once again, Dutch ingenuity came to the fore.

Soon, 20,000 people were surrounding London with ramparts

and ditch fortifications to Dutch military design.

I'm walking along Brick Lane.

During the Civil War, this was on the edge of London.

On my right was a city in Parliamentary power.

On my left the open countryside, prowling parliamentary forces,

and a vast fortification, the lost Wall of London

and down here in what is now Henley Street was a mighty rampart,

a little fort by itself, commanding the surrounding countryside.

During the Civil War, life for most Londoners went on

much as usual apart from, I suppose, more soldiers in the street.

Indeed, for many it represented something of a windfall with

tailors, ironworkers, cobblers making weapons and uniforms

and lots of money from the new armies.

And the Civil War would create an entirely new industry,

changing the way Londoners viewed their world for ever.

The Civil War gave an unexpected boost to an old technological development, the printing press.

In the chaos of the Civil War the tight regulations on printing

went by the wayside and a mighty battle of words ensued.

When Charles left London in 1642 the censorship laws,

which had existed since the time of Henry VIII, were not,

at least for a while, rigidly enforced.

Londoners were quick to exploit this new freedom.

With a male literacy rate of 80 % in London,

the printed word found a ready market.

Work by Parliamentarians like John Milton

attacking the Church and Crown was devoured by Londoners.

Pamphlets printed in London were sold at street corners,

in print shops, or carried to rural areas.

Indeed, the sale of pamphlets was becoming a lucrative business.

For the first time in England, printing was becoming

a means of mass communication.

Its effect was profound,

enabling the spread of radical ideas to disparate groups

and justifying the most extreme of actions.

Oliver Cromwell and his supporters won the upper hand.

They took control of Parliament and charged Charles I with high treason.

In January 1649, Charles was publicly beheaded in Whitehall

in front of a crowd of thousands.

Monarchy was abolished and a Republic declared.

Cromwell took over, casting a puritanical shadow over

the city that would change the way Londoners lived for the next decade.

Fines were imposed for strolling on a Sunday,

Christmas celebrations cancelled,

and to cap it all, he started closing taverns.

Stow's London was fast disappearing, but unabashed,

the literate sophisticated Londoner

was ready to take the closures in their stride.

Alcohol was soon replaced by a new drug of choice.

In 1651 a wealthy merchant in the Levant Company called Daniel Edwards

left Smyrna and came back to London,

but he brought with him an addiction.

He asked his Greek employee Pasqua Rosee

to come back to London with him

because Edwards needed Pasqua to make him

every morning a lovely strong cup of coffee.

Edwards' coffee servant was the envy of his wealthy merchant friends.

Soon Pasqua set up a shop selling coffee to the public.

They opened the first coffee house here in 1652.

Tucked away in St Michael's Alley, near the Royal Exchange,

it was perfectly located to attract not only Edwards' friends,

but also bankers, merchants, booksellers,

all who worked in the neighbourhood.

Coffee houses were not just places for trading business news.

They became the perfect venue for sharing something else... Gossip.

Fuelling this trade of gossip and news

was the first investigative journalist, Roger Morrice.

Until just a few years ago he was completely unknown,

his work having been mis-categorised.

This book is the complete collection of Morrice's work,

originally published as weekly news manuscripts.

Morrice was paid to write them for a select group of Londoners.

Dr Mark Goldie at Cambridge University

was the first man to recognise their true significance.

Why has the manuscript not been fully understood until now?

There are two reasons for that.

The first is I don't think people realise just how many

kinds of history this document can tell us about.

This was regarded as a specialist religious work

but in fact it's a fantastic source for the social,

the cultural history of London at the time.

But the second reason is that some of it is written in a shorthand code.

Right. I see, it is a shorthand isn't it?

Mark and his team spent two years firstly deciphering the code

and then transcribing over 1,000 of Morrice's manuscripts.

They offer unique insight into Londoners' business

including some of its dirty laundry.

We have got here an extract from January 1681.

It is the Ambassador of the King of Morocco who has come to visit

the King of England and he is deeply shocked by what he sees in London

and also apparently he claims he has been offered a whore into his bed.

As a rather puritanical, a Muslim, I suppose he finds it offensive.

Absolutely.

He exclaims with shock and shame, "My religion forbids whores,

"does not yours?"

-Yes.

-Really shocked by what he sees.

"So many ladies come open faced and with bare breasts."

Who would have read it? Do we know the individuals?

Who commissioned him? Who paid him?

Well, Morrice is working for a very small group

of leading opposition politicians.

He is their gofer, their factotum, their discreet man about town.

He is their eyes and ears in London

providing them with information and he would have been in deep trouble

if this had been found by the authorities.

Was Morrice ever rumbled? Does this appear in state papers?

-Do people know about his existence?

-No, that is the extraordinary thing.

If it wasn't for this manuscript in this library, you would hardly

think that Morrice ever existed.

Morrice was obsessed with his new career,

writing tirelessly about what he had seen and heard in London

during the week.

There is a lot of information from the coffee houses,

which are the newly fashionable places.

It is on the streets, it is on the boats on the River Thames.

One thing that did puzzle me, he's getting it from people

-he calls chairmen.

-Yes.

-I wondered, what on earth is that?

It dawned on me these are sedan chair carriers.

They're the taxi drivers of 17th-century London

where of course you get your news and gossip from.

-Indeed.

-This is a tremendous resource for all of that.

Morrice had started a trend that would flourish,

and soon in the expanding capital, newspapers were keeping more

Londoners politically informed than town criers ever could.

In 1660 after Cromwell's death Charles II was invited to

take the throne.

With a restored Monarch, a stronger Parliament, and a growing

population, London was poised to become Europe's greatest city,

but was about to be hit by two devastating blows.

At the close of 1664,

down a narrow street in the St Giles-in-the-fields area,

people started to die.

The great plague had arrived.

The plague was not new to London.

Stow had survived three epidemics. But the scale of this outbreak

would be catastrophic.

1665 saw the disease start its inevitable procession

through the crowded streets,

the deadly bacteria killing victims within just days of exposure.

By June, it had reached apocalyptic proportions.

Plague orders were issued and red crosses were daubed on front doors

making prisoners of Londoners in their own homes.

London, for perhaps the first time in its history, fell silent.

All that could be heard was a rumble of carts carrying away the dead.

The shops and the markets were closed. Even the Thames was empty.

Those who were not dead had fled or they had locked themselves

in their homes in an attempt to keep out of harm's way.

At street corners, massive bonfires blazed

in an attempt to purify the air.

The city was full of smoke and the sighs of the dying.

London was on its knees.

At its height in September, 8,000 Londoners died in just one week.

The sheer numbers of bodies

changed the very landscape of Stow's London.

St Olave's is one of the few remaining London churches

that John Stow would recognise today.

But there is one feature that would puzzle him.

He would wonder why we now have to go down these steps

to enter the church.

In his time, this was the level of the churchyard.

In just five months,

this graveyard was swollen with the bodies of 326 plague victims.

This is what Peyps, who lived and worked nearby,

and who knew the church well, wrote at the time.

"It frighted me indeed to go through the church to see

"so many graves lie so high upon the churchyard

"where many people have been buried of the plague."

The bodies are still here.

This mound is a monument to the dead of the Great Plague.

Just when it seemed things couldn't get any worse,

disaster ravaged London again.

This time, not pestilence but fire.

Fires were not unusual in London.

Most houses and trades had open hearths, from brewers

and soap boilers to blacksmiths.

So when a fire started on Sunday morning in September, 1666,

in the King's baking house in Pudding Lane,

no-one took much notice.

The Lord Mayor, Thomas Bloodworth, remarks that when he first

saw the fire he thought it small enough for a woman to piss it out.

But as Strype later commented:

"A easterly wind, which is the driest of all others, had blown

"for several days together before and at that time, very strongly."

The unusually hot summer had turned London into a tinderbox.

So a fire that could have been put out with a chamber pot

spread at an alarmingly rapid rate.

For the second time in as many years, the diarist

Samuel Pepys found himself reporting on a London tragedy.

As he rushed along this street, Watling Street,

he saw the chaos for himself.

This is what he wrote.

"Every creature coming laden with goods to save,

"and here and there, sick people carried away in beds."

People were saving themselves and their possessions,

not fighting the fire.

Startled Londoners were in disarray.

Not knowing what to do,

many headed for the fields of Islington, Finsbury and Highgate.

What of the boats on the Thames?

The wharves, which had done so much to boost London's economy,

now spread the fire. Warehouses, here in front of me,

were packed with combustible materials -

sugar, tar, rope, oil.

So the flames sped along the river front.

DISTANT CROWD SCREAMS

All across the city,

London's newly-developed trading centres were being laid waste.

As the fire surged through the city,

the financial heart of England's growing empire fell victim.

The Royal Exchange was engulfed in flames.

Justin Champion is a professor of history

at Royal Holloway University of London.

We are standing at Aldgate, just east of the city of London,

and the fire, of course, did not quite burn that part of the city.

-It didn't reach this far, did it?

-No, it didn't.

But this area would have felt the impact, consequences of perhaps

at some point 200,000 people fleeing the fire.

So it's quite busy out there that the moment.

In early September, 1666, it would have been packed.

It must have been absolutely traumatic.

Tell me how the fire affected trade in the city?

It is absolutely catastrophic

because it not only disrupts the sort of commerce and exchange,

it destroys large amounts of very, very valuable goods.

There are very substantial warehouses for cloth,

and for all sorts of goods,

and those are associated with big, trading, mercantile activity.

So everything in one sense is destroyed

because it's all there waiting to be traded.

You mentioned the plague and the fire.

How did the plague effect the economy of the city?

We can think of the plague as really disrupting and stopping

that mercantile activity and only once London is just about

to start to recover, the fire hits it again.

Suddenly, in the space of four days, it is wiped out.

This is a city of commerce, suddenly destroyed.

Pepys walked through the smoking streets, littered with debris,

flanked with tottering and gutted buildings.

Eventually he arrived here at St Paul's Cathedral.

Five days earlier, this would've been one of the mightiest

and most venerable churches in Christendom.

No, it was nothing but a vast ruin.

This is what he wrote at the time:

"A miserable site, the roofs and choir fallen."

The fire finally came to an end

but with over 13,000 houses destroyed,

much of the London Stow knew had gone.

London should have been finished.

Its population ravished by the plague

and its buildings laid waste by the fire.

As the city still smouldered, something remarkable happened.

On the very day the fire finally died out,

Charles II was told that people in the city were starting

to rebuild houses on their old foundations.

When rebuilding began in earnest, it started with the houses.

Despite the King's grand plans,

most people simply rebuilt their houses where they had stood before.

Some streets were levelled and widened and all new buildings

had to be faced with brick or stone, but to a remarkable degree,

the new city and its general form looked much like the old.

And the rebuilding of the city centre did not stop

the spread of London's new suburbs.

"Great numbers of edifices were erected in the suburbs,

"where before were fields and void places,

"especially in the east parts of the city."

This is Princelet Street in Spitalfields.

Of the new streets from Strype's time,

pushing steadily north-east from the city.

But it wasn't just the houses that interested Strype

but the people who were building them.

The area became home to French Protestants, Huguenots.

And the skills they brought with them were a wonderful example

of how London could benefit from its human imports.

Susie Symes shares the Museum of immigration at 19 Princelet Street.

You should go straight up, to the Georgian bit of the house.

The Huguenots were mostly silk weavers

and the skills they developed helped inspire the growth of

a whole new area of London in the East.

In 1687, there were an estimated 13,000 French Protestant

refugees settled in London.

The greater part of them were probably located

here in Spitalfields.

It's intriguing to consider what the Huguenots brought

to London in the late 17th century.

They clearly created very valuable trade, the silks, the silk industry.

They brought all of that, didn't they?

They brought a lot of skills in goldsmithing,

silversmithing and making fine instruments.

Because whilst Britain is really the crucible of the first

industrial revolution, in France, there more craft skills.

Bringing those, and being very entrepreneurial.

-And this house, of course, one of the families were here.

-Yes.

Peter Abraham Ogier and his wife lived in this house

with their children who'd have played out in the garden

behind the house and being a newly arrived refugee, he builds his skill,

he builds his workforce, he becomes master of the Weavers' Company.

Obviously, very well off and comfortably off.

The story of the Ogiers is really a success story.

They flee persecution, learn the trade...

And rise to the height of that trade. To master of the company.

Yes, yes.

The assimilation of talented foreigners started a trend

that would benefit London for centuries to come.

This room would have been the parlour.

The window here, but of course this is no longer a window

but a door into another world. A 19th-century world. But a continuation of the story.

This is the Jewish immigration, isn't it? Of the mid-19th century.

And equally dominant in Spitalfields in its day.

And what was a garden on the back of the house becomes a synagogue.

So we see how the physical changes of one house captures

what's happening in the outside streets and in the outside society.

The French immigrants transformed this newly developed area

of London into the centre of England's increasingly wealthy

silk industry.

Strype, in his survey, highlighted the benefits their skills

brought the nation as a whole.

This is what he wrote:

"A great advantage has accrued to the whole nation by the rich

"manufacturers of weaving silks and stuffs and camlets,

"which arts they brought along with them."

As the East end developed its unique character,

the West was evolving a personality of its own.

Now, land just to the north of parliament was about to

transform into a household name.

London's wonderful West End was about to be born.

Now recognised around the world, it seems hard to believe that

when Stow wrote his survey, the West End as an area

didn't even exist.

London's West End was open countryside,

home to deer and a hunting ground for the Tudors.

In Stow's time the Haymarket didn't even have a name.

It was described simply as "the way to Charing Cross."

It remained unnamed for the next 50 years.

But in 1662 Charles II granted his great companion, Henry Jermyn,

the licence to build in St James's field.

Jermyn's grand plans were the talk of the town.

In resonance with Covent Garden,

he was creating the next wave of urban development.

The square was the centrepiece of a stunning development,

a collaboration between Jermyn and Charles II, who was the owner of the land

and perhaps Christopher Wren who eventually designed the church.

The square was the first of the West End's great residential squares,

vast in scale, majestic in conception.

An amazing statement which I suppose in a way was conceived to be

a forecourt to the King's palace, St James's Palace, just over there.

Also, it formed a landmark in the development of London

because Jermyn became known as the founder of the West End.

His project became the catalyst for the development for some

of London's most iconic landmarks.

Haymarket started to develop into the place we recognise today

and this vast area that Stow hardly bothered with is now described by Strype...

The market for hay and straw here kept every Tuesday,

Thursday and Saturday makes it to be of good account.

This was the beginning of the playground of the wealthy.

Luxurious houses and theatres gave Jermyn's West End

a character that it carries to this day.

The West End was inspirational.

The spirit of enterprise rife.

More businessmen began to speculate.

They built houses even without guaranteed buyers -

a risky undertaking but a lucrative one if the gamble paid off.

Bordering on the newly created suburb of Bloomsbury

the fields near Gray's Inn were ripe for development.

Nicholas Barbon epitomised this new breed of entrepreneurial

Londoners intent on making money and making it quickly.

But as is the case today,

new developments are not always popular as Barbon found out

when he started to develop houses near Gray's Inn on Red Lion Fields.

Hearing all his plans a large body of furious lawyers came here

determined to save the green and pleasant field around their inn from redevelopment.

Amazingly, the lawyers battled the builders.

They threw bricks at them to stop them from carrying on with

construction but ultimately it all came to nothing.

The ruthless Barbon triumphed, constructtion continued

and Red Lion Square was completed during the 1680s.

These new houses, planned uniformly and with components

assembled on site pioneered aspects of modern mass housing.

It even came complete with another innovation, fire insurance.

Inevitably, profiteering has its price.

Barbon's buildings had grand interiors...

but unfortunately nothing survives, externally.

How wonderful to be in a Barbon room.

These houses were built quickly and economically

and certainly corners were cut, structurally, which of course

explains why none of the elevations survive in the square.

It all had to rebuilt quite quickly.

He mass produced details and had the components assembled on site,

which means many of his houses have very similar interiors.

Having said that, look how wonderful the mass-produced details are!

Of course the details had to be good or Barbon would not have been able

to let the houses to a discerning public.

So although they're mass produced,

there's nothing cheap and nasty about them.

These terraces were not built to last

but were just what the new gentry wanted.

Ideally suiting the capital's upwardly mobile new rich,

they were snapped up.

Barbon's risks had more than paid off.

But Barbon wasn't the only speculator making money out of property.

Out East, Damaris Page, the great bawd of the seamen,

was starting to think big.

With the money she'd made from her brothels

and recruitment service,

Damaris had moved up in the world.

She invested much of her fortune in the construction of houses,

many in the salubrious area round the Tower.

By the time Damaris died in 1699,

she'd acquired both fame and fortune.

The land east of the city that people like Damaris had developed

was a far cry from the Elm tree-lined streets that Stow

recorded over a century earlier.

And the economic engine that had

driven the transformation continued at pace.

By the early 18th century, London was once again a centre of commerce,

it had recovered after the Great Fire.

Tell me how this recovery took place.

Maritime trade is the dynamo the drives London, essentially,

and, of course, you've got hundreds, thousands of people

involved in building ships and supporting dockyards and the like.

But you've also got then thousands of other people depending on

ancillary trades - finished products made from these things

brought in from Asia and The Levant and from other places.

We're in the Master Shipwright's House in Deptford

and, of course, ships were being built over there, next door,

and over there across the Thames.

The river itself, a big highway bringing the treasures of the world, goods going out.

It would've been AMAZING, such activity, such wealth of water.

Absolutely. And a constant innovation and development.

It wasn't static, it was still expanding at a HUGE rate

at the end of the 17th century and it keeps going right up to the end

of the 18th century when you've got the biggest dockyards in the world.

How did this transform London physically and socially?

Initially, the East India Company as we know was founded in the city of London, very much within

that sort of square mile as it were, but of course, by the end of the 17th century

because it's grown so big, because it's got warehouses

and all sorts of other establishments being developed,

the East India Company linking places on the river like Deptford and Blackwell

and in between this sort of ribbon-like development

of small villages, hamlets coming together, filling in the blanks,

as it were, filling in the gaps of London in the 17th century.

By 1700, more than three quarters of England's commerce with the world passed through London.

Strype gloried in this productivity.

"At this city merchant strangers of all nations had keys and wharfs.

"The Arabians sent gold.

"The Sabians, spice and frankincense.

"The Scythians, armour.

"Babylon, oil.

"India, purple garments.

"Egypt, precious stones.

"Norway and Russia, ambergris and sables.

"And the Frenchmen...wine."

After a century of turmoil,

Londoners could be forgiven for finally looking to the future

with a sense of optimism.

Not all was rosy for London's world class moneymakers.

They faced one final hurdle to long-term security and growth.

And that hurdle came in the form of an old adversary, the King.

In 1672 Charles II was desperate for money.

It was necessary to finance a war with the Dutch,

but since he was a constitutional Monarch,

he depended on Parliament.

He could not raise taxes at a stroke.

Ever resourceful, Charles came up with a solution.

Rather than repaying his debts,

he declared a payment holiday lasting for a full year.

Well, this was convenient for him, not for others.

Many wealthy Londoners who'd lent him money

hoping for a safe investment found themselves ruined.

Investment was key to London's growth

and if it was to continue with confidence, its economy

had to be protected from the whims of the King.

In 1694, Parliament hit upon a solution -

it founded the Bank Of England.

Now when wealthy citizens wanted to lend money to the King,

they had their lands guaranteed by Parliament.

This new system not only offered comfort to investors

but also helped secure London at the heart of world finance.

"But now we are to show the modern and present state of this city

"which has grown vastly populous and improved.

"For whereas anciently it was fields except houses thinly,

"now all is built contiguously in length and breadth containing

"a great compass and that with very noble and magnificent structures."

The surveys of Stow and Strype are detailed written accounts

of the capital, allowing us to understand just how London

evolved during this defining era in British history.

The 17th century was, for Londoners, one of dazzling change and growth.

Through revolution, pestilence and fire, they struggled

to survive. But indeed, they thrived,

and London became the largest city in Europe

and set the pace for the beginning of modern Britain.

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