Great Fire of London The Hairy Bikers' Pubs That Built Britain

Pubs have been at the heart of Britain for hundreds of years.

Cheers, mukka.

-In city taverns...

-And village inns...

Landlords have pulled pints for locals, travellers

and, well, the odd king or two.

Myself included.

Try and have a drink now.

THEY LAUGH

But with 30 pubs closing every week, our historic taverns need defending.

Step, step...

We're heading out to discover amazing stories linked to the

nation's watering holes.

-Not far to go.

-How far?

-Oh, a couple of miles.

-What?!

'From the Wars of the Roses...'

To shipbuilding on the Clyde...

-We've ditched our bikes so that we can sample an ale or two.

-Get in!

This is very good.

THEY LAUGH

So join us for...

London's Square Mile,

for centuries, it's been the city's commercial heart.

And for those grafting away in the Cheesegrater,

the Gherkin, or any other skyscraper with a silly name,

a drink after work in one of the city's pubs

is a time-honoured tradition.

-Gherkin.

-Cheesegrater.

Put the two together,

and I reckon I could make a pretty respectable pub lunch.

I'm sure you could, but we're not here for the pub food, dude,

we're here to find out about the stories behind the pubs.

Here, did you hear the one about the baker, left his oven on

-and burnt down half of London?

-SIMON GASPS

September 1666, London's city limits covered an area of just over

half a square mile.

Over half a million people lived in this cramped space,

and all it took was one careless cook to

ignite a catastrophic inferno.

The Great Fire of London raged for four days,

devastating many thousands of buildings and lives along with it.

But a new city rose out of the ashes, and its pubs and taverns

played a crucial role in London's recovery.

We begin this tale on the banks of Old Father Thames.

At a pub called The Anchor, which we do believe may give us

-a slight peep into the past.

-A Samuel Pepys into the past.

I saw what you did there, like. That was good.

There's been a pub called The Anchor on this

corner of London's South Bank since the 17th century.

It's where the great diarist Samuel Pepys took refuge as the fire

ravaged the city.

From inside, he watched the terrifying events as they unfolded.

His diary entry, dated the first day of the fire, reads,

"We went to a little ale house on the Bankside and stayed there

"until it was almost dark and saw the fire grow,

"a most horrid, malicious, bloody flame."

City of London Guide Jenni Bowley has come to tell us more.

-Hi, Jenni.

-Hi.

-Hi, I'm Si, nice to meet you.

-Hello, lovely to meet you.

-Hello, and I'm Dave. Nice to meet you.

-Oh, really nice to meet you.

So Pepys actually stood here, in this very spot, looking at what the

carnage that was happening across the other side of the Thames.

He did, he was watching the fire

sweeping its way across London.

At that time, there was only one

bridge across the Thames,

that was London Bridge.

So we wouldn't have had this railway bridge here,

Cannon Street, in the way.

So you'd have seen the fire making its way across the city,

right past St Paul's over there and further on up to Fleet Street.

I think most people got the impression that the fire

started in a baker's on Pudding Lane. Is it true?

It is true.

Yes, it started in the bakery of a chap called Thomas Farriner.

He baked biscuits for the Navy,

and so he's described as being the king's baker.

I've burnt the odd biscuit myself,

but not with such devastating consequences.

Pepys lived to the east of the city

and had assumed his own home was safe from the blaze.

But as the fire spread in that direction,

he grew increasingly concerned for his most treasured belongings.

What did Pepys do?

When he thought his own house was in danger, he got his valuable

possessions, which was his wine and a big lump of Parmesan cheese...

-He sounds like our type of man, doesn't he?

-He does, yes!

THEY LAUGH

-Well, he buried them in the garden.

-Did he?!

-"So if my house is

"consumed by fire, at least I'll still have my cheese and my wine."

It's an amazing tale. How many people died, do you know?

-Well, the official records are just single figures.

-Right.

-Really?

Well, it took three days for the fire to sweep across,

so the first people got out.

The next people were hanging around thinking,

"Is my house going to go or not?"

It destroyed about two thirds of the City of London.

It took 50 years to rebuild it after the Great Fire.

You can just imagine, can't you?

Pepys standing here, looking across at it and just going,

-"Oh, it'll never last."

-No. "Where's my cheese?"

-Exactly.

THEY LAUGH

It just brings things to life, doesn't it?

And I mean, the reality of people's characters and personalities.

-And that's the importance of a diarist, isn't it?

-Absolutely.

Because it's snapshots of people's lives.

Well done, Pepys, because we wouldn't have a clue what went on.

Do you know? It's first-hand documentation.

-And isn't it amazing that this is where he stood?

-Yeah, having a pint.

-What a start to our pub crawl.

-Get in, I'll drink to that, mate.

-ALL:

-Samuel Pepys!

-Cheers, Jenny.

From his view over the Thames, Pepys also saw the city's folk

fleeing the fire, loading their worldly belongings onto boats,

with some of it being lost in the chaos.

Today, a merry band of archaeologists

known as the Mudlarkers

spend their spare time scouring the banks of the Thames.

Amongst their treasure haul are some of the very belongings

that got swallowed up by the river during the Great Fire.

They've come to The Anchor to give us a glimpse into the past.

-So, Mudlarkers.

-How are you doing?

-Good to see you.

-Hello, lads, all right? Good to see you.

-Good to see you.

-Nice to see you, boys.

-Thanks very much for coming over.

-Very nice to see you.

-You're the Mudlarkers.

But I can see there's more to it than just larking about in the mud.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're actually sifting through history.

And if you look at the table today, amongst all of us,

we've had some really serious finds.

These parts of our history are in really good condition.

-Why haven't they rotted?

-Well, it's the actual mud of the Thames.

It's anaerobic, which means there's no air in there, so

whatever goes in there comes out looking exactly the same or,

if it's brass or it's copper, it works like an electrolyte

-down there and cleans it. It comes up looking like gold.

-Really?

-Wow.

So hence why all this is in such good condition.

If you found this in a field from this age, it would

just be rotted through, you wouldn't find anything at all.

And does much of this stuff relate back to the Great Fire of London?

Yeah, a lot of it. For instance, this.

So what this is, is a food scoop.

There's an actual layer on the Thames that you can dig down to,

if you're a Mudlarker, that is, and you're registered.

And what happens is that there's a layer from the Great Fire of London.

This actually comes out of there.

And as you can see, it's made of lead, but it's burnt.

It's some kind of food scoop, but you can see where it's melted.

-That is incredible, isn't it?

-That's amazing.

It's going back to 1666.

I know.

Artefacts like these have helped scientists calculate that the

blaze reached temperatures of 1,700 degrees Celsius.

After the Great Fire, was all the detritus and rubbish,

was that just swept into the Thames?

It was an easy way to get rid of it.

You just shoved it in there and the tide hopefully took it away.

It was just the nearest river you could put it into.

-There was no rubbish collection day.

-No, exactly.

You just sling it in the river.

Some of the salvaged goods even tell us

what happened down the 17th-century boozer.

Many taverns produced their own tokens which could be used

instead of cash.

It was a bit of a canny manoeuvre.

It was at a time when the mint couldn't produce enough coinage,

so let's say the lowest coin was a penny

and you're a landlord and you're selling a beer for half a penny.

You haven't got any halfpenny coins as change,

so you'd have to make your own. So this is what these are.

Encouraged you to come back and spend it at the same place as well.

-Exactly.

-Of course.

And we get so much information from these -

it gives you the owner's name, his wife's initials,

the address where the business was

and sometimes they're dated as well.

One of these pub tokens shines some light on the infamous

Pudding Lane, where the Great Fire began.

Well, that's the one from Pudding Lane,

interestingly spelt P-U-D-I-N.

I think it's a misconception that everybody calls it Pudding Lane

because of the bakers.

It wasn't. P-U-D-I-N is the medieval term for offal.

Because at the top of Pudding Lane was slaughter houses,

all that offal would have been brought down through this street,

hence it got the name, essentially, Offal Street

but the name was termed Pudin Lane, P-U-D-I-N.

And the spelling on this token is P-U-D-I-N.

So this dates back to 1666.

That's 1657, that one.

-So that was slightly earlier than the Great Fire.

-That is amazing.

-It's in such good condition as well.

-Again, again the mud.

-Cheers.

I'll drink to that. Cheers, boys. Absolutely fascinating.

-You're welcome.

-Fascinating, lads.

-Good seeing you.

Living history, perfect.

Who'd have thought it, Kingie?

All that buried treasure giving us a peek into the pubs of the past.

Here's a bit of trivia for you, Si.

If you walked into a boozer in 1666 and asked for a wig,

what would you get?

Well, you'd get one of those, you know, furry things that you

stick on your head that Charles the...used to wear.

Oh, no, no, no, no. It is, in fact, a tasty bar snack.

It's like a yeasty roll that's served with cheese and ale.

It's a bit like the original ploughman's, if you like.

I do like. And in fact, the very thought of it, Mr Myers,

makes me feel slightly peckish.

That's not the only bit of pub trivia up our sleeves.

Pub signs are full of fascinating facts too.

In London, you're spoilt for choice. But here's three of our faves.

The Hoop & Grapes miraculously survived the Great Fire

and is the only timber-framed 17th-century pub in the city.

Its name comes from old slang.

Hoops, or hops, was the beer. And grapes, a new batch of wine.

Knock yourself out at the Punch Tavern on Fleet Street.

It gets its name from its old clientele.

That's the staff from the 19th century satirical magazine,

not the local boxing club.

And the Crutched Friar pays homage to some Italian monks who

settled in London in 1249.

Well, no. The crutch wasn't a means to get them home from the pub.

Crutched is actually the Latin term for cross.

Back on our Great Fire of London pub tour, as the blaze rapidly spread,

the city's infrastructure collapsed.

It was every man, woman and child for themselves.

You know, mate, it's astonishing to think, isn't it, that

London Bridge was the only bridge across the Thames at the time.

It must have been pandemonium on there.

I wouldn't have fancied my chances,

not with the whole of London behind me.

No, me neither, actually. Tell you what I do fancy, though,

I do fancy a trip on the river. So I'm going to see a man about a boat.

-No problem. And I've got a date with disaster.

-Oh!

The Great Fire destroyed almost all the buildings

within the old city limits.

But some areas, like Smithfield to the north, narrowly escaped

major damage and a few of the old buildings here still survive.

Professor Elizabeth McKellar

is an architectural historian,

and she's going to reveal why the fire spread so quickly.

So London was once full of houses like these -

they're from the early to mid-17th century. And by this stage, they

were using brick, as you can see,

but there's also quite a lot of wood.

You can see the wood panelling up the top storey there.

-It's quite tall as well.

-Very tall.

-Taller than I imagined.

Because the streets were so narrow, they had to build tall

and they had to go up. And they had these jettied

-windows coming out to make use of the narrow streets.

-Got you, yeah.

And in older buildings, they would jetty them right out

across the street, so you could almost, you know, shake hands

-with your neighbour on the top floor.

-That must have formed like

a natural flue for the wind to spread the fire.

Absolutely, absolutely.

The construction of the buildings and the fact they were

so tightly squeezed together meant that once the fire took hold,

there was no stopping it.

Did they have a fire brigade in those days,

or how did they fight the fire?

Well, they did have a sort of fire brigade, an amateur one,

and they had the first early fire engines around this time.

Because fires were quite frequent, when it started,

they called the mayor, he came and had a look

and said he didn't think it was very serious,

they didn't need to pull down any houses,

and they all went back to bed.

Unfortunately, then the main fire engine got destroyed in the fire,

so they didn't have much water.

-It had been an incredibly hot summer...

-Yes.

-..so everything was tinder dry...

-Yes.

..and there was a very, very strong wind blowing,

which fanned the flames eastwards.

The fire was eventually brought under control

when they started pulling down large areas of housing

to create firebreaks. But by then,

the damage was catastrophic.

Tens of thousands of people fleeing the devastating fire headed

straight for the river.

In the 17th century, the Thames was teeming with boats

crewed either by watermen who ferried passengers

or lightermen who transported goods.

I've come to meet Chris Livett, a fifth generation waterman.

-You must be Chris.

-Hi. Yes.

-Hi, gent, how are you?

-How are you doing? Good to meet you.

-Nice to meet you.

He's taking me on a trip to find out more.

Chris, thank you so much for the invitation to take this

wonderful trip up the river, thank you.

Your family have been working on the river for about 300 years.

-Absolutely.

-But they wouldn't have been working it

with boats like this, would they? What would it have been in the day?

Well, this is the height of luxury, isn't it?

The hard modern, two engines, power steering.

Early days, my first generation - I'm a fifth generation waterman -

they'd have been in rowboats. They'd have been in wherries and in skiffs.

When the Great Fire of London happened,

we've heard Pepys is having a pint in a pub

and he watches this "malicious flame" engulfing the city.

What would people have done?

Would they have come onto the river for sanctuary or...?

It was the natural way to evacuate, bearing in mind there was a lot of

exposed foreshore at certain states of the tide.

So they would have used that to clamber down, but they would

have been clambering down in the mud, in the sand, in the water.

People were spewing out onto the river.

There would have been danger, hazards, losing furniture,

losing their goods, overboard from boats.

Boats would have been laden deep.

It would have been a mass evacuation.

At that time, what would this be like?

What would the river be like then?

Amazing, absolute contrast of what we see today.

It would have been a lot wider.

We're coming up to London Bridge here. And London Bridge of the old

had many, many, many arches. It used to block the river.

It acted as a weir, so the upper side of the bridge was very quiet,

very still. There wasn't a huge amount of tide running.

The lower side was treacherous. It would have been heavily congested.

It would have been more like the M25 is today on a bad day.

It was the centrepiece of London.

Without the river, London wouldn't exist.

It was the major highway through London.

So you wouldn't walk ashore, you wouldn't walk up a road.

There were no highways. This river was the main artery

leading out and had so much activity.

I think people forget that the scale of the Thames is enormous, isn't it?

It's amazing. You know, we have two tides every 24 hours.

The tide comes up seven metres, 7.2 metres twice a day.

Think of that volume of water. We're in a narrow channel.

It's running at four or five knots as we sit here today.

If you fell overboard now and you tried to swim over to Southwark,

you'd end up in London Bridge.

Well, I haven't brought my trunks,

so I certainly won't be giving that a go.

And I'm more than happy to be on dry land on my tour of Smithfield.

When the embers of the Great Fire finally died down,

13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, and most famously,

St Paul's Cathedral had been destroyed.

But the fire obviously did stop, so what was it like then?

Well, after the fire, they started building, really, very quickly.

And they introduced new legislation.

-The main thing was that houses had to be brick.

-Right.

No more wooden houses.

We've got an example of post-fire brick houses here,

not just the exterior, also the interior party walls,

because one problem, the fire, had been in the old timber houses.

They were lath and plaster walls,

you know, and that spread the fire very rapidly.

And it still feels quite closed in here, though.

Well, although the architecture was new, the layout was the same...

-Right.

-..as the pre-fire city, so it was essentially built on the same

medieval street pattern with these new brick houses.

Christopher Wren, a rising star,

was called in by King Charles II to oversee the rebuilding of London.

St Paul's was his biggest challenge.

Wren was just at the start of his career.

He'd only designed a few buildings.

He was actually better known at this stage as an astronomer

and mathematician. But he was interested in architecture, he had

the ear of the king and he became head of the rebuilding commission.

The rebuilding of London took almost half a century

with work on St Paul's lasting an incredible 45 years alone.

But on the fringes of the fire, some buildings did survive

with only a few scorch marks.

The Seven Stars Tavern was one of them,

much to the relief of its regulars.

People would be camping out in the fields, so after the fire,

-you know, nearly everybody was homeless.

-Right.

So they made temporary encampments in the fields.

-And they went on for, you know, a good year.

-Right.

And so this area would have been

full of homeless people, essentially.

-And of course they must have got thirsty.

-Indeed.

-It's a good job that The Seven Stars was still here.

-Absolutely.

-We can thank our lucky stars. Shall we?

-Yes, let's.

Now, I know, Kingie, that you'd approve of this one.

I certainly do, mukka.

But no matter how historic the pub is,

it won't survive without its passionate punters.

So let's meet a local who loves his local.

The George Inn is one of the few pubs in London that looks

pretty much as it would have done in the 17th century.

It survived the Great Fire by being outside the old city limits

and south of the river in what's now known as Southwark.

Author Pete Brown loves it so much,

he spent a year in here writing a book about the place.

The George Inn is one of my favourite pubs in London

because it's so well preserved.

It goes back, in some shape or form, back to Chaucer's time.

And you get this sense of what pubs are like for us now

and this idea that they've been like that for centuries

and for countless thousands of people back through the ages.

Steeped in history,

the pub has been immortalised by a great literary figure.

Charles Dickens writes about The George in Little Dorrit.

He first wrote about the pubs in Southwark, where we are now,

when it was all coaching inns and people getting in stagecoaches.

By the end of Dickens' life, London Bridge station was open, these big

trains were coming in and the coaching inns were out of business.

And a few years after that,

people came here as a sort of last reminder of this

kind of beautiful golden Dickensian age. And people came to this pub

because they almost felt that, well, Dickens did drink here

and they felt that they could touch him.

They almost felt they could stay in touch with him.

I think my favourite space in the whole pub is the gallery

just above us. It's just really atmospheric.

You see people come into the yard outside and gasp

when they look up at this beautiful facade of the pub.

And when you're actually up there on the gallery, you feel special

to be standing there.

For Pete, it's not just the building itself that's special,

it's the character, soul and history that goes along with it.

As someone who spends a lot of my life in pubs,

what that really revealed to me was that the way we use pubs now

and how we behave in pubs has been unchanged in this place.

It's where you can see that continuity of the banter that

happens in pubs, the conversations, the silliness that

happens in pubs. And it's always happened.

And it's always been welcoming to everybody. And that makes me

just feel connected to, you know, a timeline

in a way that I didn't expect.

St Paul's Cathedral was the highest profile casualty of the Great Fire.

And its redesign was to become

Christopher Wren's most iconic achievement.

But during the rebuilding process,

there was a team of thirsty workmen to keep happy.

Did you know, Kingie, that pubs were some of the first

buildings to be rebuilt after the fire?

Well, they were just like the greasy spoons that we have today,

weren't they? They had to feed and water the workers.

And this pub here, Ye Olde Watling, it was where some of the men

who built St Paul's Cathedral used to come.

Do you know what, Dave?

I think that deserves a little bit more investigation, don't you?

Excellent.

Ye Olde Watling is named after the Roman road on which it stands.

In 1668, two years after the fire,

the pub was supposedly rebuilt using ships' timbers.

The pub served the workers rebuilding St Paul's and

it's said that Christopher Wren even used the upstairs as a drawing-room.

-Hello, Jacqueline.

-Hello, guys. How are you doing?

Two glasses of your finest libation, please.

Jackie the barmaid's been pulling pints here for ten years.

It's really fascinating because we're looking at the

Great Fire of London and how it affected, and what role

pubs played within that, and it's fascinating.

And then, the rebuilding of, obviously, St Paul's

and your pub features quite heavily in that.

When Sir Christopher Wren was doing St Paul's,

-he had about 17 other projects going on at the same time.

-Right.

So he was quite a busy man.

We were at Samuel Pepys' pub over the river having a jug,

-Christopher Wren was in here, they're not daft.

-Drawing.

-Drawing.

-Drawing.

-Yeah. Cheers.

-Cheers.

-Cheers, thanks.

-To good health.

-Cheers, mate.

Good health.

I'm sure Wren was far too professional

to be drinking on the job,

but it was actually common practice for surveyors to

take a room at the local tavern.

-Hi, Angela, Dave.

-Hey.

Historian of drinking Dr Angela McShane

knows a thing or two about 17th-century pubs.

Now, listen, this looks like a traditional,

-old-fashioned sort of pub.

-It certainly does.

So, is this like kind of what it would have looked like

if I'd come in from a hard day's graft from St Paul's?

-Would it kind of have looked similar to this?

-Not really.

There'd be some pretty big changes.

For a start, none of this is here. So there's no pub bar.

The bar doesn't get invented until the 19th century.

So there's no bar, so how did you get a drink?

Right, so what you're going to do is you're going to come in...

So if you imagine you come in through this door and you imagine me

as the landlady... So I'm here watching you,

clocking you coming in. I'm making sure you pay before you go out.

And then what you're going to do is

you're going to shout for your drink.

So you're going to call the drawer

and say what it is you want, or you might ask him what they've got.

And then he's going to have to go down all the really steep

stairs at the back there to pull things off the barrels

and fetch them up for you.

I mean, people drank probably about seven pints a day,

-but they started with breakfast.

-Really?

But of course, you didn't drink it all at once.

You didn't come in and drink seven pints and then go up your scaffold.

Cor, blimey, seven pints of neckwrestler

and you're up the scaffolding on St Paul's!

Where's Health and Safety in that?

People drank beer because the water wasn't safe to drink, was it?

Well, beer is good for you. Beer has got nutrition in it.

In fact, there's legislation to

make sure that everybody can afford a pint of beer.

That's why it only costs a penny for a pint of small beer,

or a quart, actually, of small beer.

Pubs like Ye Olde Watling were instrumental in

the rebuilding of London.

They were the hub for all sorts of business transactions.

I mean, originally, there was a workplace upstairs.

You're going to be paying your workers, meeting with them,

doing all sorts of business with all the kind of people who've got

to bring in the different materials. So that will

definitely have happened here, and that will have been very important.

So, what...? It's the chicken and the egg, Dave.

What came first, the pub to support the workforce for St Paul's

or the workforce from St Paul's to support the pub?

Almost certainly the pub, actually,

because... And in fact, you see that happening in other

parts of London as well, where a builder will put a pub up,

and then from there, will be the headquarters where

-they'll actually build the rest of the street.

-Wow!

So that's not unknown elsewhere in London.

So from where we're standing here, what was being built all around us?

Well, you mentioned St Paul's earlier,

but actually Christopher Wren was involved with two other

major church building projects just on either end of these streets,

so he was very busy.

There's a huge number of builders lurking around this area,

-all needing a beer.

-And the pub was at the heart of that.

-Yes.

One of the nicest things about pubs is, be it that you're a writer,

a builder or a bishop, there is a hostelry for you, isn't there?

-There is. Angela it's been a great pleasure.

-Good to meet you.

-Thank you very much.

-Cheers.

-Thanks for the info.

-Fascinating, isn't it?

-Yeah, yeah.

Almost 350 years on, Ye Olde Watling is still serving

London's workers, although it's more of a suit-and-tie affair these days.

Since then, though, things really haven't changed,

and a pint is still rich reward for a good day's work.

Well, that warms the cockles, mate.

Oh, aye, and it's a fitting end to our historical pub crawl.

Hey, listen, bit of trivia for you.

Which famous naval figure was preserved in brandy after

he was killed in battle?

I don't know, but it's certainly one way to get pickled, isn't it?

-Um, Sir Francis Drake.

-No, no.

Believe it or not, it was Horatio Nelson.

-Mm.

-Cheers, mukka.

-Cheers.