Chapter Three
Monument
The Night London Burned and the Column That Accused
Why is Monument called Monument?
In brief: Monument station is named for the nearby Monument to the Great Fire of London, designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke after the fire of 1666.
Transport context: London Underground station.
Some time after midnight on Sunday, 2 September 1666, Thomas Dagger wakes because he cannot breathe.
Smoke has entered the room before the alarm has entered his mind. He is a young baker working in the household of Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane. Below them are the ovens, timber, flour dust, baskets, fuel: the ordinary machinery of bread. London sleeps close around the bakery, house pressed against house, upper storeys leaning towards one another across narrow streets.
Dagger wakes Farriner and the others. The staircase is already lost. They climb from an upper window and cross the roof towards safety. One maid does not escape.1
Behind them, the bakery burns.
No one yet knows that a station has just been named.
The fire begins in one building and finds a city prepared for it. The summer has been dry. Timber walls are seasoned. Warehouses near the river contain pitch, oil, rope, brandy and other goods that burn with enthusiasm. A strong easterly wind drives sparks and flame westwards. Houses are crowded together, their projecting floors almost touching overhead.
London has suffered fires before. It expects to survive this one.
The lord mayor, Thomas Bludworth, is called from his bed and comes to inspect the danger. He possesses the legal authority to order houses pulled down, creating gaps through which the flames cannot pass. But demolition means compensation, arguments and angry owners. He judges the fire too small to justify it and withdraws.2
The decision lasts longer than the buildings.
By morning, Pudding Lane is no longer the centre of the fire. The centre moves as the fire moves. It runs through lanes and courts, across warehouses and churches. Burning fragments rise into the wind and descend beyond the streets already ablaze. A barrier is created; the fire crosses it. Another is attempted; the wind changes the terms.
Samuel Pepys sees the glow and goes first to the Tower, then by boat onto the Thames. From the river the scale becomes visible. People crowd the quays with beds, chests, papers, children and whatever else can be carried. Boats take goods into midstream. Carts jam the roads out of the City. The wealthy hire labourers; the poor use their backs.
Pepys goes to Whitehall and tells Charles II that houses must be pulled down more quickly. The king agrees. Orders are issued. Still the fire advances.
For four days the City is rearranged by heat.
Cheapside burns. The Guildhall burns. The old St Paul’s Cathedral, wrapped in scaffolding and surrounded by booksellers who have placed stock in its vaults for safety, burns. Lead runs from the roof. Stone cracks. The cathedral that had dominated medieval London becomes a ruin in a night.2
People later speak of the fire as though it possessed intention. It devours, leaps, hunts, rages. Such language excuses those who failed to control it. A fire is blameless. Men are not.
At last the wind weakens. Soldiers and workmen use gunpowder to demolish buildings faster than the flames can reach them. By Thursday the main fire is under control, though cellars and ruins continue to smoulder.
What remains is almost beyond counting: more than thirteen thousand houses destroyed, eighty-seven parish churches gone, the old cathedral ruined, roughly one hundred thousand people displaced.2
The official death toll is small. Fewer than ten deaths are recorded. This has sometimes been presented as a miracle. It may also be a failure of record-keeping. The poor do not always leave documents when they disappear.
London survives, but not in the form in which it went to sleep on Saturday night.
Then begins the argument over why.
England is at war with France and the Dutch Republic. Foreigners are suspected. Catholics are suspected. Anyone with an accent, an unfamiliar face or the misfortune to be noticed at the wrong moment may become evidence.
The Man Who Arrived Two Days Late
Robert Hubert is a young Frenchman, often described as a watchmaker. He confesses to starting the fire.
His first account places his crime in Westminster, where the fire did not begin. When attention fixes upon Pudding Lane, his story moves there too. He says he threw an incendiary device into the bakery. The details alter under questioning. The supposed opening through which he claims to have thrown it does not fit the building.
There is a larger difficulty.
Hubert was not in London when the fire began.
Evidence from the ship on which he travelled indicates that he arrived in England two days after Farriner’s bakery was already burning. Even officials who hear him are doubtful. The Lord Chancellor later calls him a distracted man, perhaps weary of his life. Modern accounts allow for the possibility that he was experiencing serious mental illness.3
Yet Hubert continues to confess.
A confession has a force that contradiction does not. It gives fear a speaker, foreign suspicion a face and the enormous accident a human intention. The city can imagine a hand throwing a fireball more easily than it can accept dry timber, wind, hesitation and chance.
Hubert is tried, convicted and hanged at Tyburn in October 1666.3
His execution proves nothing about the fire. It proves something about the people who survived it.
A city that cannot punish the flames has found a man upon whom to place their guilt.
Parliament investigates and concludes that the disaster was accidental. But official findings have less emotional force than fear. The belief that the City was deliberately burned by Catholic conspirators persists, because it answers a need. Accident is intolerable when the destruction is this large. Accident means the world may end without hating you.
While blame spreads, plans appear.
Christopher Wren proposes a new London of broad avenues, ordered squares and rational geometry. John Evelyn produces another plan. Others imagine a capital rebuilt like a continental city, with the old tangle of medieval lanes replaced by symmetry.
The schemes are magnificent and mostly useless.
Land ownership has survived even where buildings have not. Every foundation belongs to someone. Merchants want their premises back. Families need houses. The City cannot remain empty while planners create perfection.
London therefore rises largely on its old footprint. Streets are widened in places. Building regulations favour brick and stone. But the pattern beneath is familiar. The new city grows from the lines of the old one, as scar tissue follows the shape of a wound.4
Parliament nevertheless decides that the fire must be remembered. The Rebuilding Act provides for a monument near the place where it began.5
The commission comes to Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke.
Wren will become the more famous name: the architect of the new St Paul’s and the rebuilt City churches. Hooke is harder to contain. He is a scientist, surveyor, inventor, experimenter and architect; a man who moves between disciplines because the borders are not yet fully guarded.
Together they design a column.
It will stand on Fish Street Hill, on the site of St Margaret’s church, which the fire destroyed. It will be built of Portland stone in the Roman Doric order. From pavement to the top of its flaming urn it will rise 202 feet. The distance is deliberate: the column stands approximately 202 feet west of the bakery on Pudding Lane where the fire began.6
The Monument does not merely point towards the origin of the fire.
Its own height measures the distance.
Construction begins in 1671 and lasts six years. Obtaining pieces of Portland stone large enough for the work is difficult. War with the Dutch complicates transport. The City is rebuilding everywhere, and stone, labour and money are all contested resources.6
Slowly the shaft rises above the roofs.
Inside it, 311 steps coil upwards. At the summit is a viewing platform. Above that sits a copper urn filled not with ashes but with gilded flames. The City does not crown its memorial with what was lost. It crowns it with the thing that destroyed it.
The column has another purpose.
Wren and Hooke are men of the new experimental science. They design the hollow shaft so that it can serve as a zenith telescope. A laboratory is created below. The column may also support experiments involving gravity and pendulums. Catastrophe is to become an instrument of knowledge.7
The plan fails in practice. Traffic on Fish Street Hill shakes the ground. London is too busy for the precision London’s scientists require.
The Monument succeeds as architecture and fails as apparatus.
Perhaps no fate could be more appropriate.
It is completed in 1677. At its base, Latin inscriptions record the destruction of the City and its rebuilding. On the western side, Caius Gabriel Cibber’s relief shows Charles II presiding over London’s restoration. The city appears as a distressed female figure, raised from ruin under royal protection.5
Stone makes an argument.
The king rescues. The City obeys. Providence judges. Order returns.
But memorials do not remain politically still.
In 1681, during the anti-Catholic hysteria surrounding the supposed Popish Plot, words are added to the Monument’s inscription blaming the fire on “Popish frenzy”. The accusation has no sound evidential basis, but it is cut into stone and displayed as civic truth.
For generations the column does not merely commemorate a fire. It accuses a religion.
Alexander Pope later writes that the Monument, “like a tall bully, lifts the head, and lies”. The line endures because it identifies the danger of public monuments: height can be mistaken for authority.
The offending words are finally removed in 1830.8
Stone can lie. Stone can also be corrected, though usually more slowly than paper.
By then the Monument has become part of everyday London. It is a landmark, viewpoint and meeting place. Visitors climb the spiral staircase and look over a City repeatedly rebuilt since the fire it commemorates.
There is a darker history to the height. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries several people die after falling or jumping from the viewing platform. In 1842 an iron cage is installed around it.5
A structure intended to remember mass destruction accumulates private tragedies of its own.
Then the railway arrives.
In 1884 the Metropolitan District Railway extends through this part of the City and opens a station beside the great column.9
The name is obvious.
The station becomes Monument.
The railway takes a word already reduced to its essential form. Londoners do not usually say the Monument to the Great Fire of London. They say the Monument, as though the City possesses only one memorial worthy of the definite article.
The station name strips away the explanation but preserves the command: remember.
At first Monument is its own station, serving what will become the District and Circle lines. Nearby railway companies construct other stations beneath the financial district. Bank develops separately around the Bank of England, with platforms belonging to different lines and periods.
In 1933 an escalator passage links Monument and Bank.9
The result is one of the Underground’s strangest identities: two station names, joined below ground but retained above it. A passenger may enter at Bank and emerge at Monument, or descend beside a memorial to fire and find a route towards a station named for money.
The pairing seems almost moralistic.
First destruction. Then finance.
First the City burns. Then the City calculates.
The connected complex grows by accretion. New lines, tunnels, escalators and entrances arrive over decades. It becomes less a single planned station than an underground district, built in the same manner as London itself: piece by piece, according to immediate need, until only regular users pretend to understand it.
The Monument above remains simpler.
A column. A stair. A flame.
Leave the station and the memorial is almost impossible to see whole at first. Modern buildings press close. Traffic cuts around it. The City has grown upwards, and the structure that once commanded the skyline now stands among neighbours larger than itself.
Approach its base.
Read the inscriptions, remembering that one of them was altered because fear had been presented as fact. Study Cibber’s relief, in which political authority turns disaster into orderly recovery. Then look up the fluted shaft towards the golden fire.
If the stairs are open, climb them.
The ascent is narrow and repetitive. The outside world appears only at intervals through small openings. There are enough steps for confidence to become fatigue. At the top, London returns all at once.
The view is no longer Wren and Hooke’s. Towers of glass and steel rise around the old City. St Paul’s survives among them, the descendant of the cathedral that burned. The Thames moves beyond the rooftops. Somewhere below, Pudding Lane runs through buildings that have forgotten the bakery.
The distance between the column and the place where the fire began is also the height beneath your feet.
Two hundred and two feet west.
Two hundred and two feet high.
The Monument turns geography upright.
Then descend and walk to Pudding Lane.
There is no seventeenth-century bakery. There is a plaque. The lane is short and easily overlooked, dwarfed by the architecture of finance. Nothing in its present appearance could burn a city.
This is often the disappointment of historical places. We expect atmosphere and receive office servicing, delivery vans and a sandwich shop. The event has departed. Only coordinates remain.
But return to the station and listen to the name.
Monument.
Inside that single word are a baker’s apprentice waking in smoke; a lord mayor who delays; Pepys on the river; families carrying their goods into fields; St Paul’s collapsing in flame; a Frenchman hanged for a crime he could not have committed; Wren drawing straight avenues London will not build; Hooke turning a memorial into a telescope; Catholic guilt carved into stone and later erased; railway tunnels joining fire to finance.
The station is not named after the Great Fire directly.
It is named after the City’s effort to decide what the fire meant.
The fire destroyed without explanation. The Monument supplies one: London suffered, London rebuilt, London endured.
That story is true, but incomplete. Cities prefer survival stories because the dead cannot edit them.
The column still raises its golden flame over Fish Street Hill.
Below it, trains arrive every few minutes.
The fire has been out for centuries.
London is still telling the story.
Notes and Sources
London Museum, “First witness to the Great Fire of London uncovered”, 1 September 2023. Research by Professor Kate Loveman identified Thomas Dagger as the baker’s journeyman who raised the alarm.↩
London Museum, “The Great Fire of London”.↩ ↩ ↩
British Library, “Robert Hubert and the Great Fire of London”, and London Museum, “The Great Fire of London”. Hubert’s contradictory confession was doubted, he may have suffered serious mental ill-health, and evidence showed that he was not in London when the fire began. He was nevertheless executed at Tyburn on 27 October 1666.↩ ↩
London Museum, “The Great Fire of London”, section on rebuilding.↩
Historic England, “The Monument”, National Heritage List for England entry 1193901; and scheduled-monument entry 1002065.↩ ↩ ↩
The Monument, official City of London visitor site, “History” and “About”.↩ ↩
The Monument, “About”; Science Museum, “Great Fire of London: how science rebuilt a city”.↩
The Monument, “Inscriptions”. The anti-Catholic addition was removed in 1830.↩
Transport for London, Statement of Case of London Underground Limited: Bank Station Capacity Upgrade, section 3.1.4. The District and Metropolitan Railway station opened in 1884, and the Bank–Monument escalator link opened in 1933.↩ ↩