London, England

Flag of London, England

London, England

RELATED LINKS:

Europe World History and Trivia

PAGE CONTENTS:

Historic Goodies

London

Great Fire of 1666

Meet Queen Elizabeth

Historic Goodies

Postmen in Victorian England were popularly called "robins." This was because their uniforms were red. The British Post Office grew out ofthe carrying of royal dispatches. Red was considered a royal color, so uniforms and letter-boxes were red. Christmas cards often showed a robin delivering Christmas mail.

Residential, economic, or educational qualification gave half a million Englishmen more than one vote in England in 1885. A universitygraduate who also owned a business in the City of London voted three times -- once at his home, once for his university, and once in the City.

During the bubonic plague of London, the city was sealed off to avoid contamination. This meant no food was permitted in. The only people willing to trade with London were the Dutch, who left food on jetties and then would take the money left there. They used to steel their nerves with liquor before landing on the plague-infested shores, hence"Dutch courage." To this day, the Dutch still have the freedom of the river Thames, which was granted as a reward for their courage and kindness.

London

The city of London began as a Roman outpost around AD 50. At the time, caesar's legions were struggling to establish control in southern England. London turned out to be a good spot to set up camp.

The Romans called their town "Londinium" and built a bridge there that spanned the River Thames. This was the first of several wooden London Bridges that were prone to falling down. (The first stone bridge was built in the 12th century.)

The native Britons didn't welcome the Romans. In AD 60, the British queen, Boudicca, led an uprising and burned Londinium to the ground. The Romans came back, though, and built a stone wall 18 feet (5 meters) high around their outpost. The wall kept Rome's local enemies at bay until the 5th century, when the legions went home to defend Italy. London was largely abandoned until 600, when Saxons moved in, manning the wall that had once kept them out.

Around 400 years later, the Normans came knocking. In 1066, William the Conqueror sailed from France and seized the English throne. At the time, London was a thriving mercantile city, and William ordered construction of a tower to control it. Later surrounded by walls and a moat, this Tower of London became famous as both palace and prison.

The city prospered under its new rulers. In the 500 years following William's conquest, London grew from 10,000 inhabitants to more than 100,000. Unfortunately, more people meant more disease. Bubonic plague decimated London several times. The worst outbreak came in 1664-65, when more than 60,000 people died.

Hot on the heels of the plague came the Great London Fire. In the early hours of September 2, 1666, a baker went to bed with coals still burning in his oven. His house caught on fire, and a brisk eastern wind fanned the flames.

Four days later, 80 percent of the old, walled city had burned to the ground. To discourage future fires, Londoners rebuilt their city in brick. Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to build a number of churches, including St. Paul's Cathedral.

After that, London exploded. By the end of the 19th century, it was the largest city in the world, with some 6 million residents. As capital of the British Empire, London was also a world economic center. Wealth flowed in--but, alas, the rich moved out. New rail lines allowed the wealthy to move to the suburbs. The poor stayed behind in Dickensian slums.

The following century, during World War II, Nazi bombings took a severe toll--nearly 35,000 dead and many more left homeless. Then, after the war, London had to survive its own population density, which contributed to a deadly smog problem. In 1952, a five-day "pea souper"--basically, a fog-of-smog attack--was linked to more than 4,000 premature deaths. (The air is cleaner these days.)

At nearly 2,000 years old, London is still enormous--so large that laws have been passed to limit its further growth. What was once the entire medieval city is now just one of 33 boroughs that house some 7.5 million people and cover 610 square miles (1,580 square kilometers). Not bad for an outpost on the edge of the Roman Empire.

Mark Diller

The Great Fire of 1666

On the night of Saturday, September 1, 1666, one of the king's bakers, Thomas Farynor, went to bed above the bakery he kept on Pudding Lane in London, a few blocks from London Bridge. The day had been hot and dry, like most days that summer, but not nearly as hot as the night would be.

Sometime after midnight, the household woke to a cloud of thick, black smoke, rising from the bakery below. Farynor--or one of his servants--had apparently failed to fully extinguish the fires that heated the bakery's ovens that day. Now the house was ablaze.

Realizing that retreat through the lower level wasn't an option, the family scrambled through a small window onto the roof of the house. The street they lived on was narrow--barely wide enough for a horse-drawn carriage--and the houses were close together, so they had little trouble crossing to the roof next door.

For the Farynors, the closeness of quarters on Pudding Lane proved a blessing. For the rest of London, it proved just the opposite. Soon the fire was spreading, and local residents were rushing to remove what they could from their homes, cluttering the street with furniture and goods.

Such fires were common at the time--so common that city authorities at first took little interest. They assumed that it would burn itself out in a matter of hours. By early morning, however, a steady easterly wind had begun to fan the flames, spreading the blaze more quickly. Sparks ignited piles of hay in the yard of a nearby inn, and soon the inn itself was engulfed. More frighteningly, the fire began to spread down Thames Street, toward London Bridge.

Thames Street, which ran parallel to the river, was lined with warehouses, stocked with shipments of oil, pitch, tar, brandy, timber, and coal. If the blaze had been stopped before reaching the warehouses, the rest of London might have been spared. Unfortunately, it wasn't.

The first professional fire department was still 100 years in the future, and volunteers slinging buckets were a poor match for a raging blaze. To make matters worse, the debris in the streets made them nearly impassable.

The Lord Mayor of London, who first made light of the fire, claiming "a woman might piss it out," faced a tough decision. The only hope seemed to lie in an extreme measure--tearing down buildings that stood in the blaze's path to create "firebreaks," thereby depriving the fire of fuel. He hesitated, wondering who would foot the bill for such destruction.

By seven o'clock Sunday morning, the Thames Street warehouses were burning bright. There was now little hope of controlling the blaze. King Charles himself intervened, giving the order to create firebreaks by any means necessary. Systematic demolition began, and the king and his brother, the Duke of York, joined the fight. Still, the fire raged for two more days, at times leaping across firebreaks 20 houses wide.

On Wednesday, after blowing the fire eastward for more than three days, the wind finally shifted. The change of winds was also a change of fortune. Deprived of their natural bellows, the flames no longer reached across the firebreaks, and by Thursday the blaze had basically burned itself out.

The damage was immense: over 13,000 homes destroyed, and perhaps 100,000 Londoners homeless. At least 87 parish churches, along with famous buildings like the Royal Exchange, Guild Hall, Custom House, and St. Paul's Cathedral, lay in ruins as well. The blaze had swallowed over 400 acres of densely populated urban terrain, more than three-quarters of the walled-in portion of the old medieval city.

Within days, the British architect Christopher Wren submitted a plan for rebuilding. He envisioned wider streets, more open spaces, and a more systematic, rational design. Though Wren would eventually oversee the reconstruction of more than 50 churches, including St. Paul's, his larger plan for the city was dismissed as impractical.

The reason was simple. While much of the actual city was gone, a virtual city remained--in countless titles, deeds, and tenancy arrangements, as well as in the minds of thousands of Londoners. People knew where their homes, shops, streets, and churches had been--and so should be again. London had burned, but the idea of London remained.

--Steve Sampson

Meet Queen Elizabeth

Let's meet England's first Queen Elizabeth--the powerful, charismatic, never-married "Virgin Queen" who helped give birth to the British Empire and colonial America. Fortunately, two great Elizabethans, explorer Sir Walter Raleigh and writer William Shakespeare, arranged an audience for us.

Elizabeth was born in 1533. Her father was King Henry VIII. Her mother was Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn. Henry had parted ways with the pope--and set England on the path to Protestantism--while parting ways with his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Before Elizabeth turned three, Henry parted ways with Anne Boleyn, too--by having her beheaded.

When Henry's third wife gave birth to a male heir, the future Edward VI, Elizabeth looked destined for historical obscurity. Still, she received an education fit for a king, studying Latin, Greek, and modern languages--plus history, philosophy, and Protestant theology--under some of the realm's top scholars.

The 9-year-old Edward succeeded Henry in 1547. He died six years later, having pushed the nation further down the Protestant path. Elizabeth's older half-sister Mary (a.k.a. "Bloody Mary") took the throne in 1553 and tried in vain to return the nation to Catholicism. She died five years later.

Elizabeth, who had barely escaped beheading under Mary--and whom Catholics (and some Protestants) had declared illegitimate--became queen in 1558. Many counselors advised a quick marriage to shore up her "womanly" position. But the ruler once derided as "Anne Boleyn's brat" had other plans.

Over the next 25 years, practically every eligible European prince and English peer came calling, but Elizabeth never married. Instead, she skillfully played the power-brokering bachelors off against each other, even as she strengthened her own "womanly" position.

Attractive, intelligent, and fiery, she alternately dazzled and dominated. When one suitor tried to insist on a favor, Elizabeth famously intoned, "I will have here but one mistress and no master." Meanwhile, she cultivated her popular image as the "Virgin Queen," whose first love was her people.

Unmatched at courtly intrigue, she also had a flair for public gestures. In 1588, when the mighty Spanish Armada threatened England, Elizabeth rode out to the troops in a white gown and silver breastplate. "I am come amongst you," she said, "not for my recreation or sport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all; to lay down, for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my people, my honor and my blood, even in the dust."

When a combination of British naval skill and favorable winds wrecked most of the Armada, the nation rejoiced. England was secure, the Spanish Empire was in retreat, and the once-weak Elizabeth had gone from "brat" to "Gloriana."

Of course, Elizabeth wasn't the only person in the realm who could deliver a killer line. Her reign was a golden age of English literature. The "Elizabethan" era produced both poetic masterpieces by Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser--whose epic, The Faerie Queene, allegorized Elizabeth--and dramatic classics by Christopher Marlowe and one William Shakespeare.

Her courtiers included Francis Bacon, who helped launch the scientific revolution, and Sir Walter Raleigh, who established the first English settlement in America (the "Lost Colony" of Roanoke Island, North Carolina). Elizabeth also chartered the British East India Company, which helped establish the commercial footing for the British Empire.

Not all of her 44 years on the throne were good ones. Epidemic disease periodically laid the nation low. Population growth strained the economy. Spiraling inflation led to poverty and starvation. Still, England began to assert itself as a major world player under Elizabeth. And, thanks in part to her own skill at political theater, it's looked back fondly on "Good Queen Bess" ever since.

--Steve Sampson

Enter content here

To post your opinion regarding this page, please click on

A POINT OF VIEW, and post your opinion in my Forum.