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The Great Fire of London

The people of London who had managed to survive the Great Plague in 1665 must have thought that the year 1666 could only be better, and couldn’t possibly be worse!

Poor souls… they could not have imagined the new disaster that was to befall them in 1666.

A fire started on September 2nd in the King’s bakery in Pudding Lane near London Bridge. Fires were quite a common occurrence in those days and were soon quelled. Indeed, when the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth was woken up to be told about the fire, he replied “Pish! A woman might piss it out!”. However that summer had been very hot and there had been no rain for weeks, so consequently the wooden houses and buildings were tinder dry.

The fire soon took hold: 300 houses quickly collapsed and the strong east wind spread the flames further, jumping from house to house. The fire swept through the warren of streets lined with houses, the upper stories of which almost touched across the narrow winding lanes. Efforts to bring the fire under control by using buckets quickly failed. Panic began to spread through the city.

As the fire raged on, people…

How London became the center of the world

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew lie in a curve of the Thames, seven miles upriver from central London.

It’s a pastoral respite from asphalt and exhaust, with thousands of plants collected from the British Empire’s far-flung reach. To stroll past beds of Himalayan rhododendrons and Tasmanian grasses is to also understand the sweep of Britain’s connectivity to the world beyond.

At Kew, though, one does not entirely escape the tumult of modern life. The gardens sit directly beneath the flight path into Heathrow. As I admired a massive, ancient oak, relocated from Iran during Queen Victoria’s reign, a stream of jets descended out of the holding queue aloft. Spaced 27 to 40 seconds apart—Kew arborists know the timing—they formed a line homing in on the busiest two-runway…