Welcome to my second blog about the Monument – I hope you enjoyed the first instalment.
Let’s get the basic data out of the way first. Built between 1671 and 1677, it’s a fluted Doric column standing 202 feet (61 metres) in height and 202 feet (61 metres) to the west of the spot where the Great Fire started on Pudding Lane. 311 spiral steps lead up to the public viewing platform, where visitors can get great views of London from 160 feet (48.7 metres) above ground. I doubted my fitness to climb it but, should you choose to do so, you will get a certificate as evidence of your intrepid character! If you want to see what the view is like, have a look at this excellent video. Despite all the new buildings that have sprung up after the Second World War the views from the Monument are still fantastic so highly recommended.
Here are a few images from the London Home Girl website to also whet your appetite …
A panorama posted in Wikipedia …
Bear in mind, though, the climb will be formidable if you’re not reasonably fit …
Let’s deal now with the ‘secret’ chamber beneath the column.
Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren, who collaborated to design the Monument, were serious scientists who saw the column as a fantastic opportunity to advance celestial knowledge and the intention was to install within it a Zenith Telescope. When the two hinged semi-circular iron doors at the top were opened, someone in the underground observation chamber at the base of the column could measure with a micrometer eyepiece the changes in position of an overhead star throughout the year. Hooke chose Gamma Draconis as his overhead star, but Gamma Draconis, while very bright, is also very far away: 900 million miles away in fact. Hooke was trying to measure a very small difference in position.
The initiative failed for a mundane reason – Fish Street Hill was the main roadway entrance to the phenominally busy London Bridge, the only bridge across the Thames in London until 1750. The vibrations from the traffic upset the delicate instrumentation needed for a Zenith telescope and the idea was abanoned. The busy approach to the bridge in the mid-18th century …
If you do reach the top remember, as you descend, that you are literally walking in Hooke’s footsteps when he conducted an experiment to see how atmospheric pressure varied between the top of the building and the bottom. This is why each step is exactly six inches deep.
The chamber below is not open to the public but you can read about a visit to both it and the space directly beneath the golden urn by the Londonist blogger here. Looking down the stairs to the laboratory …
Looking down from the urn at the top …
It was also visited by Professor Lisa Jardine and you can read her fascinating views on the subject if you Google The Medlicott Medal Lecture 2006. One image from her lecture is the view looking upwards from Hooke’s basement location …
Trivia fact: The Monument actually has 345 steps rather than 311 if you include the steps up from the laboratory.
In last week’s blog I dealt with the inscription on the west side of the building, time now to look at the other three sides.
The north side inscription is famous for the fact that a final sentence has obviously been erased …
In 1679, stories of a Popish plot caused panic in response to allegations of a Jesuit conspiracy to murder Charles II, restore the Roman Catholic faith as the state religion of England and establish a French-backed tyranny under the King’s brother James, Duke of York, whose Catholic and autocratic sympathies were well known. At the source of this totally untrue story was the rather unpleasant character Titus Oates …
You can read more about him here in an excellent article from History Today magazine. Wikipedia gives a much fuller description of his life and escapades here. You can just imagine the chaos he could probably cause today if he had access to social media.
In the anti-Catholic frenzy that followed the plot’s revelation, the Court of Common Council (the primary decision-making assembly for the City of London Corporation) decided to act. The City Comptroller, Joseph Lane, was ordered to emend the inscription so as to place the blame for the Great Fire firmly on the shoulders of Catholics. Accordingly, the following words were tacked on to the end of the north side inscription: SED FVROR PAPISTICVS, QVITAM DIRA PATRAVIT NONDVM RESTINGVITVR
Translated it reads: BUT THE PAPAL MADNESS THAT HAS ACCOMPLISHED SO MANY ABOMINATIONS IS NOT YET SNUFFED OUT.
Inserted in 1681, these additions were erased when the Catholic James II came to the throne in 1685, and then carved on again at the accession of William and Mary in 1689, only to be finally removed in 1831 following Catholic Emancipation. As Philip Ward-Jackson writes: ‘For a good part of a century and a half, the Monument was thus denatured and turned into a sectarian provovation’. This was certainly how the Catholic Alexander Pope saw it, writing in 1733, in his Epistle to Bathurst:
“Where London’s column, pointing at the skies,
Like a tall bully, lifts its head, and lyes.”
The scraped out section (pigeons seem to find this part of the building really attractive to roost in) …
Here is a translation of the Latin inscription you see today:
In the year of Christ 1666, on the 2nd September, at a distance eastward from this place of 202 feet, which is the height of this column, a fire broke out in the dead of night, which, the wind blowing devoured even distant buildings, and rushed devastating through every quarter with astonishing swiftness and noise. It consumed 89 churches, gates, the Guildhall, public edifices, hospitals, schools, libraries, a great number of blocks of buildings, 13,200 houses, 400 streets. Of the 26 wards, it utterly destroyed 15, and left 8 mutilated and half-burnt. The ashes of the City, covering as many as 436 acres, extended on one side from the Tower along the bank of the Thames to the church of the Templars, on the other side from the north-east along the walls to the head of Fleet-ditch. Merciless to the wealth and estates of the citizens, it was harmless to their lives, so as throughout to remind us of the final destruction of the world by fire. The havoc was swift. A little space of time saw the same city most prosperous and no longer in being. On the third day, when it had now altogether vanquished all human counsel and resource, at the bidding, as we may well believe of heaven, the fatal fire stayed its course and everywhere died out.
The south panel is a detailed paen to Charles II, ‘Son of Charles the Martyr’, and all the work he supervised to bring the City safely back to life …
Translation: Charles the Second, son of Charles the Martyr, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, defender of the faith, a most gracious prince, commiserating the deplorable state of things, whilst the ruins were yet smoking provided for the comfort of his citizens, and the ornament of his city; remitted their taxes, and referred the petitions of the magistrates and inhabitants of London to the Parliament; who immediately passed an Act, that public works should be restored to greater beauty, with public money, to be raised by an imposition on coals; that churches, and the cathedral of St. Paul’s, should be rebuilt from their foundations, with all magnificence; that the bridges, gates, and prisons should be new made, the sewers cleansed, the streets made straight and regular, such as were steep levelled and those too narrow made wider, markets and shambles removed to separate places. They also enacted, that every house should be built with party-walls, and all raised of an equal height in front, and that all house walls should be strengthened with stone or brick; and that no man should delay building beyond the space of seven years. Furthermore, he procured an Act to settle beforehand the suits which should arise respecting boundaries, he also established an annual service of intercession, and caused this column to be erected as a perpetual memorial to posterity. Haste is seen everywhere, London rises again, whether with greater speed or greater magnificence is doubtful, three short years complete that which was considered the work of an age.
The East Panel is formulaic in style, providing a list of names of London mayors that oversaw the building of the pillar, from the beginning to the end. The surnames of the mayors are the only words not Latinised: rather, they are in English …
But what of the man who was Lord Mayor at the time the Great Fire broke out? Sir Thomas Bludworth was unlucky enough to be in that position and gained immortality because of one particularly unfortunate phrase.
The fire began in the King’s Baker’s house on Pudding Lane. Rather than making fresh loaves for the King, baker Thomas Farynor produced the dry and bland biscuits called ‘hard tack’ that filled the bellies of sailors in the Royal Navy. In the early hours of Sunday 2 September 1666, the Farynor family woke to smoke coming from the bakery on the ground floor of their house. They escaped out of the upper floor window although their maid, too frightened to leave, perished. The long hot summer and the strong wind allowed the fire to spread rapidly.
Sir Thomas Bludworth was called. Afraid to order the pulling down of houses to make firebreaks, he ensured his place in the history books by exclaiming that the fire was so weak a ‘woman could piss it out’. He then returned to bed.
Samuel Pepys, returning from a meeting with King Charles, later encountered the Mayor in the street and reported:
At last met my lord mayor in Cannon Street, like a man spent, with a handkerchief about his neck. To the King’s message, he cried, like a fainting woman, ‘Lord, what can I do? I am spent: people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses, but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it’
Many believed poor Bludworth was a scapegoat and very unfairly criticised. You can read more about him, and his earlier and later, life here.
For a lively re-telling of the Great Fire story have a look at the excellent Royal Museums Greenwich website.
I’ve really enjoyed reading and researching the story of the Monument and hope you have enjoyed the two blogs that I have published as a result. Maybe one day I’ll feel fit enough to climb to the top as I last did with my Dad when I was 15!
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