Monday, 2 August, 2021
I have yet to exhaust the area around Cornhill. It would be easy to feel exhausted, to be fair. It’s like burrowing down in the earth, only to feel that you’ll never reach centre. Except that this burrowing is exciting, finding sparkly minerals as I go and part of me hoping there actually is no centre. I don’t have a clue how many days or hours I’d need since an inch away there’d be another countless layers of earth to burrow…I’ll just wish instead for a hundred more lifetimes, if that’s enough. Perhaps 100,000. So buckle up, this will be another long one.
My plan today was to see Pudding Lane and the Monument and then meet Krish. I went from Liverpool Street Station to Fenchurch Street on a grey day when I knew the photographs might not be as sparkly. In fact, London when it’s grey is just London, so best to capture it in its relaxed state.
From Fenchurch Street, I set my destination but I can’t resist an alley and I saw one that was quite wide, only loosely an alley, and thought it might be an interesting shortcut when I saw what looked like a pub at the bottom and a promise of another exit, so not a dead end.
But I was headed to Pudding Lane.
Pudding Lane is a small street in London, widely known as the location of Thomas Farriner’s bakery, where the Great Fire of London started in 1666.
This is where it’s said the Great Fire of London started (on 2 September 1666) at Thomas Farriner’s bakery, the King’s baker. It was on the eastern side of Pudding Lane, one of the first one-way roads in the world in 1617. Pudding wasn’t a sweet thing. It’s what the butchers called the offal that they took down to the river to the waste barges.
This sounds ‘romantic,’ but Pudding Lane today isn’t quaint or anything of the kind. Instead it’s a rather barren narrow street with some boring office building on either side. I was so unimpressed that I didn’t see the plaque to the bakery and fire that Google assures me is there. That teaches me to look more closely or do a little bit of research before I leave home.
Opposite where the bakery stood, is the Monument (The Monument to the Great Fire of London.) It’s 202 feet (52M) high and it was built that high to mark the bakery site, 202 feet west. It was designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke – a Doric column topped with a gilded urn of fire. (The Golden Boy of Pye Corner marks the spot where the fire was stopped, near Smithfield. See my blog that mentions it.) It’s closed now but inside there are 311 steps leading up to a viewing platform. At one time it would have had a great view of the river and The City.
Standing at the west side of the Monument at the wonderfully named Fish Hill, to the north is Monument Tube station and to the south is the river and St Magnus The Martyr church on Lower Thames Street. I haven’t been there for years but inside there’s a four metre model of the old London Bridge, and outside some masonry thought to be from the bridge.
I hadn’t been this close to the Monument for over a decade and I was amused by stone benches, which were engraved with the rhyme of ‘London’s burning.’ When I was a child, we would sing this in rounds, but I’m quite sure I had no idea at the time that it referred to the Great Fire. It was just fun to sing. As well as the benches there was a drinking fountain nearby with the rhyme engraved on a metal plaque.
