08 September 2016
Fanning the Flames
There is a pyromaniac in each of us.
by J R Thomas
There’s nothing like a good centenary anniversary for boosting business, especially the tourist business. 2015 was a good year for Belgium (two hundred years since Waterloo) and Runnymede and Westminster (eight hundred years since the signing of Magna Carta); also Turkey – a hundred years since the landings and battles at Gallipoli. France had a double whammy – three hundred years after the death of the Sun King, Louis XIV, brought many extra visitors to Versailles, though, oddly, the tourist authorities made much less of the six hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt.
2016 is proving much less attractive for tourist events though. Gerrards Cross (Buckinghamshire) is making as much as it can out of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Roald Dahl; there are sombre events in France to mark the same anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, and mixed emotions displayed in Dublin over the Easter Rising, the precursor of Irish independence, also one hundred years ago. In 1616 Walter Raleigh was released from the Tower of London and set off to Guyana to find gold – no any obvious angle to that, nor in the burning at the stake of Jerome of Prague in 1416, so those seem to be going unremarked.
But no good modern tourist development executive will be downhearted by the failure of interesting things to occur in any chosen year. 2016 does seem a particularly bad year for centenary anniversaries, but turn the notch fifty years to centenaries and a half, and – well, that’s not so good either. Second administration of Harold Wilson elected, 1966? First passenger train on the Talyllyn Railway, 1866? Frederick III of Sicily forbids the decoration of synagogues, 1316? Oh dear, oh dear. But here’s one – 350 years since the Great Fire of London. Just the job that one, especially as the 350th anniversary of the Great Plague was so carelessly not celebrated last year – surely missing a marketing opportunity for chemists and private hospitals everywhere.
Various London bodies have seized the Great Fire as a wonderful opportunity to commission various displays and events to mark this event. The Museum of London is having a major exhibition on the fire, showing the progress of the fire, the efforts made to put it out, the dreadful aftermath, and the long term effect on London. This is linked with an interactive website which enables you to trace the course of the fire and the buildings destroyed. Work in the City, or have been let down by your stockbroker? Watch their premises burn, see that detested building crumble in showers of sparks! Well, not the actual building, of course, but the building that was where they are now.
Imaginatively, the agencies have organised a whole series of happenings to recall those momentous four days in September. The dome of St Pauls Cathedral was lit for several evenings with flickering flames and smoke. The dome was not there in 1666 of course, indeed the building of that most baroque of British churches was a result of the destruction of the medieval cathedral. But it was a true spectacle to see the flames dancing on the dome; one that might more accurately recall the horrors of the blitz in 1941, maybe not every elderly Londoner’s favourite memory. In the evening of Saturday 3rd September a series of breeze block trails were laid through the City, beginning at the Pudding Lane site where the fire began; at a signal the initial blocks were knocked over so that they fell, domino like, to end in little explosions of flames and sparks where the various routes of the fire finally expired. No matter that the City was of timber and lathe and plaster, breeze blocks being as yet unknown, or that the fire lasted four days and not a few minutes, the spectacle is the thing. As thought the Tate Modern, who had a fire garden in front of their premises on the South Bank. Relevance again not entirely clear, the Fire did not cross south of the river, but certainly exciting for spectators and for the vendors of fire-related, and non-related, artefacts. Souvenir box of matches, anyone?
The Royal College of Physicians joined in the fun, with a little exhibition of its own, showing medicines and treatments used in the seventeenth century to treat burns and scalding. One had hoped that the London Fire Brigade might also have joined in with a series of demonstrations as to how grappling hooks were used to pull down buildings in the path of the fire to attempt to stop the flames, or maybe a show of leather buckets used to chuck water on burning embers, but they seem not to have grasped the marketing opportunity presented.
The whole jolly fire-fair culminated on the night of the Sunday 4th, when a carefully constructed model of the medieval City built, as was the original, of wood, but, not as the original, floating on several barges in the Thames (it would have been a fire hazard on dry land) was unveiled to the public gaze. But not for long. A fire was lit in the model Pudding Lane and within half an hour or so the whole thing was destroyed in front of huge and excited crowds.
You might have thought that a model of the medieval City of London might have been a major and continuing tourist draw, if somewhere big enough to put it could have been found. The medieval City was so different to what exists today that it could have been a big money spinner and attraction, perhaps alongside a model of Sir Christopher Wren’s planned new City to arise from the ashes of the burnt one, of which St Paul’s is the only manifestation. Modern lighting, perhaps with push button facilitation, could have reproduced the path of the flames to create the action and interaction demanded by the modern tourist.
Frankfurt, now the financial capital of Germany, has a model of its medieval city as it was in late 1944, burnt in a fire-storm following a massive bombing raid. It is the centrepiece of the city museum, a sombre warning of the effects of modern warfare and a commemoration of the thousands who died in one night. It is not known how many people died in the Great Fire of London but certainly very few, maybe as few as six. Nothing compared with the thousands who died in the bombing blitzes of the Second World War, nor compared with the three thousand or more who died in a great fire in Southwark in 1212 (the eight hundredth anniversary of that got overlooked somehow). But many more died in the aftermath of the Great Fire, camped in tents and huts in the fields on the northern and eastern boundaries of the City over a long and cold winter – indeed some of the poor were still living there twenty years later as the City was slowly rebuilt and its eastward extension grew to accommodate the poorest. And the economic after effects of the Fire were horrendous. Hardly any buildings had any form of insurance – indeed the development of both the modern insurance industry and of professional fire brigades were long-term legacies of the Fire. Many respectable tradesmen and shopkeeping families were ruined, and the burden of rebuilding the city was a drag on the London economy for years.
Three hundred and fifty years later we build more carefully. We have proper means of escape in multi-story buildings. We have well equipped and brave fire brigades who will come rapidly to our rescue, and who keep fit and well practised for when the moment of danger comes. Even so, fire is still a danger and a killer, both of the public and those brave souls who come to our rescue. Maybe future commemorations could focus more on the avoidance of and the putting out of fires, and less on the excitements of lighting them. There must be a marketing angle in that somewhere.
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