Free The House by the Thames by Gillian Tindall Page A

alone in their wherries as they rid at their roads, as well as above bridge as below, and were not found sometimes till they were not in a condition for anybody to touch or come near them.’
    The following summer the river once again figured as a place of escape, but this time the surviving watermen were in luck. As the Great Fire spread in the City on the 2nd and 3rd September, crowds of people bearing their most prized belongings in coaches, carts or in their arms besieged the waterside. Many were prepared to pay almost any price to load their goods to get them away from the flames. Pepys himself paid eight pounds, which was more than his usual month’s total housekeeping and servants’ wages bill, to have two lighters bear his best furniture and other valuables away to Woolwich. (‘Lighters’ were the large sail boats that were usually employed to unload, or ‘lighten’, goods from seagoing ships anchored in mid-river. The lighter-masters were, by the next century, admitted to membership of the Watermen’s Company. Eventually, as the ferry-trade began to decline, they would come to dominate the Company.)
    The Watermen’s first Hall in Upper Thames Street disappeared into the flames with many other City Company Halls, and by the third day the north waterfront itself was well alight, along with Cheapside and St Paul’s. Many premises near the river were stuffed with highly combustible goods, such as pitch, hemp and flax, while the wharf sides themselves were stacked with timber and coal – power supplies for the growing industrial and commercial capital. The Fire had already burnt the houses on the City end of London Bridge, and with them the ‘water engine’ used to raise water from the river for London’s general needs, but then the flames were stopped. This time Southwark was lucky, though the district had known destructive fires before and was to lose five hundred houses round the High Street ten years later.
    On the day the Great Fire of 1666 took hold, the dry east wind driving the flames westwards made many City-dwellers such as Pepys believe for a while that the City itself would be largely spared. Pepys’s first move was to take a ferry to Whitehall to alert the King to what was happening. Then back to the City to locate the increasingly desperate Lord Mayor and hand him the King’s authority for pulling down houses to stop the blaze. Later in the day he, his wife and some friends with whom they had dined took to the river again to observe the situation. The air was hot all round them, and full of smoke and sparks, and the true and growing extent of the disaster became apparent – ‘a most horrid, malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire’. The heat, and the unending, crackling roar of destruction drove them to take shelter in ‘a little ale-house on Bankside’. There they stayed till dark came, and then hurried home, beginning to realise that, so large was the area of devastation, their own home might be at risk. The Bankside ale-house was, he says, opposite ‘the three cranes’, which was a well-known loading dock situated between St Paul’s and London Bridge, so it must have been from another inn rather than from the Cardinal’s Hat that Pepys made the observations which still epitomise the Fire for us after nearly three and a half centuries.
    The Fire, coming as it did only a few years after the Restoration, seems to constitute one of those frontiers in time which precipitate changes that were coming anyway, but which then arrive all the faster. By the end of the century, London had been transformed more than at any era in its previous history. With upwards of half a million people, 1 it was more than ten times the size of any other British city. It outstripped Paris in population, becoming the largest city in Europe, and for the first time three-quarters of its population lived outside