Free Georgian London: Into the Streets by Lucy Inglis

lifeguardsman called Mitchell’ began to walk around London crying a prophecy that London would suffer a huge earthquake on 8 April. The city would be flattened.
    Londoners began to clear out. They went to family in the country, or took a holiday. For those unable to leave it was clear that the feeling on the streets was tense. The clergy lambasted the people for cowardice. A man with a foot in each camp was Roger Pickering, pastor of a Dissenters’ church and a Fellow of the Royal Society. On 5 April, he published a sermon ordering Londoners to remain, and take their medicine.
     
I
adjure
you, by the
Interest
of that
Gospel
you profess, by the
Credit
of that
Faith
on which you rest your Souls, that, with
humble Hearts
, but with
Christian Confidence
, in your respective Stations ON THE SPOT where
Providence
had place you, YE WAIT the WILL OF GOD.
     
    But Londoners had been told for over a month that earthquakes buried both the good and the guilty. Horace Walpole recorded, on the evening of 7 April, that in the past three days ‘ 730 coaches have been counted passing Hyde Park Corner with whole parties removing into the country’. That night, everyone who feared for their lives the coming daycleared out either to Moorfields or Hyde Park, to take shelter on the open ground. Some took their carriages and slept in them. Others pitched makeshift tents and windbreaks. Moorfields had become the place of refuge on the edge of the City once again. The following morning, after the earthquake had declined to make an appearance, the Moorfields refugees crept back to their undamaged homes and got on with life, no doubt feeling both relieved and foolish.
    Close to Moorfields, Bunhill Fields burial ground holds the graves of many religious Dissenters, such as George Fox, founder of the Quaker movement, John Bunyan, the Baptist preacher, as well as that of Susannah Wesley, the mother of John Wesley. The area hosted Wesley’s open-air preaching, and it was just outside Aldersgate, on 24 May 1738, that he noted in his journal how he ‘felt his heart strangely warmed’ at a Lutheran service. A memorial outside the doors of the Museum of London now marks the spot. Wesley worked mainly amongst those who did not attend established churches, and he drew many followers from the dispossessed through his inclusive style of worship. He first occupied a disused foundry just off City Road for his Methodist meetings, but by 1777, he had enough subscribing followers to commission George Dance the Younger to design the City Road Chapel, still in existence. He wrote extensively, not only on religion but also about scientific and medical breakthroughs, and his ideas would have informed his congregations. Through his preaching and writing he embraced members of the community who felt distanced from the rich members of the City churches. He often preached in Moorfields, gathering large crowds.
    By the 1770s, the role of Moorfields as open ground for playing, protesting and preaching was declining. In 1777, Finsbury Square was built on some of the drier ground, and the parish of St Luke’s was rapidly growing to cope with a burgeoning population. By the final quarter of the eighteenth century, Moorfields was surrounded on all sides and shrinking; but in 1784, it would have one last hurrah as London’s premier space for the people.
    In 1766, Henry Cavendish’s new work on hydrogen had led scientists and madcaps all over Europe to experiment with balloon flight. The concept of little hydrogen balloons for amusement orcommunication purposes wasn’t new, but it took a series of adventurers to prove that man could take flight. The most famous of all of these were the Montgolfier brothers whose balloon ascended in Paris in 1783. The following year, the ballooning bug hit London.
    Vincenzo (or Vincent) Lunardi came to England as a diplomat, but he was obsessed with the idea of flying. He was a dashing 22-year-old and was determined to gain royal permission