Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London by Editors of David & Charles Read Free Book Online Page B

1677. Two hundred and two feet high, it is still the tallest isolated stone column in the world and is situated on the site of Farriner’s Baking House, Pudding Lane, where the fire began in an unquenched grate. An inscription on the Monument blamed the fire on a ‘Popish frenzy, which wrought such horrors’. These last words were finally deleted in 1830 as a result of a campaign by the City Solicitor, Charles Pearson, who also campaigned for the construction of the Metropolitan Underground Railway. A less well-known monument is the Golden Boy of Pye Corner, a small monument located on the corner of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane in Smithfield, which marks the point where the fire ended. Underneath the figure of a small, stout boy is the following inscription: ‘The boy at Pye Corner was erected to commemorate the staying of the Great Fire which, beginning at Pudding Lane, was ascribed to the sin of gluttony when not attributed to the papists as on the monument and the boy was made prodigiously fat to enforce the moral.’ Only six deaths from the fire were verified, one of them being the maid of the baker as she was too timid to escape with Farriner’s family over the rooftops. Many deaths were probably not recorded.

    The Golden Boy of Pye Corner
    CLEOPATRA’S NEEDLE
    London’s other freestanding monument is Cleopatra’s Needle which in reality pre-dates the Egyptian queen by almost 1,500 years. Given to England by the ruler of Egypt in 1819 it was not brought to England from Egypt until 1877, when it was transported in a specially designed cylindrical pontoon which almost sank in a gale in the Bay of Biscay in which six seamen lost their lives. It was erected on the Victoria Embankment in 1878 above a time capsule which contains a copy of Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, a set of morning newspapers, a Bible and, oddly, pictures of 12 attractive women.

    Raising Cleopatras Needle
    Where the Great Fire burned for three days in the 17th century, the lesser-known Great Bishopsgate Fire of 1964 burned for seven days. On 5th December the London Fire Brigade was alerted to a fire at the British Railways Bishopsgate Goods Depot near Liverpool Street. Two hundred and thirty-six men and 61 appliances were used to extinguish the blaze and were finally removed from the scene on 12th December, a week later. Two people died and Liverpool Street Station was closed for a week. A coroner’s enquiry established that the fire had probably been started deliberately, possibly to conceal theft from the goods at the depot. Nothing was ever proved.

St Giles takes one for team GB
Poets, martyrs, bombs and the turning point of the Battle of Britain
    I n Fore Street, Cripplegate, is one of London’s most amazing churches, almost lost amidst the brick, glass and steel of the Barbican. John Foxe, author of
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,
is buried here as are the Elizabethan explorer Martin Frobisher and the poet John Milton. Oliver Cromwell, who appointed Milton to the post of Secretary of Foreign Tongues while he was Lord Protector, was married in this little church and the children of Edmund Shakespeare were baptised here. A long tradition holds that Edmund’s brother, William Shakespeare, acted as their godfather and this legend gained strength in 2007 when it was learned that in 1604 William was lodging with a Huguenot family called Mountjoy in Silver Street, nearby, within the parish of St Giles. Another worshipper at the time was Sir Thomas Lucy, who is buried in the church and who was satirised by Shakespeare as Justice Shallow in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
following a poaching incident by William in Lucy’s deer park near Stratford-upon-Avon.

    St Giless Church
    But perhaps this little church’s greatest claim to a place in history lies not with poets but with bombs. On 24th August 1940 a German bomber became lost at night over southern England. The Luftwaffe had been ordered to attack Royal Air Force (RAF) stations to eliminate the RAF in