00:00360 years ago this week, London was about to burn.
00:03But before the first spark caught at a bakery right here on Pudding Lane on the 2nd of September,
00:08the capital had been baked by a months-long drought, making timber as dry as tinder.
00:12Sound familiar?
00:13As Britain faces record-breaking heatwaves and wildfire warnings this summer,
00:17the parallels to September 1666 are uncomfortably close.
00:21To understand how a scorching summer turned into one of the greatest catastrophes in British history,
00:25I've now come to Seething Lane Gardens, the site of the historic Navy office
00:29where famous diarist Samuel Pepys lived and watched the city fall,
00:33to speak to historical novelist and Pepys expert Jack Dewars,
00:36whose latest book, Seething Lane, explores the fallout of the fire.
00:39At first, people didn't know how seriously to take it.
00:42Because, you know, this was the mid-17th century.
00:45London was essentially a medieval city. Fires happened.
00:48Pepys's diary entry for the 2nd of September 1666 begins like this.
00:53And so I, down to the waterside, where I saw a lamentable fire.
00:58Poor people staying in their houses until the fire nearly touched them,
01:03and then clambering into boats. And among other things,
01:07I did perceive the poor pigeons were loath to leave their houses,
01:11and hovered about the windows and balconies until they were burned their wings and fell down.
01:18It's like war reporting, right? And yet, after that, he goes to work.
01:24He's got stuff to do. He's got a meeting. He goes to lunch.
01:27He meets his wife in St James's Park, because fire was a reality of life.
01:31While the heatwaves set the stage, Jack explains it was human inaction that doomed the city.
01:36Warnings had been issued months prior, but London's leadership refused to act.
01:40Everybody knew it was not a matter of if, but when there was a devastating fire.
01:45And there were lots of warnings. In the early hours of September 2nd of 1666,
01:50when the mayor was woken and told that his city was on fire, he said, and I quote,
01:55well, a woman might piss it out and went back to sleep.
01:58By the time he got to grips with how serious it was, essentially it was already too late.
02:03So had he acted sooner, had the whole city acted sooner,
02:07it wouldn't have cost an unknowable price in blood and treasure.
02:11Over four terrifying days, more than 13,000 homes were destroyed,
02:15leaving four-fifths of the capital in ruins,
02:18a disaster that would cost an estimated ÂŁ700 billion in today's money.
02:22Yet from those ashes, London was forced to reinvent itself,
02:25trading medieval timber frames for hard-edged brick and stone.
02:29Think how devastating it would have been for the people of London to wake up
02:33and their city was literally in ashes around them.
02:35For them it wasn't history, it was real life.
02:38And again, life went on. People rebuilt, people recovered.
02:41London proved 360 years ago that it could rebuild from total devastation.
02:45But as hotter, drier summers become our new normal, history's warning is clear.
02:50Ignoring the warning signs costs far more than acting on them.
02:53We can't prevent everything bad from happening,
02:57but we can mitigate their effects on us.
03:00I think the parallels between 1666 when we had a terribly hot summer and droughts
03:06and all sorts of warnings that a disaster was on the way,
03:10and today with climate change, with all sorts of things to do with our disaster preparedness,
03:16the warnings from history are there if we choose to read.
03:20time to read.
03:20I just want to read because it was very important.
03:20And I'm happy to read this edition of Monmouth Connection.
03:20I just want to read about it.
03:20It's amazing, it's amazing.
03:21It's amazing that you can write down a book,
03:21room and I's not going to read about 500,
03:21but I'm going to read about it.
03:21I'm not going to read about this week.
03:21I want to read about it.
