The First Stone of the New City

Seen from above in the spring of 1667, London was a geography of ash and memory, a terrain defined by what the fire had left and what men now had to remake. The streets were tracks in the mind, the walls stood roofless, and the open cellars gaped at the sky. To the north, the poor had camped in fields; to the west, they crowded into unscorched parishes; others had simply drifted away. Merchants conducted business from temporary quarters, from Southwark, from Westminster, from the ships on the Thames. Parliament had set the framework, the Fire Court had begun its work, and surveyors measured what remained. Now, with the earth softened and the Thames running high, the ground itself awaited its new lines.

It was April 1667. The earth had softened. The Thames ran high with spring rain. And across the ruined wards, men with chains and rods were fixing the lines upon which everything else would depend.

They moved in teams, these measurers, employed by the City Corporation and authorized by the Rebuilding Acts. Their job was to restore what the fire had dissolved: the boundaries between properties, the widths of streets, the courses of former lanes that might now be widened or straightened or erased. They worked with Fire Court records at their elbow, with the testimony of neighbors who remembered where a wall had stood, with the debris itself—hearthstones, foundation courses, the occasional iron hinge that marked a threshold. The ash was still deep in places, black and greasy, mixed with the rubble of collapsed upper stories. Men with shovels cleared the surveyors’ path. The work was slow, contentious, and essential. Without measured ground, no foundations. Without foundations, no rebuilding.

On Thames Street, near the site of the Steelyard where the Hanseatic merchants had once stored their goods, a team of surveyors was having particular difficulty. The fire had burned hottest here, close to the river, where the warehouses had held oil, tar, hemp, the resinous goods of maritime trade. The cellars had collapsed. The river wall itself had partially failed in the heat, and the tide had washed through, carrying away ash and evidence together.

An old merchant named William Warren, whose family had traded from this waterfront for three generations, stood watching the surveyors argue. His warehouse was gone. He had spent the winter in litigation, first in the Fire Court to establish his title against a ground landlord who claimed the fire had voided their lease, then in negotiation with the City surveyors who wanted to widen Thames Street by fourteen feet and take a slice of his former frontage.

The Fire Court had ruled in his favor in February 1667. The special court, established under the Fire of London Disputes Act 1666 and authorized to sit until December 1668, had found that his leasehold survived the destruction of the building upon it.

He was tenant still. But tenant of what? Of a hole in the ground, filled with water at high tide and broken pottery at low.

Warren had made his decision. On the morning of 23 April 1667, he hired laborers and set them to work. They came with shovels, with wheelbarrows, with the long iron bars used to pry apart charred timbers. Their first task was to clear the site to the level of the old river wall, which Warren’s father had built in 1612 and which survived, cracked but standing, along the water’s edge. The men worked in the stink of tidal mud, in the malarial air that rose from exposed cellars. They found things: the iron rim of a barrel, fused by heat; a cache of coins, blackened silver shillings melted into an unrecognizable lump; the bones of a dog, perhaps trapped when the roof fell.

Warren did not watch. He was negotiating with a brickmaker from Southwark who had set up his clamps on the fields north of the wall, burning London’s clay into the material of its own reconstruction. The price was high. Everything was high. Labor was scarce, timber scarcer, and brick—the brick mandated by the Rebuilding of London Act 1666 for all new construction—was selling at rates that made the old wooden London seem, in retrospect, economically inevitable.

The first foundations were laid in the third week of April. Warren’s men dug down to the old wall, then stepped back and began to raise the new structure: brick walls, minimum thickness two bricks deep; no projecting jetties; no overhanging upper stories; no wooden frontages facing the street. The new Thames Street would be fourteen feet wider than the old. Warren’s building would stand back from the water, its frontage reduced, its river access slightly more awkward than before. He accepted this. The Act gave him no choice. But he negotiated, simultaneously, for a private wharf where the old one had been, projecting into the river beyond the new street line, and for this he paid the City a premium that consumed most of his ready capital.

This was the pattern that spring. The Fire Court, grinding through its caseload of disputed titles and broken leases, produced the certainty that made construction possible. The Rebuilding Act supplied the rules: brick, not wood; wider streets; no obstruction of the riverfront. And individual owners, armed with verdicts and driven by necessity, began to break ground wherever they could. The work was not coordinated. There was no master plan, no central authority directing where the first buildings should rise. The City Corporation controlled the streets and public wharves. The King and his ministers retained interest in the overall design, particularly St. Paul’s and the other churches. But the warehouses, the shops, the tenements rose or did not rise according to private calculation, private credit, private risk.

Christopher Wren observed this process with the frustration of a man whose own plans remained on paper.

He had been appointed Surveyor of the King’s Works in 1661, before the fire, and his architectural ambitions had grown with the disaster’s scale. In the months after September 1666, he had produced a grand design for the entire City: a rational grid of streets, wide boulevards replacing the medieval tangle, great piazzas where markets could function without the congestion that had helped spread the flames. He had shown these drawings to the King, to the Royal Society, to anyone who would look. They were beautiful. They were impossible.

The legal and economic structure of London property ownership—freeholds, leaseholds, copyholds, the labyrinth of rights that the Fire Court was only beginning to untangle—made any comprehensive replanning a fantasy. Wren knew this. He continued to draw, refining his vision, waiting for the commission that would let him build at least the public monuments: the cathedral, the churches, the column that Parliament had already authorized to mark the fire’s beginning.

But in the spring of 1667, Wren’s grand design was not being built. What was being built was Warren’s warehouse, and dozens like it, rising in isolation across the ruined wards without reference to any coordinating vision. The surveyors had established the street lines, more or less. The Act mandated brick construction and minimum widths.

Beyond that, each owner built to his own needs, his own purse, his own timetable. The result was not a city but a collection of buildings, separated by cleared ground where owners had not yet found capital or resolution to begin. From the Royal Exchange, the view was still predominantly of absence.

But here and there, particularly along the river where maritime commerce created the most urgent pressure, the new walls were rising: two stories, three stories, gabled roofs replaced by the flatter profiles that brick encouraged, the whole presenting an appearance of modest, provisional, determined resurrection.

Samuel Pepys, climbing to the roof of his house in Seething Lane on a clear May morning, could see the progress and its limits. His own dwelling had survived the fire, one of the fortunate few in the eastern wards, and he had spent the winter consolidating: moving goods back from emergency storage in Woolwich, resuming his work as Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board, watching the political currents that swirled around the fire’s aftermath.

He was a man who noticed construction. On 15 May 1667, he recorded in his diary a visit to the site of the new Royal Exchange, where the Mercers were rebuilding with a speed that suggested both capital and confidence. He noted, too, the slower progress elsewhere, the gaps where owners disputed titles or lacked funds to begin. The diary entry catches the texture: the mixture of recovery and continued disruption, the sense that London was becoming functional again without yet becoming whole.

Pepys had his own rebuilding to consider. His house needed repairs—fire damage to the roof, water damage from the efforts to save it, the general deterioration of a structure that had endured both disaster and winter. He hired workmen in June, negotiating rates he found extortionate but unavoidable. The labor market was tight. Thousands of buildings needed attention. Craftsmen could command prices unthinkable in 1665, before the plague and fire together had thinned their ranks and concentrated demand. Pepys paid, and complained in his diary, and paid again. The work proceeded in fits and starts, as materials arrived late or workmen were drawn to more lucrative jobs. By July, his house was weatherproof, though finishing would occupy the autumn.

The Fire Court, meanwhile, continued its essential labor. The special jurisdiction established in February 1667 had been designed for speed: cases heard within days of filing, verdicts rendered by judges who understood both property law and the emergency’s demands. The court sat in the Painted Chamber at Westminster, or in temporary quarters when Westminster was needed for other business.

Its records show the volume: thousands of disputes between tenants and landlords, mortgagees and mortgagors, heirs who could not agree on the division of burned inheritance. The typical case was simple in outline, complex in detail. A tenant claimed his lease continued despite the building’s destruction; the landlord argued the fire had terminated the lease by frustration, leaving the tenant with no rights and the landlord free to relet at higher rates. The court’s rulings, generally favorable to tenants willing to rebuild, created the legal foundation for the construction now visible across the City.

But the court’s work was not without controversy. The ground landlords, particularly the great corporate bodies—the City livery companies, the Cathedral chapters, the Crown itself—resented the preference given to rebuilding tenants. Their income depended on rents; the fire had given them, they believed, opportunity to renegotiate leases at rates reflecting the post-disaster economy. The court’s decisions limited this opportunity, binding them to old terms while their tenants erected new buildings that would increase in value with recovery. Some resisted, appealing verdicts, delaying compliance, using every legal maneuver to preserve position. The Fire Court’s authority, though broad, was not absolute. It operated within a legal culture that respected property rights and procedural regularity, even in emergency. The result was compromise: enough certainty to permit rebuilding, enough continued dispute to remind everyone that the fire’s legal consequences would persist for years.

On the ground, this compromise translated into a particular rhythm of work. A property owner with a favorable Fire Court judgment could begin construction with reasonable confidence that his title would not be challenged. One whose case was still pending, or whose neighbors disputed the boundaries the surveyors had marked, might clear his site and even dig foundations, but would hesitate to raise walls that might have to be moved or demolished. The spring and summer of 1667 saw much preparatory labor—site clearance, boundary negotiation, the purchase of materials—without a corresponding volume of finished buildings. Warren, with his warehouse rising on Thames Street, was exceptional in his progress. More typical was the situation on Cheapside, where the great shopping street of pre-fire London remained largely open, its former sites marked by nothing more than chalked lines and occasional heaps of salvaged stone.

The Rebuilding Act’s provisions for street widening created particular difficulties. The Act mandated that certain main thoroughfares be expanded, taking land from the frontages that lined them. This was publicly rational—wider streets would retard future fires, improve commerce, allow the passage of fire engines—but privately costly. Owners whose buildings had survived the fire, or who had rebuilt quickly, found themselves required to demolish or set back their frontages to accommodate the new lines. The compensation provisions were inadequate, the enforcement inconsistent. Some complied, grudgingly. Others resisted, arguing that their buildings predated the Act, or that the surveyors had marked the lines incorrectly, or simply that they lacked funds to rebuild twice. The City Corporation, responsible for enforcement, found itself negotiating with individual owners case by case, the grand design of safer streets dissolving into myriad particular settlements.

Wren watched this process with the eye of an architect who understood that his own opportunities depended on its success or failure. The cathedral, the churches, the public monuments he hoped to build required a city that was being rebuilt, not merely a collection of individual structures rising in isolation. He needed streets that functioned, a population that returned, an economic life that justified investment in grandeur.

In the summer of 1667, he was working on preliminary designs for St. Paul’s, sketching domes and porticoes, calculating the engineering problems of a structure that would dwarf anything London had known.

But he was also, increasingly, involved in practical work of surveying and regulation, serving on committees, advising the King on implementation of the Rebuilding Acts. The gap between his visionary drawings and the messy reality of construction was not, for him, a source of despair but of strategic patience. He would build what he could, when he could, using the authority he accumulated in the years of recovery.

The first stone of the new St. Paul’s was not yet laid in the summer of 1667. The ruins of the old cathedral still dominated the skyline, its broken walls and blackened tower a reminder of the fire’s reach and the scale of the task ahead. Wren had proposed, in one early design, to incorporate the surviving structure into a new building, preserving the medieval footprint while adding a classical superstructure. This proposal was rejected, finally and formally, in the spring of 1667; the old walls were too compromised, the opportunity for a fresh beginning too compelling. The demolition of the remains began in earnest in June, workmen carefully saving what stone could be reused, letting the rest fall. By August, the site was cleared to the level of the crypt, and Wren was preparing foundations for a building that would not rise above ground for several years yet.

This was the temporal scale of genuine reconstruction. The warehouses on Thames Street, the houses in the eastern parishes, the shops and tenements beginning to fill gaps in the commercial districts—these could be built in months, given capital and labor. A cathedral, a civic monument, the physical expression of a city’s identity and aspiration, required years of planning, of fundraising, of political negotiation. Wren understood this. He was laying foundations, in 1667, for a career that would extend across four decades, that would see him outlive the King who appointed him and serve his successor, that would transform the skyline of London more radically than the fire itself had done. But in the immediate aftermath, his work was invisible, administrative, preparatory.

The contrast between Wren’s long timeline and the urgent present needs of the city’s merchants and residents created tensions that would persist throughout the rebuilding. The Rebuilding Act of 1666 had authorized the column on Fish Street Hill, near the site of Thomas Farriner’s bakery, to commemorate the fire’s beginning. But the column was not yet built in 1667. The immediate priority was functional construction, the replacement of the working city, not the erection of monuments to its destruction. Memory would wait. Commerce could not.

This prioritization was visible in the pattern of construction that emerged across the summer of 1667. The eastern wards, closest to the fire’s origin and most completely destroyed, remained largely empty. The pressure of rebuilding concentrated in the central and western commercial districts, where property values were highest and the economic incentive to return was strongest. The riverfront, as Warren’s warehouse demonstrated, led the recovery, maritime trade being the engine that drove everything else. The inland streets, the residential lanes, the poorer parishes where tenants had neither capital to rebuild nor security of tenure to encourage it, lagged behind. The city that was emerging was not the unified, rationally planned metropolis of Wren’s drawings, but a patchwork of recovery, with dense new construction beside continuing ruin, prosperous districts beside desolate ones, the whole bound together by the legal framework of the Fire Court and the physical requirements of the Rebuilding Acts.

John Evelyn, visiting the site in July 1667, recorded his impressions with characteristic moral intensity. He had been an early advocate of comprehensive replanning, of using the disaster to create a city worthy of a great commercial empire. His diary entry for 21 July notes the progress of individual buildings, the brick walls rising where wooden ones had stood, the wider streets taking shape where surveyors had marked their lines. But he notes, too, the failures: the continued narrowness of lanes that the Act had mandated for widening, the wooden structures going up in defiance of the brick requirement, the general absence of the grand unified design he had hoped for. “It is to be feared,” he wrote, “that the opportunity is lost.”

The opportunity, as Evelyn understood it, was not merely architectural but moral: the chance to build a city that would be safer, healthier, more beautiful, more just in its distribution of space and air and light.

The city that was actually being built was safer than its predecessor, certainly; the brick construction and wider streets would retard the spread of future fires. But it was not the transformation he had envisioned. It was, instead, a pragmatic adaptation, a recovery that prioritized function over form, commerce over grandeur, the immediate needs of property owners over the long-term vision of planners.

Evelyn’s disappointment was balanced, in the practical world of 1667, by the genuine achievement of recovery. The city was being rebuilt. The legal machinery was functioning. The materials were flowing—brick from the suburban clamps, stone from quarries reopening after winter, timber from the Baltic trade that had resumed its rhythms. The population was returning, slowly, from the fields and the western parishes where it had dispersed. By September 1667, the first anniversary of the fire’s end, there were hundreds of new buildings complete or nearing completion, thousands of foundations dug, a visible transformation of the urban landscape that justified the effort and expense of the preceding year.

This was the decisive turn that the spring and summer of 1667 represented: the transition from the legal and administrative work of establishing possibility to the physical work of realizing it. The Fire Court’s verdicts, the surveyors’ lines, the provisions of the Rebuilding Acts—these had created the conditions for construction. Now construction was happening, not everywhere and not always according to plan, but happening nonetheless, the incremental accumulation of walls and roofs and floors that would eventually constitute the new London.

The process was messy, contested, imperfect. It produced a city that was safer but not safe, improved but not transformed, rebuilt but not redeemed. But it produced a city. The alternative—continued paralysis, legal uncertainty, economic decline—was visible in the empty eastern wards, in the disputes that still clogged the Fire Court, in the owners who lacked the capital or the confidence to begin. Against this alternative, the pragmatic, piecemeal, private-spirited reconstruction of 1667 was a genuine achievement.

Warren’s warehouse was finished in October 1667. He moved his goods in—Baltic hemp, Norwegian tar, the materials of maritime commerce that had been his stock before the fire and would be again. The building was smaller than its predecessor, set back from the wider Thames Street, constructed throughout of brick with no projecting timbers to catch a spark. It was, by the standards of the old London, plain and severe. By the standards of the new, it was typical.

And from its upper windows, Warren could look across the river to Southwark, where the rebuilding was also proceeding, and north to the wall of the City, and east to the still-empty ground where the fire had burned longest and hottest. In the middle distance, dominating every prospect, rose the ruined skeleton of St. Paul’s, its broken walls cleared now to the foundation, waiting for the work that would not begin in earnest until the following spring. The sight of that ruin, still towering over the new construction that surrounded it, posed a question that the pragmatic work of 1667 had not answered: how the city would memorialize its trauma, whether the new London would acknowledge the old or simply bury it, whether the fire would be remembered or merely recovered from.