By Permission Of Heaven: The Story of the Great Fire of London [Paperback]

The great fire of London, here documented by Adrian Tinniswood in By Permission of Heaven is an apt reminder of urban disaster 17th-century-style. The story of the fire, which began in a bakery in Pudding Lane, is well-known, but as well as focusing on the fire itself--its cause, spread and its victims--Tinniswood is good at setting out the wider background to the event. He shows how the fire not only followed the devastation of the bubonic plague, but also came in the midst of the Anglo-Dutch war, public resentment at the restoration of the pro-Catholic Charles II and lingering anti-court feeling in the Square Mile (the City had stoutly supported Cromwell 20 years earlier). He focuses on the leading personalities of the drama--the gallant Duke of York, the hapless Sir Thomas Bludworth, the fussy Samuel Pepys, and the visionary Sir Christopher Wren.

Tinniswood is not distracted by trivia. He describes clearly the longer-term consequences of the fire: the rebuilding of the City, the emergence of fire insurance, and the exodus of noxious trades into the outer reaches of the capital. Above all, Tinniswood shows how anti-Catholic and xenophobic bigotry convinced Londoners for decades afterwards that an axis of evil starting in Popish Rome and ending with foreign arsonists was the real cause of the fire. Then, as now, religious fundamentalism and common-sense did not go hand-in-hand. --Miles Taylor --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Praise for "His Invention So Fertile: A Life of Christopher Wren":
"Lively, knowledgeable, affectionate...a fine biography." -- "Sunday Times"
"Powered by an engrossing passion for its subject." -- Andrew Motion, "Financial Times"

"From the Hardcover edition."

A magnificently told, thrilling account of one of the most dramatic events in British history.

There had been other fires, of course. Four hundred and fifty years before, the city had almost burned to the ground. The citizens still called it the Great Fire. But that autumn they were more fearful of destruction borne by water. Across the sea, the Dutch and French threatened a country barely recovered from civil war and still uncertain of its new King. Yet the signs from the heavens were ominous: comets, pyramids of flame, monsters born in city slums. Then, in the early hours of 2 September 1666, a small fire broke out on the ground floor of a baker's house in Pudding Lane. In five days that small fire would devastate the third largest city in the Western world: London. By Permission of Heaven, Adrian Tinniswood's magnificent new account of the Great Fire of London, explores the history of a cataclysm and its consequences, from that first small blaze to the decades-long work of rebuilding. The statistics of the disaster are terrible: 436 acres of closely packed streets burned; 13,200 houses destroyed; -10 million lost at a time when -10 million represented the City's annual income for 800 years. But the Great Fire wasn't simply a tragedy of economics or architecture. It wrecked lives and destroyed livelihoods, it killed and maimed, and it drove Londoners mad in their quest for vengeance. By Permission of Heaven pieces together the untold human story of the Fire and its aftermath - the panic and terror, the bewilderment and violence and chaos, the search for scapegoats, the rebirth of a city. Above all, it provides an unsurpassable recreation of what happened to schoolchildren and servants, courtiers and clergymen when the streets of London ran with fire and 'by ye Permission of Heaven, Hell broke loose upon this Protestant City.' (20030723)

A magnificently told, thrilling account of one of the most dramatic events in British history.

Adrian Tinniswood is a historian and educationalist. He has taught in various British universities, and was for many years consultant to the National Trust on heritage education. He is the author of eleven previous books, including The Polite Tourist: A History of Country House Visiting, Visions of Power: Ambition and Architecture, and, most recently, a biography of Sir Christopher Wren. (20030723)