Monthly Archives: October 2023

Great Fire, Viewpoints

City Heights

Where can one go to look down at the City? Here are some possibilities in literally ascending order.

MONUMENT TO THE GREAT FIRE

Fish St Hill, EC3R 8AH

202′ high, 360 degreee view.

Tickets are £6, can be had on the day or in advance.

themonument.org.uk/plan/buy-tickets

There may a bit of a wait as only so many people are allowed up at once. Access to the top is via a narrow spiral staircase which may not suit everybody.

Cannon Street and London Bridge BR stations are 10 minutes walk away. Monument Underground (Circle, District and Northern lines) is right by the Monument.

GARDEN AT 120

120 Fenchurch Street, EC3M 5BA

226′ high. Has a 360 degree view. Not as high as Sky Garden (see below) but this can mean things are clearer as they are easier to see. Great view of Docklands as well as the City.

Entry is free and there is rarely a queue.

www.thegardenat120.com

Fenchurch Street BR stations is 5 minutes walk away. Monument Underground (Circle, District and Northern lines), 10 minutes. Bank Underground (Central, DLR, Waterloo and City), 15 minutes.

SKY GARDEN

20 Fenchurch Street/Philpot Lane, EC3M 8AF

Atop the 525′ high ‘Walkie-Talkie’, the City’s most popular viewpoint.

Tickets are free but one often needs to book to avoid long queues

skygarden.london

Cannon Street and London Bridge BR stations are 10 minutes walk away. Monument Underground (Circle, District and Northern lines) , 5 minutes.

22 BISHOPSGATE (HORIZON 22)

22 Bishopsgate, EC3V 4QT

912′ high, the City’s tallest building. Great views East, South and West. Also look down on Tower 42, previously the NatWest tower, to see the Natwest logo on the top.

Tickets are free but must be booked. There is a limit on the size of bags that may be taken so check the website.

horizon22.co.uk

Cannon Street, Liverpool Street and London Bridge BR stations are 10-15 minutes walk away. Monument Underground (Circle, District and Northern lines), 10 minutes. Bank Underground (Central, DLR, Waterloo and City), 10 minutes.

400s, Language, Tangential Topics

Old English

…or Anglo Saxon

Considered to have been spoken during the Old English period from 450-1150.

This is the earliest recorded period of English language, up until Middle English took over in 1150.

Mainly the language of Germanic immigrants (and invaders!) . The language was also referred to as Anglo-Saxon.

1800s, Creatures, Engineers, Railways, Shipworm, Tunnels

Wapping Tunnel and Station

Wapping station opened in December 1879 as part of the East London railway but its story began over 50 years earlier.

in the early 1800s there was a need to connect the north and south docks. There were two unsuccessful attempts to dig a tunnel but these were thwarted by the soft clay and quicksand which caused the tunnel rooves to collapse. The project was declared impractical.

A French engineer, however, believed that he had a solution. Although he he no record of tunnel building he persuaded investors to finance a tunnel from Rotherhithe to Wapping. One of those investors was Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington. That engineer was called Marc Brunel who had patented a device called the tunnelling shield.

How did this work? Brunel had chanced upon a marine creature called a Shipworm. This bored tunnels through wood but in its wake secreted a coating of limestone particles on the tunnel walls to stop them collapsing.

The shield had similar principles, a round framework accommodating a dozen or so men who would dig into the sand and mud whilst bricklayers reinforced the tunnel walks behind them.

Construction started in 1825 and progress was slow, about a foot per week. There were often leaks and noxious river water would poor through. Other hazards were methane which was inflammable and hydrogen sulphide which was poisonous.

In 1827 the roof was breached and Brunel’s son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, repaired it using a diving bell lowered from a boat. Afterwards they held a dinner party in the tunnel to celebrate!

It was finally completed in 1843 at a cost of £630,000. Instead of being a thoroughfare between the docks it was ornately decorated and accommodated London’s second shopping arcade!

The tunnel was fashionable to visit, charged an admission fee of one penny to over 2 million people each year.

In 1865 is was purchased by the East London railway and became it’s northern terminus.

It is now the deepest underground station on the Overground network.

In the 1860s a young engineer called James Greathead, inspired by Brunel’s shield, developed his own version and used this to build the second tunnel under the Thames from Tower Hill to Southwark (if you want to know more, come on my Tower Hill walk). Greathead’s shield was subsequently used to build the first tunnelled underground lines including the Waterloo & City and Northern Lines.

The Wapping Tunnel is part of my Docklands North Bank walk.

1600s, Architects, Astronomy, Churches, DRAFTS, Scientists

Christopher Wren

1632-1723

We all know Wren as an architect but at the age of just 25 he was appointed professor of astronomy at Gresham College.

He studied mathematics, mechanics, medicine, meteorology and microscopy. He was a member of parliament who served three terms in the House of Commons and, despite being born a sickly child in the 1600s lived to the age of 90.

It is, however, as an architect that we best know him. in 1669, three years after the Great Fire, King Charles II appointed him Surveyor of Works and charged him with rebuilding the City.

Rebuild it, he did. Aside from other buildings, he rebuilt 52 City of London churches including St Paul’s cathedral.

He was assisted by architect and polymath Robert Hooke and worked alongside architect Nicholas Hawksmoor.

He laid the groundwork for the formation of the Royal Society of which he was later president.

1600s, Creatures, Health and disease, Plague

Great Plague

The Great Plague started in May 1665 and it was nasty stuff – worse than Man Flu. It’s reckoned that it killed 75,000 Londoners

A little biology lesson! If you see a rat in London today then it is a Brown rat.

Back in the 1600s, however, the resident rat was the Black Rat and it was believed for some time that these carried the Bubonic plague which was then passed to people by fleas.

This has proved not to be the case and the disease was actually passed from human to human by fleas and lice.

Not the first plague epidemic in London, that being the Black Death in 1348/49. Last recorded case in UK was in 1679. The last recorded case in China though, was in 2019 – but 2022 in the USA.

Want to know more? Come on either my Billingsgate or City Essentials walk.

1600s, Astronomy, DRAFTS, Scientists

Robert Hooke

1635-1703.

Hooke was a scientist engaged in a number of disciplines. He formulated Hooke’s Law relating to elastic properties of materials.

Hooke became curator of experiments for the Royal Society in 1662.

Three years later, in 1665, he was appointed Professor of Geometry at Gresham College.

Hooke was a pioneer in the development of the microscope and also wrote papers on gravity which are respected to this day.

As an architect he was chief assistant to Christopher Wren when rebuilding the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666.

Like Wren, Hooke was an astronomer and determined to prove that the earth rotated around the sun. This led to a failed experiment involving the star Gamma Draconis.

1500s, Education

Gresham College

This was effectively the first university in the City of London. Funded by a bequest from financier Thomas Gresham it was built in Bishopsgate in 1571. It stood near where Tower 42 aka the Natwest Building now stands.

It was a place, of course, of education but also of research. The Royal Society first met here in 1660 with Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke in attendance.

The college still operates today. It does not accept students nor issue degrees but offers around 140 free lectures each year.

Today it is located in the west of the City on Holborn at Barnard’s Inn Hall.

1600s, Astronomy, Tangential Topics

Gamma Draconis

Many of you will know the tower called The Monument. You may not know that its design was inspired by an object 150 light years away.

The Monument commemorated the Great Fire of 1666 and was built by Christopher Wren. The architect, however, was not Wren but his assistant Robert Hooke who had a particular plan for the building.

Like Wren he was also an astronomer. At this time some scientists still believed that the sun rotated around the earth. Hooke was determined to prove that the opposite was true.

A star called Gamma Draconis passes over the City every night and Hooke reasoned that by taking observations of the star at different times of the year he could prove that the earth went around the sun.

To do this he needed a telescope around 200’ long and, obviously somewhere to put it. The tower, therefore, was also an observatory.

Hooke’s astronomy was perfect, his calculations were flawless, the telescope was built with absolute precision and positioned perfectly within the building.

He had, however, failed to take two factors into consideration. His observations could involve fractions of a millimetre but every time a vehicle rolled down nearby Fish Street Hill, the tower vibrated slightly and upset his readings. Also, surprisingly for an architect, he’d failed to consider that a 200’ tall building would sway in the wind!

PARALLAX

How would Hooke’s experiment have worked? He was using something called parallax.

Here’s an example. Stand at the end of a room and choose something, say a picture, on the opposite wall. Take 3 paces left and you’ll be looking at the picture from a certain angle. Take 6 paces right and the angle changes. This is parallex.

He theorised that if the earth went around the sun then in, say, June it would be one side of the sun and in December on the other. and there would be quite a long way between the two.

If he took observations of Gamma Draconis in June and then again in December and the star was shown to be at a different angle (albeit a tiny one) then this would prove that the earth was indeed circling the sun.