Bob & Betty go British

The Boy of Pye Corner

On Monday, the bank holiday with seemingly no reason to be, we went on another walking tour. This time we went to follow the trail of the Great Fire of London. We started off at Monument station. The monument was designed by Sir Christopher Wren to commemorate the fire in 1666 which burnt for 3 days cosuming more than 13,000 houses and devastating 436 acres of the city. The monument is 202ft tall and can be climbed for a small fee. We didn't climb it as we were feeling a little hungry and wanted to find somewhere to eat first. We saw Pudding Lane which housed the bakers shop in which the fire started. We also saw lots of little plaques on walls saying where old buildings used to be before the fire destroyed them. It was rather strange to walk around as there are so many office buildings in that area making it rather difficult to imagine how it used to be. Many of the churches and old buildings were rebuilt, while other places were demolished and replaced. Some of the buildings took elements of the old as part of the new. One thing I never knew was the fact that they blamed gluttony and sometimes the papists for the fire - at least that's what the little boy at pye corner was meant to represent:

"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 he was originally built into the front of a public house called 'The Fortune of War' which used to occupy this site and was pulled down in 1910. The 'Fortune of War' was the chief house of call north of the river for resurrectionists in body snatching days. Years ago the landlord used to show the room where on benches round the walls the bodies where placed labelled with the snatchers' names waiting till the surgeons at St Bartholomew's could run round and appraise them."

The grammar is a little troubled, but I think it makes some sort of sense. We left Juliet to check out the Notting Hill festival with another friend and we escaped home. I wasn't terribly interested in being caught up in the crush of hundreds of thousands of people all trying to fit in to the one place.

We sent Juliet off to Paris on Tuesday for a couple of days. Personally I think she just wanted to get away from me in my bad mood ;-).

posted by Elisabeth @ 9:15 PM