A domed baroque cathedral with two towers and a columned portico, a statue on a pedestal in front, taxis on the road.

A long timber shelter with a tiled roof over a brick wall set with rows of white ceramic tablets.

A white ceramic tablet with blue-green lettering naming Alice Ayres and a burning house in Union Street, 1885.

A floodlit medieval hall with a pinnacled porch across a wide paved yard at blue hour.

A wide paved yard under a dark sky, a curved dark band set into the paving in the foreground, Guildhall behind.

City classics, London

The City: The Great Fire and Who Paid to Rebuild London

Name: The City: The Great Fire and Who Paid to Rebuild London
SKU: 188

$18.95 per tour

Two plans for a new London, a Lord Mayor’s question, a wall of forgotten heroes, a buried hoard, a statue that survived, a hanged man who could not have done it, a gap on the bridge and Pepys’s Parmesan, from St Paul’s to the Tower

Categories: City classics, London

Phones: 2 included, extra phones $2.95 each
Length: About 95 minutes
Distance: About 3.3 km (2.1 mi)
Stops: 8
Effort: Easy
Starts at: St Paul's Cathedral
Ends at: All Hallows-by-the-Tower
Language: English

Content advisory: Families are welcome; the walk mentions deaths in fires (a Victorian rescue, the few recorded deaths of 1666), a wrongful hanging and, in the optional bonus, the plague of 1665, without graphic detail, and quotes one coarse remark attributed to the Lord Mayor.

This is a self-guided smartphone experience. No human guide will meet you.

Start when you want, pause whenever you like, explore side streets, and go at your own pace.

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Description

A self-guided audio walk through the City of London, following the Great Fire of 1666 backward, from St Paul’s Cathedral to the church by the Tower where it was stopped in the east, almost at Samuel Pepys’s door. Within days of the fire, Christopher Wren and John Evelyn drew a new London of wide, straight streets, so why did the City rebuild its crooked lanes? The answer starts with a question the Lord Mayor is reported to have asked as the fire took hold, who would pay to rebuild?, and you will hear it come back at most stops: in a garden where a painter named ordinary Londoners who died saving others, in the yard of the medieval Guildhall, on the street where a goldsmith’s hoard lay buried for almost three hundred years, at the Royal Exchange where only the founder’s statue survived, beside the Monument and the story of the man hanged for a fire he could not have started, by the old approach to London Bridge, and at the tower Pepys climbed after burying his wine and his Parmesan cheese. Everything is told from public streets and open spaces; nothing is narrated inside St Paul’s, the Tower of London or any paid space, and no tickets are sold or bundled. Diarists are quoted as diarists and every legend is labeled.

The stops

St Paul’s: A Plan for a New City
Postman’s Park: The Names on the Wall
Guildhall Yard: The Lord Mayor’s Question
Cheapside: Treasure Under the Street
Bank Junction: The Statue That Survived
The Monument: The Wrong Man
St Magnus the Martyr: The Gap on the Bridge
All Hallows by the Tower: The Saddest Sight

Finding the start

Start at the top of Ludgate Hill, on the sidewalk west of Queen Anne’s statue, facing the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral (St Paul’s station on the Central line is about 300 meters north-east; many buses stop on Ludgate Hill).

Terrain and access

About 3.3 kilometers, step-free on paved sidewalks, pedestrian lanes and one public garden, gently downhill overall toward the river. Signalized crossings at Ludgate Hill, Newgate Street, St Martin’s Le Grand, the Bank junction, Gracechurch Street and Eastcheap, and twice on Lower Thames Street. Busy traffic at the Bank junction and on Lower Thames Street and Byward Street. Postman’s Park closes at dusk and Guildhall Yard is sometimes closed for events; both stops can be heard from the adjoining street. No admissions. The walk ends about 250 meters from Tower Hill station.

Tickets

Postman’s Park and Guildhall Yard can close (the park at dusk, the yard for events); nothing on the route needs a ticket.

What you get

An email from [email protected] with a link and an access code.
Use it on your phone or tablet in an up-to-date web browser, no app store needed. There is no account to set up before you start.
Download it on Wi-Fi before you go. After that it works offline: audio, text, map and pictures.
Your booking includes 2 phones, so two of you can follow along, each on your own. Extra phones are $2.95 each, or a group can share one phone on its speaker.
Play, pause and replay every part, skip back and ahead, or change the playback speed. Keep the screen on or tap play at each stop.

How it was made

Every fact in the narration is checked against a cited source, and legends are told as legends. The narration is written from that research. How our tours are made.