Telling the Stories of the Great Fire of London
We are delighted to present the postponed 2021 Annual Lecture, delivered by Professor Christine Stevenson.
We are planning to hold this event in a hybrid format, with the option to attend either in person or online. There will be a nominal charge for those attending in person, however the online stream will be free to attend.
How to join:
The event will be held at Edwardian Suite at the Museum of the Home (former Geffrye Museum)
136 Kingsland Rd, London E2 8EA.
You can join in person ( members £10 / non-members £20) and online (free with registration form at the bottom of the page.)
To register to attend in person, please complete our registration form by clicking here. This link will take you to a new webpage.
The Great Fire of London, with Ludgate and St Paul's, c. 1670. Oil on canvas, 134.6 x 110.8 cm (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection). Public domain
London’s Great Fire of 1666 continues to attract historians, though today they are more interested in the fiscal mechanics of reconstruction than on its architectural and cultural significance. Meanwhile, among those concerned with urban disaster more generally, the story encompasses global comparisons: the fires in Edo (Tokyo) in 1657, say, or Istanbul in 1660. Almost a century older than these scholarly trends is a more trans-historical type of analysis. In the face of 20th- and 21st-century urban disasters — the Great Kantō earthquake and fire of 1923, the bombing of London in 1940-41, and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001 — this kind of writing has sought the lessons of London’s recovery after the Fire. This lecture examines all these stories of the Fire and its aftermath, while exploring the possibilities of new ones.
Christine Stevenson is Professor of Early Modern Art and Architecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She is the author of Medicine and Magnificence: British Hospital and Asylum Architecture, 1615-1815, and The City and the King: Architecture and Politics in Restoration London, but her teaching naturally encompasses a wider range of topics. In the first instance, it was her teaching about modern monuments and modern theories of collective memory that encouraged her to look again at the Great Fire.
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