Samuel Pepys’ London – Bloody, Flaming, Poxy London

Tower Hill tube station, London

Guided by

"I am inclined to think that Pepys when all is said is the greatest of the Londoners – a fuller, more intensely alive Londoner than either Johnson or Lamb. Perhaps he wins his pre-eminence rather by his littleness, for to be a Londoner in the highest one must be rather trivial or at least be interested in trivialities." E V Lucas. So that's the measure of the man – the greatest of the Londoners. But it's not just Pepys we're tracking down, it's his London. And what a London it was. His three score and ten were the formative years in the life of our city. They're the bridge across – from mediaeval London to recognisably modern London, our London. They were the most dramatic – and indeed traumatic – years of London's life. The Plague, the Great Fire, the Civil War, the trial and execution of a Charles I, the Interregnum, the Restoration, the Great Wind, the Great Freeze, the Glorious Revolution, the Act of Settlement, the hoving into view of the Treaty of Union, the work of Newton and Hooke and Boyle and the Royal Society. And Wren perhaps summing up everything in his "true language of the intellect…his calculus in stone and plaster and wood." That's the London this walk explores. It is, in a word, thrilling.  Guided by Hilary, OBE.