London. October 16th, 1834.
Six o’clock in the evening.
Somebody screams.
Fire!
The House of Lords is on fire.
Flames are licking through the roof. Smoke is billowing into the evening sky. Windows are exploding. Burning timbers are crashing down.
And the Thames is turning red.
Red and gold. A river of fire.
Londoners come running. Thousands of them. Onto Westminster Bridge. Down to the river’s edge. Both banks of the Thames. Thronged with people. Into boats. Anywhere they can get a view.
Because this is no ordinary fire.
The British Parliament is burning down.
An enormous, terrified crowd looks on. But the must see here is the little man on a boat in the Thames. A little man with a remarkable pair of eyes. And a remarkable hand.
Joseph Mallord William Turner.
One of the greatest painters who ever lived.
He’s 59 years old. London born and bred. The son of a Covent Garden barber.
And right now he’s witnessing the spectacle of a lifetime.
Parliament is burning down.
Turner’s got his sketchbook out.
Welcome to London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
And what a story we’ve got today.
Because exactly 192 years ago, on October 16th, 1834, the British government managed to burn down its own Parliament.
And how it managed to do so is almost too delicious for words.
Two cartloads of sticks.
That’s what did it.
Wooden sticks.
Tally sticks, to be precise.
You see, for hundreds of years the British government had kept financial records by cutting notches into pieces of wood.
A notch for this amount of money. Another notch for that amount.
Debts. Payments. Taxes.
And here’s the clever bit.
The stick was split lengthways. One half went to one party, the other half to the other.
Fit the two halves back together and you had proof of the transaction.
No fiddling the figures. The notches either matched or they didn’t.
A medieval accounting system.
And a pretty ingenious one at that.
But by 1834, tally sticks were hopelessly out of date.
And the Exchequer had accumulated an enormous quantity of them.
What to do?
Well, this is Britain. We can’t just throw government records away.
Burn them.
Excellent idea.
And where shall we burn them?
How about in the furnaces underneath the House of Lords?
Splendid.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, quite a lot, as it turned out.
The workmen began feeding the sticks into the furnaces.
And feeding them in.
And feeding them in.
The furnaces got hotter.
And hotter.
The brickwork heated up. So did the wooden structure around it.
There were warning signs.
But the burning continued.
And by six o’clock that evening, the old Palace of Westminster was on fire.
Not just a little fire.
An inferno.
The flames raced through the ancient buildings.
The roof of the House of Lords went up.
Then the fire spread towards the Commons.
Timbers crackled. Great sheets of flame leapt into the October sky.
The heat was ferocious.
And the noise!
Roaring flames. Shattering glass. Crashing beams. The shouting of the crowds. The desperate cries of the firefighters.
And above it all, a great boiling mountain of smoke.
Imagine the scene.
It’s getting dark.
The sky above Westminster is blazing orange.
The river is reflecting the flames.
The outlines of boats and bridges are black against that extraordinary light.
And Turner is taking it all in.
Now, Turner knew a thing or two about light.
Storms. Sunsets. Shipwrecks. Mountains disappearing into mist. Ships tossed about on furious seas.
He’d spent a lifetime painting nature at its most beautiful and its most terrifying.
But here was something else altogether.
Man-made destruction.
One of the great seats of government in the world going up in flames.
And a spectacle of almost unimaginable beauty.
And yes, tradition has it that Turner got himself into a boat on the Thames to get a better view.
Certainly he witnessed the fire. Certainly he made sketches.
And those sketches would eventually become two of his most extraordinary paintings.
But hold that thought.
Because meanwhile the firefighters were fighting a desperate battle.
The tide was low.
Getting water from the Thames was difficult.
The old buildings were a firetrap. Centuries of additions, alterations, passages, stairways, wooden floors and timber roofs.
The flames were winning.
The House of Lords was lost.
The House of Commons was burning.
And now the fire was threatening something infinitely older.
Westminster Hall.
That magnificent medieval hall.
Built in the reign of William Rufus, son of William the Conqueror.
Think about that.
A building that had stood there since 1097.
More than seven centuries old on the night of the fire.
And above it, that breathtaking hammerbeam roof. One of the great masterpieces of medieval carpentry.
If the flames got hold of that roof, it would be gone.
Forever.
So the battle changed.
Forget the Lords.
Forget the Commons.
Save Westminster Hall!
The firefighters concentrated their efforts there.
Londoners helped.
And against the odds, they did it.
Westminster Hall survived.
The rest of the old Palace, for the most part, was reduced to smoking ruins.
And here’s an astonishing fact.
Nobody died.
For all the destruction, all the chaos, all those thousands of people packed into the surrounding streets, there were no fatalities.
But London had lost its Parliament.
Well, its Parliament building.
And what happens when you lose a Parliament building?
You build another one.
And that’s how we got the Palace of Westminster we know today.
The great Gothic extravaganza beside the Thames.
All those pinnacles. Towers. Windows. Carved stone. Elaborate decoration.
The work of Charles Barry, with a crucial contribution from that brilliant Gothic enthusiast, Augustus Welby Pugin.
One of the most recognisable buildings on the planet.
The building that says London as surely as the Eiffel Tower says Paris.
And it’s there because somebody decided that two cartloads of old wooden accounting sticks needed burning.
You couldn’t make it up.
But now, back to Turner.
Because while the politicians were contemplating the loss of their Parliament, Turner was doing something else.
He was turning catastrophe into art.
Two great paintings came out of that extraordinary evening.
Both called The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons.
In one, the fire blazes across the river. Westminster Bridge stretches through the scene, almost swallowed by light and smoke.
In the other, the flames rise in a great incandescent mass above the dark water.
Look at those paintings.
The buildings are almost dissolving.
The fire is everything.
The sky is on fire. The river is on fire. Even the air seems to be burning.
And the people?
Tiny figures.
Spectators.
Human beings dwarfed by the elemental forces Turner has unleashed on his canvas.
One painting is now in Philadelphia.
The other in Cleveland, Ohio.
Two masterpieces.
Two extraordinary records of one extraordinary London night.
And I love the contrast.
The government wanted to get rid of its old records.
In doing so, it destroyed its own Parliament building.
Turner wanted to record what he saw.
In doing so, he created something immortal.
One more thing.
Next time you’re walking past the Houses of Parliament, take a good look at Westminster Hall.
It’s still there.
That extraordinary survivor.
It stood there when medieval kings held court.
It stood there when Charles I was put on trial.
It stood there when Parliament burned.
And it stands there today.
The building the fire couldn’t take.
And Turner?
He gave the fire something it never imagined it would have.
A kind of immortality.
October 16th, 1834.
The night London’s Parliament burned down.
And one of London’s greatest painters watched it happen.
Word of the Day: Tally.
It comes from the Old French taille, meaning a notch or a cut.
And that’s the key to the whole business.
As we learned earlier, that’s how medieval accountants kept their records. Those notches they cut into wooden sticks to represent sums of money.
A way of keeping count. Keeping score. Keeping a record.
A tally.
And on this particular occasion, the tally was the old British Parliament building.
A way of bringing the house down.
Quite literally.
This is London. This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
And why not. An unashamed London Walks plug. remember, if you want to get to know London better, really get to know London, there’s no better way than London Walks.
And this has been your London Calling London fix for October 16th. See you tomorrow.