Epilogue• 265nues and verdant squares. Robert Hooke, newly returned from the country,
and Christopher Wren, back from travels in France during the year of the
plague, had equally bold schemes. But these visions yielded to pressure from
Londoners to rebuild their homes and shops on existing sites and return
business to normal as quickly as possible. Sir William Turner became lord
mayor in 1668 – 69 , when construction and financing lagged for the largest
public structures, and donated the four hundred pounds bestowed on bach-
elor mayors by the king and much of his own money and talents to complet-
ing the material restoration of the city.
Red brick and stone replaced combustible wood. Slate and tile roofing
made residents safer from fire and vermin than had overhanging thatch.
Drainage at the curbside improved on filthy ditches in the middle of streets.
The trademark spires of Christopher Wren’s churches, exemplified by the
triumphant octagonal spheres at Saint Bride’s, which inspired the design of
multilayered wedding cakes, softened the city’s grief for the thousands of
plague victims buried below. Towering over the new cityscape was Wren’s
dome at the new cathedral, Protestant England’s response to Catholic
Rome’s basilica of Saint Peter.
The restoration of central London, spectacular though it was, only cam-
ouflaged the chronic dangers to public health. A hundred narrow streets
grew straight and wide, but back alleys remained. The Fleet stream became a
canal but continued to receive its habitual household and industrial pollu-
tants. Miles of new water pipes replaced the old but carried water of dubious
purity. Old food markets inside the wall were combined and new ones
opened in the suburbs, but sanitation around the animal slaughters remained
a neighborhood responsibility. The tangle of tumbledown sheds and ware-
houses cramming the alleyways running down to the Thames River had been
consumed along with their flammable contents of oil, pitch, and tallow. But
even as the quays were opened up and warehouses moved back, their resident
rats, which were the bane of London’s householders and a boon to city rat-
catchers, migrated upstream and downstream to the crowded suburban wa-
terfront areas that had escaped the Great Fire. When all was said and done,
the repairs to the central city left unchanged the suburban areas where
plague and other diseases concentrated. Thus is disproved the myth, which
persists to this day, that the Great Fire ended the danger of a new Great
Plague.
People might not talk about “the sicknesse” anymore, but medical experts
and ordinary citizens kept the frightening words miasmaandcontagionin
their vocabulary. In the privacy of their medical casebooks, doctors and