The secrets of the past are all around us,
hidden in our streets, buried under our feet.
And in this series I'll be uncovering those secrets,
as I explore Britain's most historic towns.
I'll decipher physical clues...
Look at that, it's covered with lizard-like scales.
...and get to know some extraordinary characters who are often overlooked.
She sounds like an extraordinary woman.
Nicola really was an iron lady of her day.
With the help of Ben Robinson's eye in the sky,
I'll discover which towns across the UK reveal
the most about each period in British history,
and find out how those stories still resonate today.
If the French had won this battle,
history would have played out very differently.
Yes, we would have had a French monarchy.
Oh, my goodness.
From the adventurous Elizabethans to the elegant Georgians,
from medieval knights through to the height of empire,
I'll tell the story of an era through the story of a single town.
Today I've come to the heart of the epic drama that was
Britain's Restoration.
It changed the world, and it happened here.
A place where a new king created a boom in science, economics
and put women on the stage...
This was an incredibly erotic proposal for the men of London Town.
...but also helped build a slave trade of brutal efficiency.
And everybody's doing it, so you have to?
Yes, but you had to do it better.
It's a metropolis that was at war,
would be engulfed in fire,
and devastated by a plague,
with chilling echoes for today.
"And having, as it were, got master of us all,
"made a most terrible slaughter."
If you really want to understand the political, economic, cultural
revolution that was the Restoration,
London is the place to come.
21st-century London is a city that's always changing, always in flux.
There are constantly new buildings going up.
And it's always been this magnet for people and for ideas,
going back through the centuries.
And so many projects - creative, scientific, industrial -
have started off right here.
Love it or loathe it, it's our capital.
2,000 years ago the Romans established Londinium
on the banks of the Thames, right where today's city stands.
After the Romans, a few centuries of decline were reversed as the
Normans made London England's centre of trade, government and crown -
a role it's never relinquished.
London is brimming with evidence of the powerful empire
that Britain once controlled.
But these clays it represents a culturally rich,
high-tech modern age.
A modern age that begs a simple question -
where did all this start?
And I think we have the answers here in London.
Not just London, actually, but this nucleus
between Tower Bridge to the east and St Paul's to the west.
It's here, in this few square miles, that the seeds of global dominance
were sown in an astonishing quarter of a century -
the white-hot years of the Restoration.
The Restoration refers to the period between 1660 and 1688,
when the monarchy was restored to the throne
following the collapse of Cromwell's republic.
Cromwell's short-lived commonwealth had been created after a bloody
civil war had ended with the capture and execution of Charles I.
It was a tumultuous era for England,
as the new king, Charles ll, removed the shackles of puritanism.
So it's 1660, Oliver Cromwell's deeply unpopular son Richard
has been deposed, and Parliament is in disarray.
It was a year of frantic politics, with republicans and royalists
vying for power.
And, meanwhile, Charles l's son -
also very originally called Charles -
is in exile in the Netherlands, planning his return.
To find out what happens next, I'm meeting historian
Professor Kate Williams, on the way to Westminster Abbey -
the crowning place of British kings and queens since 1066.
It seems that Charles ll achieves what should have been impossible.
His father was executed, and then he comes back as king.
How does he do it? It's incredible, isn't it?
11 years after his father is executed.
And, really, he's always waiting for the moment he can come back
and be king. He's got the faith, he thinks one day he'll come back.
And when Oliver Cromwell,
he dies, his son Richard is very unpopular, and people are saying,
"Well, why are we passing it down between father and son?"
There's a great series of instability,
and essentially there is this moment in which everyone says,
"Why don't we just invite the king back?"
But the king can't come back before he's essentially signed
a job contract.
Because we can't have the king back in the old way,
we can't have divine right,
we can't have him chopping off heads of whoever he wants.
So what he signs is the Declaration of Breda, named after where he
is at the point, in the Netherlands, and this is a declaration
in which Charles says, "l am going to introduce religious toleration,"
so whatever religion you want to be,
"l'm not going to have vengeance on those
"who attacked my father,
"and also people who got their property from royalists
"who lost property can keep it."
So these key things that Parliament wants, Charles agrees to,
and once he agrees to, it's like a trigger.
That is when everyone says, "He can come back."
And that is when Charles ll sets off to be king.
Almost a full year since arriving back on English soil,
Charles entered Westminster Abbey to be adorned with new crown jewels -
the previous ones having been melted down by Cromwell.
Kate, what would it have been like if we were here in that year,
in 1661, for the coronation?
What would we have seen?
Charles ll's coronation was completely mind-blowing.
This was the biggest coronation people had seen
since Elizabeth I, almost 100 years earlier.
It was the biggest royal PR set-up you can imagine.
This was the first coronation they actually had tiered seating
to cram everyone in, cos it was so popular.
There's this incredible show of status, of wealth and power,
but what did it mean? What was this about?
Every monarch is the beginning of a new era -
none so much as Charles ll.
Everyone knew that society would be different - entertainments,
theatres, sports, everything that had not been allowed
under Cromwell is now suddenly permitted,
and we start to see in the coronation, the beginning
of the mythology of Charles ll as popular, as the Merry Monarch.
Among those who witnessed the overblown coronation
was a certain diarist.
Samuel Pepys, who, by the way,
seemed to be everywhere in Restoration London,
saw it all, and was incredibly impressed.
His diary entry for 23rd April 1661 read,
"l may now shut my eyes against any other objects,
"or for the future trouble myself to see things of state and show
"as being sure never to see the like again in this world."
He thought he was witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle.
And of course this tradition would continue down through the centuries.
I mean, what new monarch is going to pass up the PR opportunity
offered by a coronation?
The chance to dazzle people,
the chance, some might say, to distract.
Don't ask awkward questions about the constitution
and where power lies in Britain,
look at the shiny things!
The pomp and ceremony was a fresh start for a king who had
already shown his teeth.
Charles had returned to the English throne
with an assurance to those who had signed off
on the execution of his father,
who was beheaded here at Banqueting House in 1649.
In the Declaration of Breda, Charles had promised clemency.
But the wording was vague,
it was open to interpretation.
So the final decision would rest with a future Parliament
as to who was punished and how.
And it soon became clear that for those directly involved
with the execution,
there would be no clemency.
The regicides were a group of 59 men who had signed
Charles's death warrant, plus the judges who had presided over them.
For those that declined to flee, a brutal fate awaited.
Thomas Harrison was the first to be executed,
and he was hanged right here at Charing Cross,
where this equestrian statue of Charles I now stands.
And of course Samuel Pepys was there,
displaying his flair for dark humour.
"L went out to Charing Cross," he wrote,
"to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered,
"he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition."
Five more of the 59 signatories were executed in the same
thorough manner in 1660.
Historian Dr Onyeka Nubia has studied the fates of the regicides.
At some point something seems to have gone wrong,
or it's been misinterpreted, because Charles ll
starts off by saying,
"If I'm put on the throne, everything is forgiven,"
and that doesn't seem to be quite what happened.
Well, we presume that when he says what he says,
he means what he says.
You don't think he meant it? Because kings in these days are politicians.
Everybody who writes on court politics would say,
"Look, do not allow the murderers of your father to live."
So then we have this situation where the regicides are hunted down,
but presumably a lot of them had already made themselves scarce.
I mean, they would have known what was coming.
Well, some of these regicides are, in fact, dead already.
Oliver Cromwell, for example, was dug up, hung,
and then his head was put through a spike at Whitehall in London.
And it was left there to rot.
He's dead already, this is all about... He's dead already.
...telling other people. Yeah, it was about telling other people.
It's sending a message, a sign.
So what about the ones who had fled the country, then?
I mean, how were they found?
Well, people turned and changed sides.
People like George Downing.
They hunted them down,
and they knew how to hunt them down because they were their old friends.
So George Downing was basically turning his... That's right.
...his old friends over.
He's a remarkable individual.
Someone who raises himself up from quite a low position,
and he uses the civil war to become a republican.
And to be an ardent member of that faction that wants to kill the king.
As soon as that's done,
he then becomes a supporter of Oliver Cromwell.
And then when Oliver Cromwell dies he switches sides again
and says, "Look, in fact, we need to invite the king back.
"We need the stability of the king."
So he's someone who is politically expedient,
but also willing to sacrifice his friends.
Yeah, he operated like a spy master.
He had a ring of agents that worked for him.
They lied, they deceived, they cheated,
so that they could make sure that all the regicides were captured,
and then seeing that they are dispatched.
Downing's operation insured three more of the regicides
were tracked down and brought back to London
to be publicly tortured and dissected.
The surviving fugitives lived out their lives abroad,
terrified of the king's revenge.
Well, you won't be surprised to hear that Pepys
had something to say about George Downing.
He called him a "perfidious rogue",
but the king had an entirely different opinion,
rewarded him handsomely with a plot of land on which
Downing built a terrace of houses.
And if you ever thought,
"Will Britain turn into a republic at some point?"
well, just reflect on the fact
that our leaders live on Downing Street.
I'm in London - the best place to understand Restoration Britain.
Charles ll had been crowned in a lavish ceremony
at Westminster Abbey, but had showed his steel
by wreaking bloody vengeance on those who'd executed his father.
Revenge is one thing, but what Charles ll really needed
was to create political stability. He needed popular appeal
and he set out to win hearts and minds by rolling back some
of the severe restrictions that had been placed on society
during Cromwell's Commonwealth.
Top of his list - reopening the theatres.
Puritanism was out, entertainment was in.
I've come to London's West End to meet theatre historian
Dr Lucy Powell, who can help me understand how bringing plays
back to the stage transformed the city's cultural life.
So was it just a question of taking the theatres out of mothballs, then,
and just picking up where they left off?
Not at all.
So, in Shakespeare's day, theatres had been these huge,
open-air arenas,
and they were in these seedy backwaters like Southwark, on
the other side of the river, which, in those days, was where the leather
tanneries of London were happening, so they were incredibly stinky.
What happened when Charles arrives back in London is he issues to
patents to two of his followers to build these big, fashionable closed
theatres, which were also incredibly large, right here in Covent Garden.
So in the middle of what was becoming
the fashionable area of town.
So is this really the beginning of West End theatre in London? Yes.
Was Charles ll actually coming out to public theatre?
Indeed. He was. And he had done this on the Continent, in France
and in places like Italy, where women were allowed on stage.
In this country, that wasn't the case.
One of the first things Charles does when he comes
back to the throne, in 1660, is he issues a patent that says
that from this time forth,
all female parts must be played by women.
And the reason he said that this law was necessary was to suppress
obscene and scurrilous passages in plays being spoken by boys
pretending to be women, in an effort, he says,
to suppress..."unnatural vice" is the euphemistic phrase.
Now, what happens is exactly the opposite of this attempt
to kind of make theatre more morally respectable. Yeah.
It becomes a place of incredibly, sort of, sexual freight.
People go to the theatre in order to look at this new
draw of these handsome young women in various states of undress.
And you can actually see it in the fabric of the plays
that are written for them.
S0 this new form of part for women, called the breeches role,
became immensely popular in the Restoration period.
So walking around the streets of London,
cleavage and breasts were ten a penny.
They were everywhere on show, so you had these incredibly
low-cut dresses. But, the bit of women that you would never normally
see would be hips, thighs and buttocks.
So if a woman actress is wearing a man's clothing, the breeches
part, you would be able to make out the shape of her hips
and her thighs and her bum,
and this was an incredibly erotic proposal for the men of London town,
who would flock to go and see women
in these states of theatrical undress. They have legs!
They have legs, and bums, yeah.
It was thrilling for the male populace.
The fun-loving Merry Monarch was a successful PR image for Charles,
but he also had serious ambitions for Britain
to become a major player on the world stage.
He knew cutting-edge technology
and new scientific ideas would lead the way.
This is now the site of Tower 42, but, in 1660,
some of the country's most brilliant minds gathered right here.
They'd come to hear a lecture by Christopher Wren
and then they held the very first meeting of what would become
the most widely respected
and influential scientific society in the world.
With Charles's blessing, they called it the Royal Society.
Former presidents include
Sir Isaac Newton,
Sir Christopher Wren,
Samuel Pepys, of course,
and Nobel prize-winning geneticist Sir Paul Nurse,
who I'm meeting in the City of London.
Paul, what was the purpose of the Royal Society?
I mean, was it just a club of scientists?
Well, it was a club. It was called the Invisible College,
and they met regularly to talk about scientific issues.
And the motto of the Royal Society in Latin - nullius in verba,
or something like that - means
"don't take everybody's word for it". Yeah.
And that had some critical consequences, actually,
because it meant you had to show that you'd really thought about it,
you'd really made the observations, made the experiments,
done the calculations, and demonstrate it to others. Yeah.
And that led to something we call peer review, which is that if you
provide evidence, then others should look at it to see if it looks good.
And if it's good, then it would be worth publishing.
Talking about the Royal Society, why are we here by the Monument?
Well, it was designed by Robert Hooke
and Christopher Wren to celebrate the fire of London, or
at least to remember it, but, actually,
it was also a scientific instrument.
Really? It's a telescope, so, at the top,
they had a lens, a big lens,
and then that focused the light down into the basement below it,
where they could look up.
What they wanted to do was to make very precise
measurements of the stars at opposite sides of the Earth's orbit.
Did it work? No. Oh! Now, why didn't it work?
It didn't work, because there was so much traffic going past
all the time, over cobblestones. So you can imagine.
And it wobbled, so they couldn't get precise enough measurements.
But Hooke, I mean, he made some amazing discoveries.
He worked with lenses at the other extreme, as well, didn't he?
Microscopy. Hooke was more of an artisan.
He did all these drawings. There's a magnificent book
called Micrographia. I know, we've got a version of it
at the University of Birmingham it's huge. It's about that big.
It's massive. Gorgeous book. It's got the details of a flea
under the microscope. A wonderful flea.
And can you imagine? Nobody had any ever seen this before.
And it must have looked like some monster.
And the second thing that really excites me
is that he used a razor and cut a thin slice of a plant
and looked at it underneath the microscope and he discovered cells.
And cells are the basic unit of life.
I've spent all my life studying them,
so that's why I particularly like Robert Hooke and Micrographia.
Sometimes, I can overuse the word "world-changing",
but this did change the world, then, this really did.
It changed the world and it happened here. Yeah.
Happened in here, in London, in the 1660s.
And it's dominated science, which, of course, has dominated many
other things ever since, over those 350 or more years.
Those brilliant scientists were crucial to King Charles
getting what he wanted more than anything - a booming economy.
The key to that was having a Navy that could command the oceans...
...protecting trade and battling for new territories.
The problem was sailing on the open seas
was still a haphazard, treacherous task.
Navigating the globe relied on knowledge of the heavens.
Aerial archaeologist Ben Robinson is in Greenwich to find out
about the founding of the Royal Observatory.
There we go. Just a bit more height.
Wow. That's all spread out before me.
This is one of the most recognisable views of the most recognisable
city in the world. There's the Isle of Dogs, the Thames snaking round.
But I've got to sweep all of that away
and think back to the 17th century,
and this is what I'm interested in - Greenwich Park.
Back in the 17th century, this was Kent,
this was the countryside -
it was away from the smog, from the clutter,
there were clear skies.
And that's why they chose this spot for this observatory.
This is what Christopher Wren was tasked with building
and, in effect, it was a house for the Astronomer Royal,
a new post that Charles had created.
And that Astronomer Royal was John Flamsteed.
So this is Flamsteed's house.
And his purpose was to make accurate star charts
and try to capture this elusive way of understanding longitude.
If they could work out longitude and latitude,
then they've got accurate navigation.
And if you've got accurate navigation, you rule the world.
But he didn't manage it. It would take decades before they did that.
And it was decades after that that, finally,
Greenwich was fixed as the point of the Prime Meridian.
And, thereafter, Greenwich became the centre of world time -
Greenwich Mean Time.
And the foundations for all that were laid in the Restoration period.
The scientific breakthroughs that happened during the Restoration
period allowed ships to travel much further
into what was still a largely uncharted world.
So that in itself necessitated another revolution,
because where do you get the money to go on such risky ventures, to
buy new ships, and to insure yourself against disaster.
Against the potential loss of those ships on the high seas?
And, rather strangely, the answer lay with a warm beverage.
I'm in England's capital, London,
trying to take in the cascade of era-defining events that made
Restoration Britain a unique melting pot of innovation
that changed the world.
With this new vibrancy in London came a need for more places
for the movers and shakers to discuss deals and debate ideas.
You had official but exclusive institutions,
like the Royal Society,
but there were places where people were starting to come
together in a much less formal way, where ideas could bobble up
and propagate, and they were being drawn in to those place by
the lure of a powerful new drug.
In 1652 a man called Pasqua Rosee started pushing that drug,
here on St Michael's Alley, that created an instant high
and the city boys just couldn't get enough of it.
But it may not be what you think.
It was coffee.
But it was very potent.
I've ventured deep into the labyrinth of the financial
district to meet Dr Matthew Green, who has studied the impact
of Restoration London's coffee house scene.
So, Matthew, if we'd have been here in the middle of
the 17th century, we would've been able to buy a coffee from Pasqua?
That's absolutely right.
On this site was the first coffee shack, I would call it,
because it didn't really have tables and chairs,
it was shrouded in smoke, sometimes actually on fire.
But if we were to drink the coffee now, you'd be horrified.
I don't know if you're, like, a flat white kind of person, but...
I like an Americano.
You like an Americano, yeah. Me too.
If you're used to, you know, beautifully filtered,
delicious Epicurean coffee, the taste of the 17th-century
stuff would have you heading for the nearest vomit bucket.
Presumably, it was the effect of it rather than the taste of it, then?
It was the effect.
Now, remember, until the arrival of coffee most people in the city
were either slightly or very drunk all day long.
The habitual drink would be ale, watered-down ale,
so the arrival of coffee would trigger a dawn of sobriety.
Imagine these people were going to be emerging from this, like,
haze, this alcoholic fog.
Exactly, yes.
And then turning to coffee, and suddenly... And suddenly...
...full of ideas. Exactly.
And it all can be traced to the impact of this
disgustingly bitter, black drink.
And would there be different coffee houses for different
QFWPS of People?
I mean, when I was at university, there was one pub where the lawyers
used to go and another pub where all the medical students used to go.
Was it that kind of thing?
Yeah, exactly right.
In the heart of the city, there was a triptych of monumentally
significant coffee houses.
For example, Jonathan's Coffee House,
which was the birthplace of the stock markets.
You had Garraway's, which was just round the corner from that,
which was the birthplace of international auctioneering.
So you could bid for rotten boroughs or a nice mansion in Edmonton
or Tottenham. So that business was happening in the coffee house?
It was happening inside, yes, with a face-to-face interaction.
And, perhaps most strikingly, there was a place called Lloyds
that opened in the 1690s, by a boy called Edward Lloyd,
who had cultivated excellent links with the maritime community.
And this meant that it was a natural meeting place for people
involved in overseas trade.
At the time, the British economy was expanding.
The tentacles of the overseas trading empire are reaching
ever further afield.
They need to find a way of financing these voyages
without facing ruin, so you need to mitigate against the risk,
and that meant, almost organically, the insurance industry coalesced
within this smoky, candlelit forum that was Lloyd's.
And we still have Lloyd's today.
That comes from the coffee house?
It began as a direct link, yes.
The porters are still called waiters,
in an allusion to its caffeinous origins.
But even though the original buildings have long since crumbled,
or were burnt down, the capitalist concoctions that took place there
are still with us.
Caffeine-powered innovations in business,
banking and marine insurance meant that Britain would soon be
nosing ahead of her European competitors in the race to
trade and exploit commodities on a global scale.
There was one business that was really taking off
in the second half of the 17th century, and Charles ll
and his aristocratic friends wanted a piece of the action.
But it was cruellest and the most inhumane business imaginable.
It was slavery,
and the British establishment was right at the heart of it.
I've come to the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich to find out
just how complicit the British establishment was
in the enslavement of Africans.
This is one of those times where I feel really privileged because
this is a print which has been taken out of the archives in the museum.
It's not normally on display to the public.
And I'm lucky enough to be able to see it up close.
It's quite chilling, actually.
What this is depicting is some of the forts that dotted
the coast of West Africa,
in the 17th century.
And in the dungeons of these castles are African prisoners,
and those African prisoners are going to become slaves.
They're going to be transported across the Atlantic to what'll
develop into the plantations.
So this is the beginnings of the slave trade.
And it's with the...
It's not even the collusion of the state - it's state-sponsored.
And we see that so clearly when Charles ll comes to the throne.
So what I've got here are photographs of a document
which is a patent for the company that will have
the monopoly over this West African trade,
the slave trade.
So this is Charles ll, "By the grace of God, King of England,"
and he is granting this patented to his clearest brother,
James, Duke of York.
So James is effectively the chief executive of what was then
the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa.
That's what would become the Royal Africa Company.
And he's granting the patent for 1,000 years.
And here are some of the other beneficiaries of it.
The Royal Consort, Queen Catherine.
Mary, the Queen Mother.
And clearest sister, Henrietta.
It just goes on and on and on.
20 of the 66 beneficiaries listed here
are members of the royal family.
To try to interpret that shocking evidence,
I'm catching up with Dr Onyeka Nubia again.
I've just been looking at these remarkable documents
from the archive, and it seems as though what Charles ll
was essentially saying, you know, "This is where we make money,
"and we need to regulate that, we need to govern it." Yeah.
"L need to be in control, or at least my brother needs to be
"in control." Yeah, I don't know if it's Charles ll saying that.
I think it's the people that are advising him that are saying that.
I think that he's advised,
"Look, this is what Spain has done, this is what Portugal has done.
"And this is what we can do.
"And if we don't do it, they will do it,
"and they'll become too powerful and they'll conquer us."
So it's about the balance of power in Europe,
and getting rich at the same time.
It is 100% about the balance of power in Europe.
And everybody's doing it, so you have to?
Yes, but you have to do it better.
And England would end up doing it very well.
Yeah. Well, exactly. That's the point.
Not only does that well, but then does colonialism
and imperialism better than any other nation.
And does the exploitation better than any other nation.
Because it's coming, in a way, after the other nations,
and so it learns from their mistakes, and because
it's a very good student it doesn't make the same mistakes
that Spain made or Portugal made.
I know that you...
I know that you don't like to put numbers on it,
because the numbers are actually impossible to get at. Yeah.
But is there some kind of idea of the scale of this?
OK, well, that...
That's an impossible figure to give, and I'll tell you why.
Because the figure that I would give you would be wrong.
It would only ever be a gross, gross underestimation.
It does not give account to the millions of people who would
have died en route, the millions of people who died as the result
of civil war and civil conflict, the millions of people that died
of starvation and hunger, the millions of people that died
of disease and malnutrition as a result of the conflict.
We just don't know the number,
but what we do know is that by 1884 and 1885 the entire continent
of Africa did not have - with the exception of Ethiopia -
one single unitary African state run by African people.
What?
That, we do know.
So whatever went on was continuously systematic over
several hundreds of years,
resulting in the destabilisation of an entire continent.
In the 1660s, that royal family firm set out to profit both
by enslaving Africans and through the global trade that would enable.
Control of shipping routes was crucial,
but to achieve that control Britain would have to fight.
War always gets in the way of making money,
and throughout the middle of the 1600s Britain's upstart empire
had been battling it out with a much richer country,
the Dutch Republic.
This was a naval war.
To understand how much was at stake,
Ben Robinson has taken his drone downriver to Tilbury.
That's a great view down the Thames towards the estuary here,
and this was the gateway to the world in the Restoration period,
but like any gateway it could let in trouble.
And in 1667, the Dutch sailed into the Thames estuary, down to Chatham.
They burnt the English fleet at anchor,
they trashed the dockyard there.
They towed away the Royal Charles, the pride of the English fleet.
This was an utter humiliation,
an embarrassment unparalleled in British military history.
Something had to be done.
And this is what they came up with.
Tilbury Fort.
You can see how it utterly controls the Thames.
The gun batteries could fire across the river here.
No Dutch ship would be able to get through this.
But, also, the Dutch fleet might have moored further up
the river here, disembarked troops, and they could have come round
and attacked the fort from the land side, so they had an answer to that.
These wide moats here.
An inner one and an outer moat.
And these were controlled by sluices,
so in times of trouble you could flood them quickly,
and these spearhead bastions - look at its symmetrical shape -
they allow covering fire of every square inch of ground.
This was a complete defensible island, utterly impregnable.
Fortification helped Britain defend itself against the Dutch,
but London was about to face a much deadlier enemy.
I'm in London, uncovering what happened
during the Restoration of the 1660s,
the moment that innovations in science,
business and brutal human exploitation combined
to elevate England to the top tier of the world's power players.
By the start of the Restoration period,
London was experiencing rapid growth.
Its population had doubled since 1600.
These new residents almost all moved
into outer areas near the city's Roman walls.
The poorest were crammed into damp, overcrowded, filthy housing,
ideal conditions for the return of the deadly disease,
the bubonic plague.
In 1664, people started to die.
But really, that was unremarkable.
London's poor were dying all the time
and the authorities could afford to turn a blind eye to it.
But in the summer of 1665, the plague really took off.
Mortality was rising week on week.
Thousands of people were dying and there was no cure in sight.
It all sounds chillingly familiar.
Part of our pandemic experience has been to witness health workers
risking their lives to treat the ill.
But during the Restoration's epidemic,
almost everyone who could fled for the countryside.
One of the few brave doctors who remained in London
also, uniquely, recorded his experience.
I've come to London's Wellcome Collection
to meet Pooja Swali, who studies ancient pathogens.
The book she's retrieved from the archive is by Dr Nathaniel Hodges.
This is his account, then, is it?
Yeah, of the spread of the plague, and he notes how it changes.
And it's called Loimologia,
which actually means "study of the plague".
It says there that "ln the months of August and September,
"the contagion changed its former flow and languid pace.
"And having, as it were, got master of us all,
"made a most terrible slaughter
"so that 3,000, 4,0000r 5,000 died in a week, and once 8,000".
It's just horrendous, isn't it?
Actually, there's an account of who it affected the most. He goes,
"But it is incredible to think
"how the plague raged amongst the common people,
"insomuch that it came by some to be called the poor's plague".
Really? And we start to see a lot of parallels with today,
in terms of how coronavirus is having an effect
on the working class,
in that they don't have the option of having someone cover their work.
They don't have the opportunity of self-isolation.
They just don't have the access to a lot of these things.
What was his idea, what was he trying to do?
So in a lot of his book, he does put an emphasis on social isolation
and quarantine as a way of slowing the actual spread of the disease.
I think it's really easy to look back to the 17th century
and to think that they don't know what's going on,
they're reaching out in the dark. But actually,
there's a lot of evidence-based thinking going on. Yeah.
Nathaniel Hodges' courage and thorough methods
epitomised an empirical approach to medicine,
leaving mediaeval quackery behind.
In this city of statues, there surely should be one to him.
Despite the plague having killed over 70,000 Londoners,
around 100,000 remained, still living within the ancient city walls
in houses made largely of wood and thatch.
It was a disaster waiting to happen
and on Sunday, 2nd September 1666,
a fire broke out in the house and bakery
of Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane.
The Mayor of London, Thomas Bloodworth, woke up,
saw the fire and famously claimed, "a woman could piss it out".
And then, obviously exhausted by this hilarious witticism,
went back to bed.
Samuel Pepys obviously saw the fire as well
and also thought it was insignificant, and went back to bed.
How wrong can two men be?
To start with, the fire spread east towards the Tower of London
but then the wind changed, fanning the flames westwards,
pushing it remorselessly one and a half miles,
as far as Fleet Street.
By day four, although only six people had died, 436 acres,
the very heart of mediaeval London, had been turned to ash.
Most powerfully of all,
it had completely destroyed London's single greatest building,
St Paul's Cathedral,
just as Christopher Wren had started a comprehensive renovation.
I'm meeting Dr Hannah Dawson
to see how an architectural phoenix arose from the ashes.
So the previous cathedral is basically razed to the ground
and demolished, so Wren has a very different prospect then.
Rather than renovating an existing building,
he's building a completely new one. That's right.
The entire project becomes a completely different, enormous one.
Wren is engaged not just to rebuild St Paul's Cathedral,
but actually to rethink the whole of London.
It takes him nine years in the planning.
It's an unbelievably complicated back-and-forth process
but then finally, they agree on his plan with his dome
and the scaffolding goes up
but even then once the scaffolding is up,
Wren actually takes the opportunity
behind the secrecy of the scaffolding
to slightly do his own thing again... Does he?
"Against the orders of Charles.
Just adjusts it back. Exactly. Just baroques it up a bit, yeah.
Alongside designing 50 new churches for London,
Wren collaborated with his friend, Robert Hooke,
to create the new St Paul's.
At 365 feet high,
other building in London
its dome would be taller than any other building in London
for over 250 years.
How far is he pushing this design,
because that is a huge dome to build?
It's so enormous,
and because they wanted it to look beautiful from the outside
as well as from the inside, they had to therefore make two domes.
And so to work out how to connect them
so that they wouldn't fall in, they'd never done it before
and so in keeping with the spirit of the scientific revolution,
which was all about experiment and empiricism and trial and error,
this was really a case of, "Let's see if this is going to work". Yeah.
It was very much an experiment, which they pulled off.
In St Paul's, Charles ll and Christopher Wren
had created an indestructible stone phoenix
arising from the devastation of civil war,
regicide and cataclysmic fire.
An unmissable statement that a new age had been born,
with Britain at its centre.
This building is the greatest physical symbol of the Restoration,
but our story of Restoration London doesn't finish here.
It ends over there,
at the building affectionately known as the Cheesegrater.
This is 122 Leadenhall Street.
The giant, slanting steels of this glass monolith
stand astride an area that was just beyond the reach of the Great Fire.
With most of London in tatters,
deal-hungry businessmen flocked here,
creating a vibrant new financial district
as London was rebuilt fit for the modern age.
It's quite strange, really, isn't it,
to think that the foundations of this building, Leadenhall,
go right back to the Restoration.
It wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that supernova
that ignited down there and lit up the world.
It was a few short years when this city exploded with the ideas
and innovations that changed the course of humanity,
often for the better, sometimes for the worse.
An era that didn't just help create modern Britain,
but forged the way our whole world is today.
That's why London
is the city
at the centre of Britain's world-changing Restoration.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media