QUANTITATIVE REASONING AND COMMERCIAL LOGIC IN REBUILDING PLANS AFTER THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON, 1666

Abstract

ABSTRACTRebuilding plans submitted after the Great Fire of London in 1666 have been widely treated by historians of the Great Fire and in wide-scope histories of London and modern city planning. However, few attempts have been made to assign an overarching logic to all of them, while paying attention to their texts as well as to their maps. The following article highlights certain common features in these abortive efforts to plan London, assigns a common logic to all of them, and traces the origins of this logic. Such an analysis illuminates the economic principles in plans that are usually examined for their architectural features, and places them in a different historical context. Rather than seeing them as manifestations of contemporary architectural trends, or as a continuation of ongoing attempts to regulate London's cityscape, the plans are presented here as a response to emerging ideas in mid-seventeenth-century England about the nature of value and the economic function of cities within the world of commerce. Such a view reveals the complex interplay between London's early modern growth and the emergence of new forms of knowledge in seventeenth-century England and reasserts the importance of these plans as forerunners of present-day city planning.