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Restoration London

The city Daniel navigates: crowded, filthy, brilliant, and on fire.

The physical city

London in the 1660s was a medieval city that had outgrown its medieval infrastructure. About 400,000 people (making it the largest city in Europe after Paris and Constantinople) were packed into a few square miles around the Thames. Streets were narrow, unpaved, and open sewers. Buildings — mostly timber-framed, jettied upper stories overhanging the street — leaned toward each other until neighbors on opposite sides could nearly shake hands across the gap. The Thames was the main highway; watermen ferried passengers in thousands of small boats. London Bridge, lined with shops and houses, was the only bridge.

The smell

Tanneries, slaughterhouses, breweries, and dye works operated within the city walls. Chamber pots were emptied into the street. The Fleet Ditch (nominally a river) was an open sewer. The diarist John Evelyn wrote a pamphlet (Fumifugium, 1661) complaining that London’s coal smoke made the air “so fatall” that inhabitants suffered “Catharrs, Phthisicks, Coughs, and Consumptions.” The plague of 1665 thrived in these conditions.

After the Fire

The Great Fire of 1666 destroyed most of the old city. The rebuilt London was different: brick and stone instead of timber, wider streets, better drainage. But the transformation was partial and slow. The new St. Paul’s Cathedral wasn’t finished until 1710. Many areas outside the old walls remained as dense and filthy as before. The contrast between the rebuilt City (the financial center, increasingly modern) and the surrounding neighborhoods (still medieval in character) is part of the novel’s landscape.

The social geography

London’s neighborhoods were sharply defined by class and function:

  • The City (within the old Roman walls) — merchants, bankers, the Royal Exchange, Guildhall. Governed by the Lord Mayor, jealous of its independence from the Crown.
  • Westminster — the court, Parliament, Whitehall Palace. A separate city with different rules.
  • Southwark (across the bridge) — theaters, bear-baiting, brothels, prisons. Outside the City’s jurisdiction, therefore anything goes.
  • The Strand — connecting the City to Westminster, lined with aristocratic townhouses and their gardens running down to the river.
  • Wapping, Rotherhithe, Deptford — downriver, the docklands. Shipyards, rope walks, warehouses, sailors’ taverns.

The institutions

The novel’s London is defined by its institutions as much as its geography:

  • The Royal Society — meeting at Gresham College in Bishopsgate, then at Arundel House, then Crane Court.
  • Coffeehouses — hundreds of them, each with its own clientele and specialty.
  • The Exchange — London’s stock market and commodity trading center. Burned in the Fire, rebuilt, and thriving.
  • The Tower — prison, armory, mint, menagerie. The place where political careers ended.
  • The Mint — where money was made, literally. Newton would become its Warden in 1696.

In the novel

Stephenson’s London is a character in its own right — dense, noisy, dangerous, intellectually electric. Daniel walks its streets from Puritan meeting houses to Royal Society lectures to court audiences at Whitehall, and the physical journey maps the novel’s intellectual landscape. The city’s transformation from medieval to modern, from timber to stone, from plague-ridden to rebuilt, mirrors the transformation in thought that the novel chronicles.

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