A plan of the City of London, after the Great Fire in the year of our Lord 1666, according to the design and proposal of Sir Christopher Wren Kt, for rebuilding it

These two plans were drawn by Christopher Wren (bottom) and John Evelyn (top). They are suggestions of how London should have been rebuilt after the Great Fire of London. Wren submitted his plan to rebuild London on 11 September 1666, only six days after the fire was extinguished. The plan included long, wide streets, a canal for the Fleet River, a straight quayside, piazzas and squares. The buildings were in neat blocks. Like the other plans, Wren’s design was never built but certain elements of it were adopted.

Two new streets, King Street and Queen Street, were created, which linked the Guildhall to the river. A uniform quayside was planned (though never fully completed) to ease access to the Thames. The Fleet River canal was built between 1671 and 1674, which cleared away the filthy buildings and stinking banks alongside.

Evelyn showed his plan to the king on 13 September. He wrote in his diary that it would make London ‘the most noble city that can be’. Evelyn aimed to replace the crowded and narrow streets of the City with wide, elegant vistas, squares and a neat grid-like system. Like all the other plans submitted, Evelyn’s layout was never adopted. It would have been far too time-consuming and expensive to build.

Evelyn’s book ‘Fumifugium’ (1661) deplored the conditions in the old City: ‘a congestion of misshapen and extravagant houses; that the streets should be so narrow and incommodious in the very centre, and busiest places of Intercourse; that there should be so ill and uneasy a form of paving under foot’. After the fire many improvements were introduced – certain streets were widened, pavements were added for pedestrians and obstructions in the streets, such as market stalls and water conduits, were removed.