Now I would go to London's Pudding Lane on 2 September 1666 and put out that little fire. I'd love to investigate the histories of a few of the buildings that burned for Restoration Home.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing - the existing landowners wanted things as they had been.
In the summer of 1988, my father took me up to look at the remains of our home, the dream house that he'd built. It was my first time since our family left four years earlier. Political and obscene graffiti covered the half-torn walls. There was no ceiling and surprisingly no floor: the parquet, the stone, the marble, all looted.
Years ago I had a house in Sussex, it was like Arcadia, with an old Victorian bridge, a pond and the Downs.
You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
The thing I'd really like to see is the old London Bridge, with all the old buildings around it like Shakespeare's Globe. I'd like to walk along that. Don't worry, I won't get drunk and fall in.
It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire.
I'm very fond of an old map of London that used to belong to my father. I'm a big London fan, and the evolution of the city is astonishing, when you look back to Pepys and how small it was - everyone knew each other.
My family and I live in a wing of a Georgian mansion in East Sussex, which was built in the 1780s and fell into disrepair. It was rescued in the Seventies and carved into six terrace houses.
I live in an apartment building built in 1925, and it hasn't been heavily renovated, so I feel very much connected to that time and what went on in that place.
We went to the British Museum, and I was looking up my family in the books - pages and pages on it.
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