Adrian Tinniswood

And there was something like a 9 out of 10...

mortality rate if you got the plague you died basically certainly early on the bills of mortality they're dreadful to hear and of course anybody who was anybody cleared out leaving only the poor and the dedicated certainly kind of dissenting ministers who hung around and took the place of anglican clergy who were clearing off to

Oxford or to the south coast.

Those kind of dissenting ministers really came into their own then.

They were the welfare system that looked after the plague victims.

Yeah, it was small, and that's the thing.

The city of London itself, what we call the Square Mile, was home to about 80,000 people.

what we will think of as Greater London, the suburbs and some of the outlying areas, all together had a population of maybe 250,000, 300,000.

It's hard to be precise, of course.

That's about the same size as Coventry today.

Most of the street's very narrow.

You're living in mainly timber-framed, laugh-and-plaster houses.

Typically, they're jettied out across streets so that on some of the narrower thoroughfares, you could lean out of your bedroom window and shake hands with your neighbour across the road.

The sky is blotted out by these houses.

If you think, we're looking at a world that was lit by fire.

People were always airing their clothes by putting them in front of an open fire.

They were looking for a chamber pot with a lighted candle under the bed.

And fires took place all the time in London, all the time.

Yeah, but, well, I say yes.

I mean, in retrospect, yes, of course it was.