Adrian Tinniswood

After the fire, Elizabeth, his wife, starts to lose her hair and she gets stomach upset.

Fairly clearly, she's got post-traumatic stress disorder.

And I'm sure that a lot of Londoners will have suffered mentally.

Their mental health will have been really severely damaged by this.

We know of half a dozen or so plans to rebuild London, some more sophisticated than others.

I mean, some of the less sophisticated ones involved just drawing a checkerboard and saying, let's make London a checkerboard.

Within days of the fire, Christopher Wren, who is... Christopher Wren isn't an architect at this point.

Christopher Wren is professional astronomy at Oxford.

But he's mated with the king, and he's in the king's private chambers with a plan for redesigning the whole city of London.

John Evelyn's just after him.

I'm sure every country gentleman had a go at doing a plan to rebuild London.

Of the ones described, Christopher Wren's is the best.

Far and away the most sophisticated.

It came close, actually.

It came very close.

But the problem was that the king, quite early on, gave an undertaking that nobody would lose their homes or their land as a result of the fire.

And Wren's rebuilding would have involved massive compulsory purchase.

He's driving boulevards basically right through the center of the city.

It would also have taken a very long time, whereas the city authorities would rather just say to everybody, go ahead and build your house.

Go ahead and rebuild.