Discovering Samuel Pepys’ London

Juliet Rix follows in the footsteps of the UK’s most famous diarist in the company of the curators of a new exhibition
St Olave’s church
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Juliet Ri16 November 2015

Samuel Pepys, diarist extraordinary, was nothing if not a Londoner. Born just off Fleet Street and buried at Tower Hill, he lived London to the full, frequenting its theatres, churches, pubs and palaces, witnessing plague, fire and revolution. As an employee of the Navy Office his work took him east to the docklands and Greenwich, where the National Maritime Museum is set to launch the largest-ever Pepys exhibition, along with themed Pepys walks.

Behind St Bride’s church, off Fleet Street, where Pepys was baptised, is a narrow alley called Salisbury Court. Here an inconspicuous plaque on a flat-faced office block states simply that this was the site of the Pepys family home where Samuel was born in 1633. He was the fifth of 11 children, soon to become the eldest as his older siblings fell victim to untreatable childhood diseases. Pepys himself nearly didn’t make it through his twenties.

In his cousin’s house on this same street he underwent — without anaesthetic, antiseptic or antibiotics — an operation to remove from his bladder a stone the size of a snooker ball. In celebration of his remarkable survival, he had it mounted in gold. It is sadly lost but a similar bladder stone is co-curator Robert Blyth’s favourite item in the new exhibition because, he says, without the successful removal of Pepys’s stone there would have been no diary, no exhibition.

Pepys lived, worked and wrote most of his diary in Seething Lane. His home has been replaced with a modern cube but “our church”, opposite, remains. Here in St Olave’s Pepys worshipped, did business and was eventually buried. As we enter, the organ is playing a 17th-century hornpipe and church manager Phil Manning insists Pepys would easily recognise the church today. Certainly he would know the animated face that looks down from high above the altar; it is his wife, Elisabeth, whom he moaned about and cheated on but clearly loved. A copy of this lively bust, commissioned by Pepys, is in the exhibition. Here, the original keeps a watchful eye on the Navy pew, built under Pepys’s direction (and now beneath his own memorial), where he and his colleagues sat for services.

Dear diary: All Hallows church
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After a brief imprisonment a few streets away in the Tower of London on a trumped-up charge of popery, Pepys would have sat here displaying his new gold-embossed (Protestant) Book of Common Prayer. Now owned by the church and lent to the exhibition, it has a beautiful curlicued calligraphic frontispiece (he collected calligraphy) and odd red lines ruled around the text. These are also found in the diaries where Pepys’s father or a paid boy would rule the lines before Pepys wrote.

It was through the arched stone gateway of St Olave’s, carved with skulls (and still standing), that Pepys reported seeing the bodies of plague victims piled high awaiting burial. As disease spread, he rushed out to buy tobacco, then thought to protect against sickly air. The Clothworkers’ Company, just around the corner, owns his octagonal carved-wood tobacco box, along with an extraordinarily ornate loving cup and huge silver-gilt dish that Pepys gave the company on becoming their Master. By this time a wealthy and influential man, he “wanted to out-bling his predecessor,” says co-curator Kris Martin, “and he did!”

A few steps back towards the Thames, we find the 7th-century Church of All Hallows by the Tower, with claims to be the oldest church in London. From its copper spire — then newly rebuilt and one of the capital’s highest points — Pepys watched “the saddest sight of desolation”, the Fire of London. The interior is interesting but you can no longer climb the spire on grounds of “health and safety”. No matter, says Blyth, “you wouldn’t see far from it today”.

Pepys bust outside the St Olave's church
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So instead we puff up the spiral staircase of the nearby Monument, the gold-topped column that is London’s memorial to the Great Fire — 350 years ago next September — designed by Pepys’s friend, Sir Christopher Wren. Each of the 311 steps is exactly six inches deep so that they could be used to measure height in experiments by another Pepys associate, physicist Robert Hooke. Though not a scientist himself, Pepys took a close interest in the discoveries of the day and eventually became President of the Royal Society, overseeing publication of major scientific works including Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica.

From the top of the Monument the views are still panoramic and we can pick out many of the landmarks of the diarist’s life tucked into crevices between shiny modern towers. We can almost reach out and touch a new block of glass and steel rising right beside the Monument itself, which prompts us to wonder what Pepys would have made of all this. Would he have thought it vandalism? Perhaps, but I can’t help feeling he would have relished the mix of history, commerce, overflowing pubs and contemporary design that is the City today. He would have expected nothing else of London.

Details: Samuel Pepys’s London

Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire & Revolution opens at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (020 8858 4422; rmg.co.uk), on November 20. Entry costs £12, £6 for children. Pepys walks can be booked on the website and cost £15.

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