The Monument to the Great Fire of London, more commonly known simply as the Monument, is a stone Roman Doric column in the City of London, near the northern end of London Bridge, which commemorates the Great Fire of London.
It stands at the junction of Monument Street and Fish Street Hill, 202 ft (62 m) tall and 202 ft (62 m) from the place where the Great Fire started on 2 September 1666. Another monument, the Golden Boy of Pye Corner, marks the point near Smithfield where the fire stopped. Constructed between 1671 and 1677, it is the tallest isolated stone column in the world[1] and was built on the site of St. Margaret's, Fish Street, the first church to be burnt down by the Great Fire.
The Monument comprises a fluted Doric column built of Portland stone topped with a gilded urn of fire, and was designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke. Its height marks its distance from the site in Pudding Lane of the shop of Thomas Farynor, the king's baker, where the Great Fire began.
The top of the Monument is reached by a narrow winding staircase of 311 steps. A cage was added in the mid-19th century at the top of the Monument to prevent people jumping off, after six people had committed suicide from the structure between 1788 and 1842.
Three sides of the base carry inscriptions in Latin. The one on the south side describes actions taken by Charles II following the fire. The one on the east describes how the Monument was started and brought to perfection, and under which mayors. Inscriptions on the north side describe how the fire started, how much damage it caused, and how it was eventually extinguished. In 1681, the words "but Popish frenzy, which wrought such horrors, is not yet quenched" were added to the end of the inscription. Text on the east side generally blames Roman Catholics for the fire, and this prompted Alexander Pope to say of the area that it is:
The words were chiselled out in 1830.
The west side of the base displays a sculpture, by Caius Gabriel Cibber, in alto and bas relief, of the destruction of the City; with Charles II and his brother, James, the Duke of York (later James II), surrounded by liberty, architecture, and science, giving directions for its restoration.
The nearest London Underground station is Monument.
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The first Rebuilding Act, passed in 1669, stipulated that "the better to preserve the memory of this dreadful visitation", a column of either brass or stone should be set up on Fish Street Hill, on or near the site of Farynor's bakery, where the fire began. Wren, as surveyor-general of the King's Works was asked to submit a design. It was not until 1671 that the City Council approved the design, and it was another six years before the 202 ft column was complete. It was two more years before the inscription (which had been left to Wren — or to Wren's choice — to decide upon) was set in place. "Commemorating — with a brazen disregard for the truth — the fact that 'London rises again...three short years complete that which was considered the work of ages.'"[2]
Surviving drawings show that several versions of the monument were submitted for consideration: a plain obelisk, a column garnished with tongues of fire, and the fluted Doric column that was eventually chosen. The real contention came with the problem of what type of ornament to have at the top. Initially, Wren favoured a statue of a phoenix with outstretched wings rising from the ashes, but as the column neared completion he decided instead on a 15 ft statue either of Charles II, or a sword-wielding female to represent a triumphant London; the cost of either being estimated at £1,050. King Charles himself disliked the idea of a statue of himself atop the monument, pointing out "I didn't start the fire", and instead preferred a simple copper-gilded ball "with flames sprouting from the top", costing a little over £325, but ultimately it was the design of a flaming gilt-bronze urn suggested by Robert Hooke that was chosen.
The total cost of the monument was £13,450 11s 9d., of which £11,300 was paid to the mason-contractor Joshua Marshall.[2]
The Edinburgh-born writer James Boswell visited the Monument in 1762 to climb the 311 steps to what was then the highest viewpoint in London. Halfway up, he suffered a panic attack, but persevered and made it to the top, where he found it "horrid to be so monstrous a way up in the air, so far above London and all its spires".
The area around the base of the column, Monument Street, has now been pedestrianised in a £790,000 street improvement scheme.[3][4]
The Monument closed in July 2007 for an 18-month, £4.5 million refurbishment project and re-opened in February 2009.[5]
Wren and Hooke built the monument to double-up as a scientific instrument. It has a central shaft meant for use as a zenith telescope and for use in gravity and pendulum experiments that connects to an underground laboratory for observers to work (accessible from the present-day ticket booth). Vibrations from heavy traffic on Fish Hill rendered the experimental conditions unsuitable.
A hinged lid in the urn covers the opening to the shaft. The steps in the shaft of the tower are all six inches high, allowing them to be used for barometric pressure studies.
During the 2007-2009 refurbishment, a 360-degree panoramic camera was installed on top of the Monument. Updated every minute and running 24 hours a day, it provides a record of weather, building and ground activity in the City.
Charles Dickens, in his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, published in 1844, describes the Monument thus:
The Monument is a prominent setting in The System of the World, the third book in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. George, the hero of Charlie Fletcher's children's book about unLondon Stoneheart, has a fight at the top of the Monument with a raven and a gargoyle.
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