After dinner (= the midday meal) young Mitchell and I, it being an excellent frosty day to walk, did walk out, he showing me the baker’s house in Pudding Lane where the late great fire did begin, and thence all along Thames Street, where I did view several places, and so up by London Wall, by Blackfriars to Ludgate.      Samuel Pepys. Diary for 6 January 1667.

It was rare for Pepys to choose to go on foot. His diary for September 23rd that same year started:

Up, and walked to the Exchange, there to get a coach, but failed, and so was forced to walk a most dirty walk to the Old Swan, and there took boat, and so to the Exchange, and there took coach to St.James’s and did our usual business with the Duke of York. Thence I walked over the Park to White Hall and took water to Westminster.

Walking was mainly to get from his home in Seething Lane (just north-west of the Tower), either to pick up a coach (from the 17th century equivalent of a taxi rank) or a boat, depending on where he was headed. And when it was bad weather the streets could be ruinous for the fine clothes that Pepys was increasingly wearing, as his social status rose and he found himself consorting, practically daily, with the likes of the Duke of York, his ultimate superior in the Navy Office.

So it is not surprising that he would have chosen ‘an excellent frosty day’ to go for a walk of pleasure, as he did on the 6th of January. Any mud would have frozen solid, and his good clothes would have stayed unsullied.

Apart from briefly heading north to Pudding Lane he and his companion would probably have stayed on Thames Street, since it ran due west, to the north of the wharves and other buildings lining the Thames. This would have taken them to Blackfriars and they would then have followed the walls up to Ludgate - the western-most gate - then on round to London Wall, on the north side of the City. He and his companion wouldn’t have cut through what remained of the city, where the odd fire still flared up, and various shady characters were to be encountered.

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The great diarist would be pleased to know that, just to the east of Seething Lane we now find ‘Pepys Street’ and that a pub in Stew Lane (meaning “Brothel Lane”), south of Thames Street, is called the ‘Samuel Pepys’. He would be less happy to discover that Thames Street is now a major through route taking a constant stream of cars and lorries whizzing along from Tower Hill, right along the Embankment to Westminster and beyond.

In fact, when I first got to know that part of London, in the early 1960s, it was a very peaceful thoroughfare, especially on Sundays when I often used to head down towards the river after a couple of hours wandering through Petticoat Lane.  If the tide was out I would walk along the foreshore as I did many years later on the other bank, when I lived in Waterloo; and I recall one particular day climbing up an iron ladder fixed vertically to the wall above me, and - on reaching the top - being enthralled to see Saint Paul’s just a few hundred yards to my north.

Where I had emerged was Pauls Pier Wharf, one of the many riverside wharfs to have been swept away when this part of London was redeveloped in the years between the time I studied in London in the early 60s and when I moved in with Jane in 1980.

Googling the name of the wharf led me to a fascinating website, from which I have used the above photograph, taken by the writer’s father in 1948.

If you want to know more about how London has changed over recent years, just go to the website below.

                    http://alondoninheritance.com/about/