I remember writing my very first Pepys Mystery – which feels like an age ago – the introductory novella, Mr Pepys’s Stolen Diaries. It was my first dip into 17th century London and I remember thinking, What did the houses look like? Happily, there are many books and online articles on the subject. (I highly recommend Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain for the breeziest overview of 17th century life.)

The Great Fire, of course, destroyed so much of the city – the buildings being largely medieval (ie made of wood and plaster) at the time… There’s an argument to be made that the fire did the city a favour, in forcing an upgrade in building materials and construction practices, which was dearly needed.

This building pictured is (a beautifully restored) 41 Cloth Fair in Farringdon, the oldest building in London, said to have survived the fire since it was enclosed within a stone priory complex. Built around the turn of the 17th century, note the gorgeous large leaded bay windows and the red-brick construction (marking it out as an expensive property – Mr Pepys’s home on Seething Lane was similarly constructed).

Both 41 Cloth Fair and Pepys’s home survived the fire. So what did the medieval properties look like, which did not?

I discovered two really evocative sources of information. One was the four-part ITV TV series, The Great Fire, starring Daniel Mays as Pepys. The other was a quite wonderful YouTube “fly-through” of London before the fire, created by students at Leicester’s De Montfort University, for their Crytek Off the Map project. That’s today’s first rabbit-hole link.

I’ve also just come across this second link, featuring some fabulous engravings of higgledy-piggledy buildings – you’d have been hard-pressed to find a straight line among the narrow streets of the old city pre-Great Fire – that would have existed at the time.