Creative History

A Watchmaker, a drifter, an injured man or a person with a cognitive disability--it didn’t matter.  No matter what Robert Hubert was--or may have been--in September of 1666 in the days just after the Great Fire of London had left most of England’s largest city a smoldering ruin, Robert Hubert was an immigrant; maybe a Catholic, a foreigner and what everyone at the time called a stranger.  Robert Hubert was a Frenchman who resided in England and for that reason he was considered a threat in September of 1666; a person who instantly became one of interest on account of his immigration status--a person who may have been responsible for the flaming holocaust that had just incinerated England’s seat of royal power--and who for that reason, was taken into custody by the King’s authorities in the days after the Great Fire of London. Robert Hubert arrived in London at the age of twenty six in the spring of 1666 only weeks prior to the outbreak of the Great Fire.  History does t...

  February 15, 1894 was a brisk winter’s day in late-Victorian Era London. At around 5 o'clock in the afternoon a cold hazy setting sun still hung in the sky and glowed--a dull orange orb suspended in air--like the light of a flickering candle about to be extinguished over Greenwich Park just outside the city center and home to the Royal Greenwich Observatory. The Royal Observatory was located on a prominent hill southeast of downtown London in the affluent suburb of Greenwich and overlooked the bustling River Thames--the lifeline of the late 19th century British Empire.  The Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO) founded by King Charles II in 1675 literally split the known world in half.  It is the Prime Meridian; the spot on the planet earth from which longitude and the passing of time are measured and which to this very day gives us Greenwich Mean Time and the dates on our calendars. Today, the RGO is a tourist attraction located in an urban parklike setting that attrac...

  On June 22, 1861 the day of the fire, Arthur Munby, a local resident who was attempting to get back to his home via horse drawn omnibus in London that night, wrote in his diary, “ From Epsom and Cheam we saw a great fire in the direction of London.   A pyramid of red flame on the horizon sending up a column of smoke that rose high in the air and then spread like that over Vesuvius.” What Munby was describing as he rode towards his home that summer night was the infamous 1861 Tooley Street Fire--the largest conflagration to consume London in nearly 200 years since the Great Fire of 1666.   The Tooley Street Fire of 1861, parts of which would burn continuously for up to two weeks, was started sometime around what we today would call rush hour at about 5 in the afternoon on Tuesday, June 22.  It is believed that at about that time, as a warehouse worker was closing up shop for the day along one of London’s many wharves packed with textiles, specifically at a ...

  May Day, the 1st day of May, was typically  a day of feasting, festivity and celebration in early modern England.  Ordinarily, in London May Day was a day off from work for the laboring masses and a day to gather in the warm Spring sunshine for dancing and sport in the city’s narrow streets.  But, in London on the 1st of May during the fateful year of 1517, a day of celebration and revelry took on a much more sinister tone and became forever known to history as “Evil May Day”. On the night of May 1, 1517 a violent and drunken mob which numbered perhaps in the thousands took control of old London’s densely packed, muddy and narrow late-medieval city streets.  Fired by years of simmering rage over low wages and lack of meaningful employment, the angry mob sought to assault and in some instances even attempt to murder every member of London’s ever growing foreign born immigrant population that they could find. At that time in Tudor England during the reign of...