London in the late seventeenth century

The home of the Baker family for a few decades

The Bakers Home Page Return to the Home Page of the Bakers Family part of the website

The Bakers of Highfields Story The Story of the Dods and Bakers and of Highfields, Fenton House and Hasfield Court. A journey through the history of Cheshire and Staffordshire, an Anglo-Saxon nobleman who retained his lands after the Conquest, pottery at Stoke on Trent, an encounter with Elgar, and the history of an Elizabethan manor house at Audlem

The Bakers of Highfields The family tree of the Bakers of Highfields

The Dod Family The Family Tree of the Dods, predecessors to the Bakers of Highfields

The Bakers of Fenton House and Hasfield Court The Family Tree of the pottery Bakers of Stoke on Trent

The Bellyse Family The Family Tree of the Bellyse Family

The Farndale Story The main part of this website tells the story of the Farndale family from Yorkshire Descendants of Arthur Baker, the story of the Farndale ancestry is told through the main part of this website You can also return to the Farndale website home page

The Hall Family The genealogy of the family of James Hall, linked to the Baker family through marriage to Arthur Baker

Headlines of are in brown.

Dates are in red.

Hyperlinks to other pages are in dark blue.

References and citations are in turquoise.

Context and local history are in purple.

This page is work in progress

Fleet Street and the City

In the mid-seventeenth century, life around Fleet Street and St Bride's parish was a bustling, chaotic, and densely packed microcosm of London. Positioned just outside the City walls as a critical artery connecting the commercial City with the political West End at Westminster, the neighbourhood was undergoing a massive transition driven by the explosive growth of the printing, legal, and literary trades.

Ever since Wynkyn de Worde set up his press next to St Bride's Church in 1500, the area evolved into London's typographic heartland. Workshops and offices expanded aggressively north into what had been open fields. The neighbourhood attracted some of the greatest minds and diarists of the era. John Milton, John Dryden, and John Evelyn lived in the immediate vicinity. The diarist Samuel Pepys was born in a house adjacent to St Bride's in 1633 and was baptised in the parish church, where his family maintained a permanent pew.

Due to the proximity of the Inns of Court, like Inner and Middle Temple, the population teemed with legal professionals, clerks, and wealthy patrons who were eager consumers of the printed word. Grand noble mansions lined the southern side of the street stretching down to the River Thames, while tight alleys and courts behind the main thoroughfare were packed with manual workers, shopkeepers, haberdashers, and craftsmen. Fleet Street was legendary for its density of alehouses and taverns. These served as vital newsrooms where printers, writers, and lawyers mingled, gossiped, and gathered intelligence for early newsletters and pamphlets. The street served as an early showplace for eccentric street performers, exotic animals, fire-eaters, and oddity exhibitions that drew rowdy crowds.

Before it was famously rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of 1666, the medieval St Bride's was a massive, light-filled gothic building situated in a densely used, overcrowded graveyard. Local diaries from the 1650s frequently complain about the relentless clatter of building works, as residents desperately added storeys and extensions to handle the skyrocketing rent and overcrowding.

A Maritime Economy at Stepney

In the late seventeenth century, Stepney was a massive, rapidly transforming maritime and semi-rural parish located just east of the City of London. It served as the heart of what would become London’s East End, acting as a transition zone between the bustling, crowded docks of the River Thames and open countryside.

The parish was anchored by St Dunstan's Church, the Seaman’s church. It had such powerful ties to the British Merchant Navy that children born at sea were traditionally registered as parishioners here. The area became a favoured residential retreat for sea captains, shipwrights, and merchants making fortunes in foreign trade. They built high-quality, classical brick residences, such as the surviving No. 37 Stepney Green (built in 1694), to stay close to where their ships berthed.

Situated safely outside the jurisdiction of the City of London's strict laws, Stepney became a major hub for Protestant dissenters, Independents, and Puritans. In 1674, they erected the Stepney Meeting (Broad Street Church), which grew into the largest dissenting congregation in London.

In the mid-seventeenth century, a wine cooper operating in the maritime parish of Stepney, London, held a highly skilled, and multifaceted position at the intersection of international trade, manufacturing, and chemistry. Stepney was a rapidly expanding riverside hub just east of the City of London. It encompassed docks like Ratcliff, making it a critical base for merchants, mariners, and vintners who relied heavily on the wine trade.

The Great Plague 1665

The Great Plague of London was an outbreak of bubonic plague that killed an estimated 100,000 people, nearly a quarter of the city's population, between 1665 and 1666. Crowded housing, uncollected waste, and open sewage in London's streets created ideal conditions for rats. It began in the spring of 1665 in the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields and peaked during the hot summer months of August and September.

King Charles II, his court, and wealthy citizens fled London for the countryside.

Homes with infected people were locked up for 40 days, marked with a red cross and the words Lord have mercy upon us, with guards watching the doors.

The death toll dropped sharply in the winter of 1665, and the epidemic largely ended, though the Great Fire of London in 1666 later destroyed many of the infected, rat-infested areas.

The Great Fire of London 1666

The Great Fire of London was a catastrophic blaze that swept through the heart of England's capital from Sunday, 2 September to Wednesday, 5 September 1666. It destroyed the majority of the medieval city inside the old Roman walls, permanently transforming London's architecture, safety regulations, and urban layout.

The fire broke out after midnight at a bakery owned by Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane. A long, hot summer had left the city dry. Strong easterly winds pushed the sparks from house to house. Most homes were built of wood and thatch, built extremely close together over narrow streets, allowing the fire to spread with terrifying speed. London had no formal fire brigade. The Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bludworth, hesitated to order the demolition of houses to create

firebreaks, allowing the blaze to grow out of control.

The Great Fire of London heavily impacted Fleet Street and St Bride's parish in September 1666. Over four days, the inferno laid waste to this bustling area, turning its timber-framed printing houses, crowded courts, and medieval landmarks into ash. The fire raged westward from Pudding Lane, and by Tuesday, 4th September, it reached the Fleet River. Although the river acted as a natural ditch, the intense easterly winds and the dry, tightly packed wooden properties along the banks allowed the flames to leap across the water. It aggressively pushed up Ludgate Hill and into the heart of the Fleet Street commercial district.

St Bride's Church possessed its own manual fire engine. However, because it had been poorly maintained, scoured, oyled and trimmed, it failed completely when the flames engulfed the building. The medieval gothic church was completely gutted, leaving only a shell of stone walls and piles of rubble. The heat was so intense that the heavy church bells melted. Centuries later, archaeologists digging in the crypt found clumps of this fused bell metal from 1666.

The fire consumed thousands of households, tenements, and businesses along the eastern half of Fleet Street. Coordinated firefighting efforts, including blowing up houses with gunpowder to create firebreaks, finally managed to stop the westward spread of the fire at Fetter Lane. Because the fire was stopped here, the historic Inner and Middle Temple legal complexes were only partially damaged, but the vast majority of St Bride’s parish was entirely erased. Dozens of printing shops, bookbinders, and publishers lost their heavy wooden presses, paper stocks, and life's work overnight.

Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to rebuild the city's churches. He spent seven years constructing a grand new, expensive baroque design for St Bride's, which reopened in 1675. Between 1701 and 1703, he added its iconic, tiered wedding cake spire, which permanently redefined the Fleet Street skyline.

The King’s Road, London

In 1700, the area of the King's Road in Chelsea was very different from the bustling, fashionable shopping district it is today. The road was a private, restricted thoroughfare. Built just a few years earlier in 1694 by King Charles II, its sole purpose was to provide a smooth, direct route for the monarch and the royal court to travel between St James’s Palace and Hampton Court or Kew. In 1700, the general public was strictly forbidden from using the road. It was blocked off by a series of security gates. Only royalty, high-ranking courtiers, and select aristocrats who had been granted special permission or copper tokens bearing the King’s monogram could pass through

The surrounding area of Chelsea was largely rural, possessing a population of only about 3,000 people. It was an area of farmland, nurseries, and market gardens that grew produce to feed the city of London.

A gilder setup near the local manor houses or courthouse would have been strategically positioned to cater directly to the wealthy aristocracy, judges, and landed gentry who owned properties in these affluent outskirts away from the dirty, overcrowded core of the City of London.

In 1700, a gilder living near Maiden Road and the King’s Road Courthouse area in London practiced a delicate, highly toxic craft. He applied ultra-thin gold leaf to wood, metal, or picture frames using dangerous mercury amalgams or sizing glues. Working by candlelight in a rapidly growing capital, he balanced modest artisanal independence with the constant threat of poverty and occupational illness. Gilders handled paper-thin sheets of gold, using squirrel-hair tips and specialised glues or wet gold techniques. They decorated ornate furnishings, coach trimmings, mirrors, and architectural moulding for affluent Londoners or merchant classes. They generally worked in small, poorly ventilated domestic workshops with open charcoal fires or stoves used to dry primed surfaces.

The area of King’s Court Road comprised tightly packed, volatile urban parishes near Westminster. Gilders would have suffered frequent exposure to harmful fumes and chemicals, particularly mercury if doing 'fire-gilding' on metals. They earned a fluctuating income dependent on luxury trade demand, leaving families vulnerable to seasonal slowdowns, high food prices, and crowd diseases.

Bibliography

Early Stepney and Settlement and Building to c.1700 in A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 11, Stepney, Bethnal Green. Originally published by Victoria County History, London, 1998.