The story
Welcome to the foot of one of the most imposing structures in the City of London. As you stand here at the junction of Monument Street and Fish Street Hill, look up. This fluted Doric column, designed by Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, reaches two hundred and two feet into the sky.
That height isn’t random. If you were to lay this column flat on the ground, pointing eastward, the golden urn of flames at the top would rest exactly where the Great Fire of London began in Thomas Farriner’s bakery on Pudding Lane. For centuries, visitors have climbed the three hundred and eleven spiral steps to see the city skyline.
But the most chilling part of this monument isn’t the height—it’s a ghost story written in stone that remained here for a hundred and fifty years. If you look at the pedestal, you’ll see elaborate Latin inscriptions. For a long time, these stones didn’t just record the facts of the 1666 inferno; they carried a blatant, state-sponsored lie.
In 1681, during a period of intense religious paranoia known as the Popish Plot, an additional sentence was carved into the base. It claimed that the fire was not an accident, but was "begun and carried on by the treachery and malice of the Popish faction." In short, the city officially blamed the Catholics.
There was no evidence for this, but in the seventeenth century, fear was a more powerful currency than truth. The poet Alexander Pope famously mocked this monument, writing that it "Like a tall bully, lifts the head and lies." Imagine walking past this spot in the year 1800.
You would have seen those words clearly visible, fueling prejudice and cementing a false history in the minds of every Londoner who passed by. It wasn’t until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 that the city finally felt the weight of its own dishonesty. In 1830, the local authorities sent workmen here with hammers and chisels.
If you look closely at the inscriptions today, you can see the faint disruptions in the stone where those hateful words were finally hacked away. Today, the Monument stands as a symbol of London’s resilience and its ability to rise from the ashes. But as you stand in its shadow, remember that it is also a reminder of how easily history can be weaponized.
The stones were eventually scrubbed clean of their lies, but for over a century, this "tall bully" stood as a testament to the fact that sometimes, the stories we tell about our tragedies are as dangerous as the tragedies themselves.