The Golden Boy and the Resurrectionists’ Pub
On the corner of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane, set into the side of an office building, there is small statue of a podgy little boy, known as the Golden Boy of Pye Corner. The statue’s location is said to mark the limit of the Great Fire of London in 1666. The fire is accepted to be accident today, starting in a bakery on Pudding Lane – a combination of exceptionally dry weather and a stray spark, most likely. However, at the time, there was great suspicion that the fire had been started deliberately, and so a scapegoat was sought.
After blaming and executing a French watchmaker who was actually not even in the country at the time (but who was likely suffering from a mental illness through which he believed he was an agent of the pope), French and Dutch immigrants, an astrologer who had predicted a fire, and just papists in general (the Monument to the fire was originally inscribed to blame them), it was finally decided that the fire was a direct act of God, wreaking wrath on London for being gluttonous – the fire had starting at Pudding Lane and ended at Pye Corner, after all. Thus the Golden Boy was commissioned, and made fat just to emphasise the point.
The Golden Boy was until 1910 located on a pub on the same site called The Fortune of War, before its demolition. The pub played host to resurrectionists (i.e., body-snatchers) who would bring corpses, fresh from the grave (or river) to a room there, before they were sold on to the anatomists of St Bartholomew’s Hospital just across the road.
