In September 1666, a fire sparked in a bakery in Pudding Lane grew until it had destroyed four-fifths of central London. The rebuilding efforts that followed not only launched the careers of some of London’s most famous architects, but also transformed Londoners’ relationship to their city by underscoring the ways that people could shape a city’s spaces—and the ways that a city’s spaces could shape its people. Movable Londons looks to the Restoration theater to understand how the dispossessed made London into a modern city after the Great Fire of 1666 and how the introduction of changeable scenery in theaters changed how Londoners conceptualized the city. The introduction of movable scenery revolutionized London’s public theaters and invited audiences to observe how the performers—many of them hailing from the same communities as their characters—navigated the stage.

Fawcett argues that wealthy Londoners relied on the knowledge of impoverished populations as they figured out how to reorient themselves to the mobility and unpredictability of the modern cityscape, whose space-making tactics suddenly had value in a changed cityscape. Exploring the introduction of changeable scenery to public theaters, Fawcett makes a claim for the centrality of unplanned spaces and the role of the Restoration theater in articulating those spaces as the modern city emerged.

Julia H. Fawcett is Associate Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696–1801.