The Golden Boy of Pye Corner, London, UK
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Team Sieni
N 51° 31.027 W 000° 06.084
30U E 701105 N 5711316
The Golden Boy of Pye Corner is a monument to the Great Fire of London. This monument attributes the cause of the fire to the sin of gluttony.
Waymark Code: WM5139
Location: United Kingdom
Date Posted: 10/24/2008
Views: 16
The Golden Boy of Pye Corner is a statue of a chubby boy, and a monument to the Great Fire of London. It was erected at the limit of the fire. Unlike Sir Christopher Wren's monument "The Monument" which blames (or did until the text was removed in 1831) the fire upon the malice of Papists, the Golden Boy blames the fire on the sin of gluttony.
It was originally built into the front of a public house called the Fortune of War. This pub was a gathering place for "resurrectionists" who obtained corpses for dissection by the surgeons at nearby St Barholomew's Hospital.
It is on the corner of Giltspur St and Cock Lane. Cock Lane was once notorious for prostitution, and was the site of a famous ghost hoax in 1762.
Beneath the statue is inscribed
This Boy is in Memory Put up for the late FIRE of LONDON Occasion'd by the Sin of Gluttony 1666
An inscription on the wall below the statue reads
The Boy at Pye Corner was erected to commemorate the staying of the Great Fire which beginning at Pudding Lane was ascribed to the sin of gluttony when not attributed to the Papists as on the Monument and the Boy was made prodigiously fat to enforce the moral He was originally built into the front of a public house called The Fortune of War which used to occupy this site and was pulled down in 1910.
The Fortune of War was the chief house of call North of the river for resurrectionists in body snatching days years ago. The landlord used to show the room where on benches round the walls the bodies were placed labelled with the snatchers' names waiting till the surgeons at St Bartholomew's could run round and appraise them.