Golden Boy of Pye Corner

The Golden Boy of Pye Corner is a gilded wooden statue that stands as a deliberate moral counterpoint to the city's official history. While the massive Monument to the Great Fire near Pudding Lane originally blamed the 1666 conflagration on a Catholic plot, this small, rotund figure suggests a more domestic culprit. The statue was crafted to be visibly overweight, serving as a symbolic physical manifestation of gluttony. According to the logic of the time, since the fire began at a bakery on Pudding Lane and finally burned itself out here at Pye Corner, the divine cause of the destruction was clearly the sins of the belly.