It began in Thomas Farriner's bakehouse in Pudding Lane, in the small hours (2 September 1666)
Farriner was baker to the king; he denied to his death that his ovens were to blame
History · Early modern
The Great Fire of London
2–6 September 1666
Four days that burnt out the medieval City of London
A bakery fire in Pudding Lane spread through a city of timber, pitch and thatch, packed tight inside the old Roman walls and short of water after a dry summer. In four days it destroyed most of the City within the walls, including Old St Paul's, and left tens of thousands homeless — but killed, officially, almost nobody.
How to spot them
- ▸September 1666: four days of fire in a timber-built city, the year after the plague
- ▸Quiz clue: 'Pudding Lane', 'Pepys's diary', 'Bloodworth', 'firebreaks', 'the Monument'
- ▸Why Christopher Wren got to rebuild fifty-one churches and a cathedral
- ▸Officially only a handful of deaths, but four-fifths of the City within the walls destroyed
What happened
'A woman might piss it out' — the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, going back to bed
His refusal to pull down houses early cost the City its best chance of containment
A diarist burying his Parmesan cheese and his wine in the garden (1666)
Samuel Pepys, whose diary — with John Evelyn's — is the classic eyewitness account
Houses blown up with gunpowder to make firebreaks, on the king's orders
Charles II and the Duke of York took personal charge of the firefighting
The old cathedral's roof lead running molten down Ludgate Hill (1666)
Books stored in St Faith's crypt by the booksellers burnt for days
A French watchmaker, Robert Hubert, hanged on a confession he could not possibly have made good (1666)
He had not even been in England when it started; the inscription blaming Catholics stood on the Monument until 1830
A 202-foot Doric column by Wren and Hooke, set 202 feet from where it started (1671–77)
Quick-fire facts
- •It burnt from Sunday 2 to Wednesday 5 September 1666, with embers smouldering on the 6th
- •Contemporary estimates: about 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall and Old St Paul's destroyed
- •Only about six deaths were officially recorded, though the real toll among the poor was probably far higher
- •Around 70,000 of the City's 80,000 inhabitants were made homeless, camping in fields at Moorfields and Islington
- •It followed the Great Plague of 1665, and was widely read as a divine judgement — or as a French or Catholic plot
- •No treaty ended it; the settlement was legislative — the Rebuilding of London Act 1666 and a Fire Court to resolve landlord–tenant disputes
- •Christopher Wren's grand plan for a boulevarded new city was rejected; he did rebuild 51 churches and the new St Paul's
- •The disaster helped create the first fire insurance companies, which issued metal firemarks for buildings they covered
- •The Monument, by Wren and Robert Hooke, was designed to double as a zenith telescope
Drill it — 10 cards
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Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Great Fire of London
- Museum of London — The Great Fire of London
- Adrian Tinniswood — By Permission of Heaven: The Story of the Great Fire of London