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Great Fire of London

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A painting showing the great fire of London, 4 September 1666, as seen from a boat in vicinity of Tower Wharf
The Great Fire of London, depicted by an unknown painter, as it would have appeared from a boat in the vicinity of Tower Wharf on the evening of Tuesday, 4 September 1666. To the left is London Bridge; to the right, the Tower of London. St. Paul's Cathedral is in the distance, surrounded by the tallest flames.



Origin and consequences of the fire[edit]

The Great Fire started at the bakery (or baker's house) of Thomas Farriner (or Farynor) on Pudding Lane shortly after midnight on Sunday, 2 September, and spread rapidly west across the City of London. The major firefighting technique of the time was to create firebreaks by means of demolition; this was critically delayed owing to the indecisiveness of Lord Mayor of London Sir Thomas Bloodworth. By the time large-scale demolitions were ordered on Sunday night, the wind had already fanned the bakery fire into a firestorm that defeated such measures. The fire pushed north on Monday into the heart of the City.

Order in the streets broke down as rumours arose of suspicious foreigners setting fires. The fears of the homeless focused on the French and Dutch, England's enemies in the ongoing Second Anglo-Dutch War; these substantial immigrant groups became victims of lynchings and street violence. On Tuesday, the fire spread over most of the City, destroying St Paul's Cathedral and leaping the River Fleet to threaten King Charles II's court at Whitehall. Coordinated firefighting efforts were simultaneously mobilising; the battle to quench the fire is considered to have been won by two factors: the strong east winds died down, and the Tower of London garrison used gunpowder to create effective firebreaks to halt further spread eastward.

The social and economic problems created by the disaster were overwhelming. Evacuation from London and resettlement elsewhere were strongly encouraged by Charles II, who feared a London rebellion amongst the dispossessed refugees. Despite several radical proposals, London was reconstructed on essentially the same street plan used before the fire.[5]

London in the 1660s[edit]

Map of central London in 1666, showing landmarks related to the Great Fire of London
Central London in 1666, with the burnt area shown in pink

By the 1660s, London was by far the largest city in Britain, estimated at half a million inhabitants. However, due to the Great Plague of London during the last winter, its population was lower than before it. John Evelyn, contrasting London to the Baroque magnificence of Paris, called it a "wooden, northern, and inartificial congestion of Houses", and expressed alarm about the fire hazards posed by the wood and the congestion.[6] By "inartificial", Evelyn meant unplanned and makeshift, the result of organic growth and unregulated urban sprawl.[7]




The relationship was often tense between the City and the Crown. The City of London had been a stronghold of republicanism during the Civil War (1642–1651), and the wealthy and economically dynamic capital still had the potential to be a threat to Charles II, as had been demonstrated by several republican uprisings in London in the early 1660s. The City magistrates were of the generation that had fought in the Civil War, and could remember how Charles I's grab for absolute power had led to that national trauma.[10]



Fire hazards in the city[edit]


The human habitations were crowded to bursting point, intermingled with these sources of heat, sparks, and pollution, and their construction increased the fire risk. The typical six- or seven-storey timbered London tenement houses had "jetties" (projecting upper floors). They had a narrow footprint at ground level, but maximised their use of land by "encroaching" on the street, as a contemporary observer put it, with the gradually increasing size of their upper storeys. The fire hazard was well perceived when the top jetties all but met across the narrow alleys; "as it does facilitate a conflagration, so does it also hinder the remedy", wrote one observer[14]—but "the covetousness of the citizens and connivancy [corruption] of Magistrates" worked in favour of jetties. In 1661, Charles II issued a proclamation forbidding overhanging windows and jetties, but this was largely ignored by the local government. Charles's next, sharper message in 1665 warned of the risk of fire from the narrowness of the streets and authorised both imprisonment of recalcitrant builders and demolition of dangerous buildings. It, too, had little impact.

Wattle-and-daub was a common building material: research by fire brigades showed that well-made new wattle-and-daub is strongly fire-resistant, but old neglected wattle-and-daub with patches of daub flaked off exposing patches of wattle that readily caught fire.


London was also full of black powder, especially along the river front. Much of it was left in the homes of private citizens from the days of the English Civil War, as the former members of Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army still retained their muskets and the powder with which to load them. Five to six hundred tons of powder was stored in the Tower of London.[16] The ship chandlers along the wharves also held large stocks, stored in wooden barrels.

17th-century firefighting[edit]

Woodcut image showing how firehooks are used to help tear down buildings to stop fires from spreading, as seen during a fire at Tiverton in Devon, England, 1612


The methods available for this relied on demolition and water. By law, the tower of every parish church had to hold equipment for these efforts: long ladders, leather buckets, axes, and "firehooks" for pulling down buildings (see illustration right, see also pike pole).[18] Sometimes taller buildings were levelled to the ground quickly and effectively by means of controlled gunpowder explosions. This drastic method of creating firebreaks was increasingly used towards the end of the Great Fire, and modern historians believe that it was what finally won the struggle.[19]

Failures in fighting the fire[edit]

An advertisement for a comparatively small and manoeuvrable seventeenth-century fire engine on wheels: "These Engins, (which are the best) to quinch great Fires; are made by John Keeling in Black Fryers (after many years' Experience)."




Demolishing the houses downwind of a dangerous fire was often an effective way of containing the destruction by means of firehooks or explosives. This time, however, demolition was fatally delayed for hours by the Lord Mayor's lack of leadership and failure to give the necessary orders.[23] By the time that orders came directly from the King to "spare no houses", the fire had devoured many more houses, and the demolition workers could no longer get through the crowded streets.

The use of water to extinguish the fire was also frustrated. In principle, water was available from a system of elm pipes which supplied 30,000 houses via a high water tower at Cornhill, filled from the river at high tide, and also via a reservoir of Hertfordshire spring water in Islington.[24] It was often possible to open a pipe near a burning building and connect it to a hose to play on a fire or fill buckets. Further, Pudding Lane was close to the river. Theoretically, all the lanes from the river up to the bakery and adjoining buildings should have been manned with double rows of firefighters passing full buckets up to the fire and empty buckets back down to the river.

This did not happen, or at least was no longer happening by the time that Pepys viewed the fire from the river at mid-morning on the Sunday. Pepys comments in his diary that nobody was trying to put it out, but instead they fled from it in fear, hurrying "to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire." The flames crept towards the river front with little interference from the overwhelmed community and soon torched the flammable warehouses along the wharves. The resulting conflagration cut off the firefighters from the immediate water supply from the river and set alight the water wheels under London Bridge which pumped water to the Cornhill water tower; the direct access to the river and the supply of piped water failed together.


On this occasion, an unknown number of fire engines were either wheeled or dragged through the streets, some from across the City. The piped water had already failed which they were designed to use, but parts of the river bank could still be reached. Gangs of men tried desperately to manoeuvre the engines right up to the river to fill their reservoirs, and several of the engines toppled into the Thames. The heat from the flames by then was too great for the remaining engines to get within a useful distance; they could not even get into Pudding Lane.

Development of the fire[edit]

The personal experiences of many Londoners during the fire are glimpsed in letters and memoirs. The two best-known diarists of the Restoration are Samuel Pepys (1633–1703)[27] and John Evelyn (1620–1706),[28] and both recorded the events and their own reactions day by day, and made great efforts to keep themselves informed of what was happening all over the City and beyond.

Sunday morning[edit]

     Approximate damage by the evening of Sunday, 2 September[29]
Oil painting of Samuel Pepys, 1666

After two rainy summers in 1664 and 1665, London had lain under an exceptional drought since November 1665, and the wooden buildings were tinder-dry after the long hot summer of 1666. A fire broke out at Thomas Farriner's bakery in Pudding Lane a little after midnight on Sunday 2 September. The family was trapped upstairs but managed to climb from an upstairs window to the house next door, except for a maidservant who was too frightened to try, who became the first victim.[30] The neighbours tried to help douse the fire; after an hour, the parish constables arrived and judged that the adjoining houses had better be demolished to prevent further spread. The householders protested, and Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth was summoned, who alone had the authority to override their wishes.

When Bloodworth arrived, the flames were consuming the adjoining houses and creeping towards the paper warehouses and flammable stores on the riverfront. The more experienced firemen were clamouring for demolition, but Bloodworth refused on the grounds that most premises were rented and the owners could not be found. Bloodworth is generally thought to have been appointed to the office of Lord Mayor as a yes man, rather than by possessing requisite capabilities for the job. He panicked when faced with a sudden emergency[31] and, when pressed, made the oft-quoted remark, "Pish! A woman could piss it out", and left. After the City had been destroyed, Samuel Pepys looked back on the events and wrote in his diary on 7 September 1666: "People do all the world over cry out of the simplicity [the stupidity] of my Lord Mayor in general; and more particularly in this business of the fire, laying it all upon him."

Pepys was a senior official in the Navy Office by then, and he ascended the Tower of London on Sunday morning to view the fire from a turret. He recorded in his diary that the eastern gale had turned it into a conflagration. It had burned down several churches and, he estimated, 300 houses and reached the riverfront. The houses on London Bridge were burning.


Young schoolboy William Taswell had bolted from the early morning service in Westminster Abbey. He saw some refugees arrive in hired lighter boats near Westminster Stairs, a mile west of Pudding Lane, unclothed and covered only with blankets.[33] The services of the lightermen had suddenly become extremely expensive, and only the luckiest refugees secured a place in a boat.

Sunday afternoon[edit]

The fire spread quickly in the high wind and, by mid-morning on Sunday, people abandoned attempts at extinguishing it and fled. The moving human mass and their bundles and carts made the lanes impassable for firemen and carriages. Pepys took a coach back into the city from Whitehall, but reached only St Paul's Cathedral before he had to get out and walk. Pedestrians with handcarts and goods were still on the move away from the fire, heavily weighed down. The parish churches not directly threatened were filling up with furniture and valuables, which soon had to be moved further afield.

Pepys found Bloodworth trying to co-ordinate the fire-fighting efforts and near to collapse, "like a fainting woman", crying out plaintively in response to the King's message that he was pulling down houses. "But the fire overtakes us faster then [sic] we can do it." Holding on to his civic dignity, he refused James's offer of soldiers and then went home to bed.[34] King Charles II sailed down from Whitehall in the Royal barge to inspect the scene. He found that houses were still not being pulled down, in spite of Bloodworth's assurances to Pepys, and daringly overrode the authority of Bloodworth to order wholesale demolitions west of the fire zone.[35] The delay rendered these measures largely futile, as the fire was already out of control.

By Sunday afternoon, 18 hours after the alarm was raised in Pudding Lane, the fire had become a raging firestorm that created its own weather. A tremendous uprush of hot air above the flames was driven by the chimney effect wherever constrictions narrowed the air current, such as the constricted space between jettied buildings, and this left a vacuum at ground level. The resulting strong inward winds did not tend to put the fire out, as might be thought;[36] instead, they supplied fresh oxygen to the flames, and the turbulence created by the uprush made the wind veer erratically both north and south of the main easterly direction of the gale which was still blowing.

Pepys went again on the river in the early evening with his wife and some friends, "and to the fire up and down, it still encreasing". They ordered the boatman to go "so near the fire as we could for smoke; and all over the Thames, with one's face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops". When the "firedrops" became unbearable, the party went on to an alehouse on the South Bank and stayed there till darkness came and they could see the fire on London Bridge and across the river, "as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side of the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it". Pepys described this arch of fire as "a bow with God's arrow in it with a shining point".



The fire was principally expanding north and west by dawn on Monday, 3 September, the turbulence of the fire storm pushing the flames both farther south and farther north than the day before.[37] The spread to the south was mostly halted by the river, but it had torched the houses on London Bridge and was threatening to cross the bridge and endanger the borough of Southwark on the south bank of the river. Southwark was preserved by a pre-existent firebreak on the bridge, a long gap between the buildings which had saved the south side of the Thames in the fire of 1632 and now did so again.[38] Flying embers started a fire in Southwark but it was quickly stopped.

The fire's spread to the north reached the financial heart of the City. The houses of the bankers in Lombard Street began to burn on Monday afternoon, prompting a rush to get their stacks of gold coins, so crucial to the wealth of the city and nation, to safety before they melted away. Several observers emphasise the despair and helplessness which seemed to seize Londoners on this second day, and the lack of efforts to save the wealthy, fashionable districts which were now menaced by the flames, such as the Royal Exchange—combined bourse and shopping centre – and the opulent consumer goods shops in Cheapside. The Royal Exchange caught fire in the late afternoon, and was a smoking shell within a few hours. John Evelyn, courtier and diarist, wrote:



     Approximate damage by the evening of Monday, 3 September
John Evelyn (1620–1706) in 1651

Suspicion and fear[edit]

Suspicion soon arose in the threatened city that the fire was no accident. The swirling winds carried sparks and burning flakes long distances to lodge on thatched roofs and in wooden gutters, causing seemingly unrelated house fires to break out far from their source and giving rise to rumours that fresh fires were being set on purpose. Foreigners were immediately suspects because of the current Second Anglo-Dutch War. Fear and suspicion hardened into certainty on Monday, as reports circulated of imminent invasion and of foreign undercover agents seen casting "fireballs" into houses, or caught with hand grenades or matches.[41] There was a wave of street violence.[42] William Taswell saw a mob loot the shop of a French painter and level it to the ground, and watched in horror as a blacksmith walked up to a Frenchman in the street and hit him over the head with an iron bar.

The fears of terrorism received an extra boost from the disruption of communications and news as facilities were devoured by the fire. The General Letter Office in Threadneedle Street, through which post passed for the entire country, burned down early on Monday morning. The London Gazette just managed to put out its Monday issue before the printer's premises went up in flames. The whole nation depended on these communications, and the void which they left filled up with rumours.

There were also religious alarms of renewed Gunpowder Plots. Suspicions rose to panic and collective paranoia on Monday, and both the Trained Bands and the Coldstream Guards focused less on fire fighting and more on rounding up foreigners, Catholics, and any odd-looking people, arresting them or rescuing them from mobs, or both together.

The inhabitants were growing desperate to remove their belongings from the City, especially the upper class. This provided a source of income for the able-bodied poor, who hired out as porters (sometimes simply making off with the goods), and it was especially profitable for the owners of carts and boats. Hiring a cart had cost a couple of shillings on the Saturday before the fire; on Monday, it rose to as much as £40, a fortune equivalent to more than £4,000 in 2005.[43]

Seemingly every cart and boat owner within reach of London made their way towards the City to share in these opportunities, the carts jostling at the narrow gates with the panicked inhabitants trying to get out. The chaos at the gates was such that the magistrates ordered the gates shut on Monday afternoon, in the hope of turning the inhabitants' attention from safeguarding their own possessions to fighting the fire: "that, no hopes of saving any things left, they might have more desperately endeavoured the quenching of the fire."[44] This headlong and unsuccessful measure was rescinded the next day.

Monday marked the beginning of organised action, even as order broke down in the streets, especially at the gates, and the fire raged unchecked. Bloodworth was responsible as Lord Mayor for co-ordinating the fire-fighting, but he had apparently left the City; his name is not mentioned in any contemporaneous accounts of the Monday's events.[45] In this state of emergency, the King again overrode the City authorities and put his brother James, Duke of York, in charge of operations.

James set up command posts round the perimeter of the fire, press-ganging into teams of well-paid and well-fed firemen any men of the lower classes found in the streets. Three courtiers were put in charge of each post, with authority from Charles himself to order demolitions. This visible gesture of solidarity from the Crown was intended to cut through the citizens' misgivings about being held financially responsible for pulling down houses. James and his life guards rode up and down the streets all Monday, rescuing foreigners from the mob and attempting to keep order. "The Duke of York hath won the hearts of the people with his continual and indefatigable pains day and night in helping to quench the Fire," wrote a witness in a letter on 8 September.[46]


A contemporary account said that King Charles in person worked manually, that day or later, to help throw water on flames and to help demolish buildings to make a firebreak.


Tuesday, 4 September was the day of greatest destruction.[48] The Duke of York's command post at Temple Bar, where Strand meets Fleet Street, was supposed to stop the fire's westward advance towards the Palace of Whitehall. He hoped that the River Fleet would form a natural firebreak, making a stand with his firemen from the Fleet Bridge and down to the Thames. However, early on Tuesday morning, the flames jumped over the Fleet and outflanked them, driven by the unabated easterly gale, forcing them to run for it. There was consternation at the palace as the fire continued implacably westward; "Oh, the confusion there was then at that court!" wrote Evelyn.



Everybody had thought St. Paul's Cathedral a safe refuge, with its thick stone walls and natural firebreak in the form of a wide empty surrounding plaza. It had been crammed full of rescued goods and its crypt filled with the tightly packed stocks of the printers and booksellers in adjoining Paternoster Row. However, the building was covered in wooden scaffolding, undergoing piecemeal restoration by Christopher Wren, who was relatively unknown then. The scaffolding caught fire on Tuesday night.

Leaving school, young William Taswell stood on Westminster Stairs a mile away and watched as the flames crept round the cathedral and the burning scaffolding ignited the timbered roof beams. Within half an hour, the lead roof was melting, and the books and papers in the crypt caught with a roar. "The stones of Paul's flew like grenados," reported Evelyn in his diary, "the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them." The cathedral was quickly a ruin.

In St.Paul's, falling heavy masonry broke through into its crypt, where booksellers had stored huge stocks of books, and all were burned.

During the day, the flames began to move eastward from the neighbourhood of Pudding Lane, straight against the prevailing east wind and towards Pepys's home on Seething Lane and the Tower of London with its gunpowder stores. The garrison at the Tower took matters into their own hands after waiting all day for requested help from James's official firemen who were busy in the west. They created firebreaks by blowing up houses on a large scale in the vicinity, halting the advance of the fire. In a letter to William Coventry, Pepys wrote that he "saw how horribly the sky looks, all on a fire in the night, was enough to put us out of our wits; and, indeed, it was extremely dreadful, for it looks just as if it was at us, and the whole heaven on fire."[49]


James, Duke of York, later James II.

The wind dropped on Tuesday evening, and the firebreaks created by the garrison finally began to take effect on Wednesday 5 September.[50] Stopping the fire caused much fire and demolition damage in the lawyers' area called the Temple. Pepys walked all over the smouldering city, getting his feet hot, and climbed the steeple of Barking Church, from which he viewed the destroyed City, "the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw." There were many separate fires still burning themselves out, but the Great Fire was over. The following Sunday, rain fell over the city extinguishing the fire. However, it took until the following March before embers stopped reigniting.[51]

Pepys visited Moorfields, a large public park immediately north of the City, and saw a great encampment of homeless refugees, "poor wretches carrying their good there, and every body keeping his goods together by themselves". He noted that the price of bread had doubled in the environs of the park. Evelyn also went out to Moorfields, which was turning into the main point of assembly for the homeless, and was horrified at the numbers of distressed people filling it, some under tents, others in makeshift shacks: "Many [were] without a rag or any necessary utensils, bed or board ... reduced to extremest misery and poverty."[52] Evelyn was impressed by the pride of these distressed Londoners, "tho' ready to perish for hunger and destitution, yet not asking one pennie for relief."

Fears were as high as ever among the traumatised fire victims, fear of foreign arsonists and of a French and Dutch invasion. There was an outbreak of general panic on Wednesday night in the encampments at Parliament Hill, Moorfields, and Islington. A light in the sky over Fleet Street started a story that 50,000 French and Dutch immigrants had risen, widely rumoured to have started the fire, and were marching towards Moorfields to finish what the fire had begun: to cut the men's throats, rape the women, and steal their few possessions. Surging into the streets, the frightened mob fell on any foreigners whom they happened to encounter, and were appeased, according to Evelyn, only "with infinite pains and great difficulty"[53] and pushed back into the fields by the Trained Bands, troops of Life Guards, and members of the court.

The mood was now so volatile that Charles feared a full-scale London rebellion against the monarchy. Food production and distribution had been disrupted to the point of non-existence; Charles announced that supplies of bread would be brought into the City every day, and safe markets set up round the perimeter. These markets were for buying and selling;[54] there was no question of distributing emergency aid.

Deaths and destruction[edit]


Only a few deaths from the fire are officially recorded, and deaths are traditionally believed to have been few. Porter gives the figure as eight[55] and Tinniswood as "in single figures", although he adds that some deaths must have gone unrecorded and that, besides direct deaths from burning and smoke inhalation, refugees also perished in the impromptu camps.[56]


The fire was fed not merely by wood, fabrics, and thatch, Hanson points out, but also by the oil, pitch, tar, coal, tallow, fats, sugar, alcohol, turpentine, and gunpowder stored in the riverside district. It melted the imported steel lying along the wharves (melting point between 1,250 and 1,480 °C (2,300 and 2,700 °F)) and the great iron chains and locks on the City gates (melting point between 1,100 and 1,650 °C (2,000 and 3000 °F)). Nor would anonymous bone fragments have been of much interest to the hungry people sifting through the tens of thousands of tons of rubble and debris after the fire, looking for valuables, or to the workmen clearing away the rubble later during the rebuilding.[57]

Hanson appeals to common sense and "the experience of every other major urban fire down the centuries", emphasising that the fire attacked the rotting tenements of the poor with furious speed, surely trapping at the very least "the old, the very young, the halt and the lame" and burying the dust and ashes of their bones under the rubble of cellars, producing a death toll not of four or eight, but of "several hundred and quite possibly several thousand."[57]

The Bills of Mortality were not compiled for the period of the fire, due to the disruption caused by the fire.

The material destruction has been computed at 13,500 houses, 87 parish churches, 44 Company Halls, the Royal Exchange, the Custom House, St Paul's Cathedral, the Bridewell Palace and other City prisons, the General Letter Office, and the three western city gates—Ludgate, Newgate, and Aldersgate.[58] The monetary value of the loss, first estimated at £100,000,000 in the currency of the time, was later reduced to an uncertain £10,000,000[59] (equivalent to £1.66 billion in 2018). Evelyn believed that he saw as many as "200,000 people of all ranks and stations dispersed, and lying along their heaps of what they could save" in the fields towards Islington and Highgate.[59]






Christopher Wren's rejected plan for the rebuilding of London.

In the chaos and unrest after the fire, Charles II feared another London rebellion. He encouraged the homeless to move away from London and settle elsewhere, immediately issuing a proclamation that "all Cities and Towns whatsoever shall without any contradiction receive the said distressed persons and permit them the free exercise of their manual trades." A special Fire Court was set up to deal with disputes between tenants and landlords and decide who should rebuild, based on ability to pay. The Court was in session from February 1667 to September 1672. Cases were heard and a verdict usually given within a day; without the Fire Court, lengthy legal wrangles would have seriously delayed the rebuilding which was so necessary if London was to recover.

Radical rebuilding schemes poured in for the gutted City and were encouraged by Charles. If it had been rebuilt under some of these plans, London would have rivalled Paris in Baroque magnificence (see Evelyn's plan on the right). The Crown and the City authorities attempted to establish "to whom all the houses and ground did in truth belong" to negotiate with their owners about compensation for the large-scale remodelling that these plans entailed, but that unrealistic idea had to be abandoned. Exhortations to bring workmen and measure the plots on which the houses had stood were mostly ignored by people worried about day-to-day survival, as well as by those who had left the capital; for one thing, with the shortage of labour following the fire, it was impossible to secure workmen for the purpose. Apart from Wren and Evelyn, it is known that Robert Hooke, Valentine Knight, and Richard Newcourt proposed rebuilding plans.

With the complexities of ownership unresolved, none of the grand Baroque schemes could be realised for a City of piazzas and avenues; there was nobody to negotiate with, and no means of calculating how much compensation should be paid. Instead, much of the old street plan was recreated in the new City, with improvements in hygiene and fire safety: wider streets, open and accessible wharves along the length of the Thames, with no houses obstructing access to the river, and, most importantly, buildings constructed of brick and stone, not wood. New public buildings were created on their predecessors' sites; perhaps the most famous is St Paul's Cathedral and its smaller cousins, Christopher Wren's 50 new churches.


On Charles' initiative, a Monument to the Great Fire of London was erected near Pudding Lane, designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, standing 61 metres (200 ft) tall and known simply as "The Monument". It is a familiar London landmark which has since given its name to a tube station. In 1668, accusations against the Catholics were added to the inscription on the Monument which read, in part:


Another monument marks the spot where the fire stopped: the Golden Boy of Pye Corner in Smithfield. According to the inscription, it was evidence of God's wrath on the City of London for the sin of gluttony that the fire started at Pudding Lane and stopped at Pye Corner.

The Great Plague epidemic of 1665 is believed to have killed a sixth of London's inhabitants, or 80,000 people,[67] and it is sometimes suggested that the fire saved lives in the long run by burning down so much unsanitary housing with their rats and their fleas which transmitted the plague, as plague epidemics did not recur in London after the fire.[68] Historians disagree as to whether the fire played a part in preventing subsequent major outbreaks. The Museum of London website claims that there was a connection,[69] while historian Roy Porter points out that the fire left the most insalubrious parts of London, the slum suburbs, untouched.[70]

Following the Fire, the thoroughfares of Queen Street and King Street were newly laid out, cutting across more ancient thoroughfares in the City, creating a new route up from the Thames to the Guildhall; they were the only notable new streets following the fire's destruction of much of the City.[71]

In culture[edit]

"London's Burning"[72] About this soundPlay 

William Harrison Ainsworth's novel Old St Paul's is set during the events of the fire.[73]

The Great Fire was released on ITV television in 2014. It was shown in four episodes. It constructs a fictional scenario involving the Pudding Lane baker's family in an alleged popish plot.[74]

The round "London's Burning" is said to be about the Great Fire.[72] However, the first notation of a song in this theme dates from 1580 as "Scotland's Burning".[75]

See also[edit]


See Category:Former buildings and structures in the City of London.

  2. ^ Porter, 69–80.
  3. ^ Tinniswood, 4, 101.
  4. ^ "Pottery". Museum of London. Retrieved 14 November 2014.
  5. ^ Reddaway, 27.
  6. ^ John Evelyn in 1659, quoted in Tinniswood, 3. The section "London in the 1660s" is based on Tinniswood, 1–11, unless otherwise indicated.
  7. ^ a b Porter, 80.
  9. ^ Hanson (2001), 80.
  19. ^ Reddaway, 25.
  21. ^ Robinson, Bruce, "London's Burning: The Great Fire"
  23. ^ "Bludworth's failure of nerve was crucial" (Tinniswood, 52).
  24. ^ See Robinson, London:Brighter Lights, Bigger City" and Tinniswood, 48–49.
  26. ^ A patent had been granted in 1625 for the fire engines; they were single-acting force pumps worked by long handles at the front and back (Tinniswood, 50).
  27. ^ "Samuel Pepys Diary 1666 – Great Fire". Retrieved 22 July 2018.
  28. ^ "John Evelyn". Retrieved 22 July 2018.
  30. ^ Tinniswood, 42–43.
  32. ^ Pepys' diary, 2 September 1666.
  33. ^ Tinniswood, 93.
  34. ^ Tinniswood, 53.
  35. ^ London Gazette, 3 September 1666.
  36. ^ See firestorm and Hanson (2001), 102–105.
  38. ^ Robinson, "London's Burning: The Great Fire".
  39. ^ All quotes from and details involving John Evelyn come from his Diary.
  40. ^ a b Evelyn, 10.
  41. ^ Hanson (2001), 139.
  42. ^ Reddaway, 22, 25.
  43. ^ Hanson (2001), 156–57.
  44. ^ Quoted by Hanson (2001), 158.
  45. ^ Tinnisworth, 71.
  46. ^ Spelling modernised for clarity; quoted by Tinniswood, 80.
  47. ^ Walter George Bell (1929) The Story of London's Great Fire: 109-11. John Lane: London.
  48. ^ The section "Tuesday" is based on Tinniswood, 77–96.
  49. ^ Pepys, Samuel(1996). The Great Fire of London. London: Phoenix Paperback. p. 15. ISBN 9781857995213
  51. ^ Woodward, Antony; Penn, Robert (2007). The Wrong Kind of Snow: The complete daily companion to the British weather. London: Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 978-0-340-93787-7.
  52. ^ Quoted Tinniswood, 104.
  53. ^ Evelyn (1854), 15.
  54. ^ Hanson (2002), 166.
  55. ^ Porter, 87.
  56. ^ Tinniswood, 131–35.
  57. ^ a b Hanson (2001), 326–33.
  58. ^ Porter, 87–88.
  59. ^ a b Reddaway, 26.
  61. ^ Tinniswood, 163–68.
  65. ^ Jones, J.R (2013). The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century Modern Wars In Perspective. Routledge. p. 173. ISBN 9781317899488.
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Coordinates: 51°30′57″N 0°05′32″W﻿ / ﻿51.5157°N 0.0921°W﻿ / 51.5157; -0.0921