Great Fire of London 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. He took a boat to inspect the destruction around Pudding Lane at close range and describes a "lamentable" fire, "everybody
Squares in London question. Another is that some older squares were irregularly shaped to begin with, or lost their original layout due to the city's many transformations, not least following the Great Fire of London and The Blitz. The street naming (or streetnaming) authority of each London Borough and the City of London Corporation by authority of an Act of 1939 imposes rules to authorise appropriate street names for new developments and for owners wishing to rename features. Commercial building and retained historic names apart, new residential squares must in many boroughs be "for a square only" — considered not well elongated but