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
Second Great Fire of London or partially destroyed. Stationers' Hall, neighbouring offices, the book wholesalers Simpkin Marshall, and several bookshops were lost. An estimated five million books were lost in the fires caused by tens of thousands of incendiary bombs. The economic damage from such large devastation of a major city is thought to have accelerated the collapse of the British Empire, and the decline of Great Britain as a superpower in the decades following the war. Second Great Fire of London The "Second Great Fire of London" refers to one of the most destructive air raids of the Blitz. An American correspondent in a