St Magnus-the-Martyr Great Plague of 1665, the City authorities ordered fires to be kept burning night and day, in the hope that the air would be cleansed. Daniel Defoe's semi-fictictional, but highly realistic, work "A Journal of the Plague Year" records that one of these was "just by St Magnus Church". Despite its escape in 1633, the church was one of the first buildings to be destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. St Magnus stood less than 300 yards from the bakehouse of Thomas Farriner in Pudding Lane where the fire started. Farriner, a former churchwarden of St Magnus,
Great Chelsea fire of 1908 Great Chelsea fire of 1908 The Great Chelsea fire of 1908, also known as the First great Chelsea fire, was a conflagration that occurred on 12 April 1908, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Nineteen people were killed, fifteen thousand people were left homeless, and were burned in the fire. The fire started two hundred yards away from the Great Chelsea fire of 1973. According to a summary of the fire at the time: On Sunday April 12 1908, at about 11 in the morning, an alarm was rung for a fire in the works of the Boston Blacking Company on West 3rd