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 Oulu fire of 1916 Great Oulu fire of 1916 The great Oulu fire of 1916 was Finland’s last urban fire, which left 200 people homeless. The fire started during the night of July 19 in an outbuilding located at the back corner of Kirkkokatu 39. No reason for the fire was ever determined. The fire destroyed nearly all of the buildings in the city block delimited by the streets of Kirkkokatu, Sepänkatu, Isonkatu and Albertinkatu that the district of Vanhatulli was located on; the block is currently home to Oulu’s Mannerheim Park. The buildings across the streets from the city block were also damaged