Encyclopedia
The
Great Fire of London was a major
conflagration that swept through the
City of London from 2-5 September 1666, and resulted more or less in the destruction of the city. Before this fire, two early fires of London, in 1133/1135 and 1212, both of which destroyed a large part of the city, were known by the same name. Later, the
Luftwaffe's fire-raid on the City on 29th December 1940 became known as
The Second Great Fire of London.
The fire of 1666 was one of the biggest calamities in the
history of London, coming at the end of the
Great Plague of London . The fire destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, 6 chapels, 44
Company Halls, the Royal Exchange, the Custom House,
St Paul's Cathedral, the
Bridewell Palace and other City prisons, the Session House, four bridges across the rivers
Thames and
Fleet, and three city gates, and made homeless 100,000 people, one sixth of the city's inhabitants at that time. The death toll from the fire is unknown, and is traditionally thought to have been quite small, but a recent book theorizes that thousands may have died in the flames or from smoke inhalation. Only nine verifiable deaths are recorded.
Events
The fire broke out on Sunday morning, September 2, 1666. It started in Pudding Lane at the house of Thomas Farynor, a
baker to
King Charles II. It is likely that the fire started because Farynor forgot to extinguish his oven before retiring for the evening and that some time shortly after midnight, smouldering embers from the oven set alight some nearby firewood. Farynor managed to escape the burning building, along with his family, by climbing out through an upstairs window. The baker's housemaid failed to escape and became the fire's first victim.
Within an hour of the fire starting, the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, was awakened with the news. He was unimpressed however, declaring that "a woman might piss it out." He then went back to sleep.
Most buildings in
London at this time were constructed of highly combustible materials like
wood and
straw, and sparks emanating from the baker's shop fell onto an adjacent building. Fanned by a strong wind from the east, once the fire had taken hold it swiftly spread. The spread of the fire was helped by the fact that buildings were built very close together with only a narrow alley between them.
According to a contemporary source:
Then, then the city did shake indeed, and the inhabitants did tremble, and flew away in great amazement from their houses, lest the flames should devour them: rattle, rattle, rattle, was the noise which the fire struck upon the ear round about, as if there had been a thousand iron chariots beating upon the stones. You might see the houses tumble, tumble, tumble, from one end of the street to the other, with a great crash, leaving the foundations open to the view of the heavens.
The progress of the fire might have been stopped, but for the conduct of the Lord Mayor, who refused to give orders for pulling down some houses,
without the consent of the owners. Buckets were of no use, from the confined state of the streets.
The Great Fire came at the end of the
Great Plague of London, and was thought to have brought a quicker end to the plague, by killing off any disease-carrying rats and their fleas. However, this is doubtful, since the fire was confined to the prosperous business and residential districts, leaving the rat-infested slums intact.
Destruction
The fire consumed 13,200
houses and 87 churches, among them
St. Paul's Cathedral. While only 6 people were reported as having died in the fire, author Neil Hanson believes the true death toll numbered in the hundreds or the thousands. Hanson believes most of the fatalities were poor people whose bodies were
cremated by the intense heat of the fire, and thus their remains were never found. These claims are controversial, however.
The destructive fury of this conflagration is thought never to have been exceeded in the world, by an accidental fire.
Within the walls, it consumed almost five-sixths of the whole city; and
without the walls it cleared a space nearly as extensive as the one-sixth part left unburnt within. Scarcely a single building that came within the range of the flames was left standing. Public buildings, churches, and dwelling-houses, were alike involved in one common fate.
In the summary account of this vast devastation, given in one of the inscriptions on the
Monument, and which was drawn up from the reports of the surveyors appointed after the fire, it is stated, that:
The ruins of the city were 436 acres , viz. 333 acres within the walls, and 63 acres in the liberties of the city; that, of the six-and-twenty wards, it utterly destroyed fifteen, and left eight others shattered and half burnt; and that it consumed 400 streets, 13,200 dwelling-houses, 89 churches [besides chapels]; 4 of the city gates, Guildhall, many public structures, hospitals, schools, libraries, and a vast number of stately edifices.
The value of the property destroyed in the fire has been estimated as exceeding ten million
pounds, which corresponds to roughly 1 billion pounds in 2005 money . As well as the buildings, this included irreplaceable treasures such as paintings and books:
Pepys, for example, gives an account of the loss of the entire stock of his own preferred bookseller. Despite the immediate destruction caused by the fire, it is nevertheless claimed that its
remote effects have benefited subsequent generations: for instance, it completed the destruction of the
Great Plague which, greatly in decline by 1666, had taken the lives of 68,590 people, the previous year; and it also led to the building of some notable new buildings, such as the new St. Paul's Cathedral.
Aftermath and consequences
The fire had a marked and varied impact on
English society: see, for example, articles concerning
Charles II of England,
Christopher Wren and
Samuel Pepys.
The fire took place during the very expensive
Second Anglo-Dutch War. Losses in revenues made it impossible to keep the fleet fully operationable in 1667, leading to the
Raid on the Medway by the Dutch. In the
Dutch Republic the fire was widely interpreted as a divine retribution for Holmes's Bonfire not a month earlier.
After the fire, a rumour began to circulate that the fire was part of a
Catholic plot. A simple-minded
French watchmaker, Robert Hubert, confessed to being an agent of the
Pope and starting the fire in
Westminster. He later changed his story to say that he had started it at the bakery in Pudding Lane. He was convicted, despite some belief that he was either not of sound mind or lying, and was
hanged at
Tyburn on September 28 1666. After his death, it surfaced that he had not arrived in London until two days
after the fire had started.
Christopher Wren was put in charge of re-building the city after the fire. His original plans involved rebuilding the city in brick and stone to a grid plan with continental
piazzas and avenues. But because many buildings had survived to basement level, legal disputes over ownership of land ended the grid plan idea. From 1667,
Parliament raised funds for re-building London by taxing coal, and the city was eventually rebuilt to its existing street plan, but built instead out of brick and stone and with improved
sanitation and access. This is the main reason why today's London is a modern city, yet with a medieval design to its streets. Christopher Wren also re-built St Paul's Cathedral 11 years after the fire.
Lessons in fire safety were learned, and when the current
Globe Theatre was opened in 1997, it was the first building in London with a
thatched roof since The Fire.
Cultural impact
The
Monument to the Great Fire of London, known simply as The Monument, was designed by Wren and
Robert Hooke. It is close to the site where the fire started, near the northern end of
London Bridge. The corner of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane where the fire ended was known as Pye Corner, and is marked by a small gilded statue known as the Fat Boy or the
Golden Boy of Pye Corner, supposedly a reference to the theory expounded by a non-conformist preacher who said:
The calamity could not have been the sin of blasphemy for in that case it would have began at Billingsgate, nor lewdness for then Drury Lane would have been first on fire nor lying for then the flames would have reached the City from Westminster Hall. No, it was occasioned by the sin of gluttony for it began at Pudding Lane and ended at Pye Corner.
John Dryden commemorated the fire in his poem of 1667,
Annus Mirabilis. Dryden worked, in his poem, to counteract paranoia about the causes of the fire and proposed that the fire was part of a year of miracles, rather than a year of disasters. The fact that Charles was already planning to rebuild a glorious city atop the ashes and the fact that there were so few reported fatalities were, to Dryden, signs of divine favor, rather than curse.
This is an extract from the Diary of
Samuel Pepys:
By and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down tonight by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish Street, by London Bridge. So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower; and there got up upon one of the high places, and there I did see the houses at the end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side of the bridge!
Pop culture references
Doctor Who is a long-running British [i] science fiction television [i] ...
- In one episode,
Pyramids of Mars is a serial [i] in the British [i] science fiction television [i] ...
, the
Fourth Doctor suggests that he was once blamed for starting the fire. A later story,
The Visitation is a serial [i] in the British [i] science fiction television [i] ...
, shows that his successor the
Fifth Doctor did indeed start the fire .
Batman Begins is a 2005 [i] Academy Award [i]-nominated superhero film [i] based on the ...
-
Ra's al Ghul claims that his organisation started the fire, giving his reason as "When a forest grows too wild, a purging fire is inevitable, and natural."
The Baroque Cycle - The great Fire of London figures heavily in
Quicksilver .
Ultraviolet - Upon discovering that the Leeches are investing in HIV and Leukemia research, Father Herman comments "They are trying to protect their food supply- they've done it before- the great fire of London".
Predictions of a fire in London
There had been much prophecy of a disaster befalling London in 1666, since in
Hindu-Arabic numerals it included the
number of the Beast and in
Roman numerals it was a declining-order list . Walter Gostelo wrote in 1658 "If fire make not ashes of the city, and thy bones also, conclude me a liar forever!…the decree is gone out, repent, or burn, as
Sodom and Gomorrah!" It seemed to many, coming after a civil war and a plague, Revelation's third
horseman.
Prophesies made by Ursula Southeil ,
William Lilly, and
Nostradamus are also sometimes claimed to predict the Great Fire.
A large fire had already burnt around the northern end of
London Bridge in 1632. In 1661,
John Evelyn warned of the potential for fire in the city, and in 1664, Charles II wrote to the Lord Mayor of London to suggest that enforcing building regulation would help contain fires.
Further reading
- Hanson, Neil . The Dreadful Judgement: The True Story of the Great Fire of London. ISBN 0-552-14789-3. Released in the U.S. as The Great Fire of London: In That Apocalyptic Year, 1666. ISBN 0-471-21822-7.
- Robinson, Bruce. . BBC's History website. —an account of the Great Fire.
- Robert Latham and William Matthews . The Diary of Samuel Pepys, a new and complete transcription, published by Bell & Hyman, London, 1970–1983.
Footnotes
External links
- Dr Simon Thurley, director of the Museum of London, and other experts at the museum answered questions about the Great Fire of London.
