The Great Fire of London
A fire that began in a baker's oven destroyed 13,200 houses and old St Paul's, yet the official death toll was just a handful. Here is the real story.
Published
Quick Facts
- Dates
- Sunday 2 to Thursday 6 September 1666
- Started
- Thomas Farriner's bakery, Pudding Lane, in the early hours of 2 September
- Homes destroyed
- Around 13,200 houses
- Churches lost
- 87 parish churches, plus old St Paul's Cathedral
- Area burnt
- About 436 acres, most of the walled City
- Recorded deaths
- Only a handful officially confirmed, though the true figure is unknown
- Famous witnesses
- Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, both of whom wrote diaries
- Memorial
- The Monument, 202 feet tall, completed in 1677
A baker, a bakehouse and a very bad weekend
In the early hours of Sunday 2 September 1666, a fire broke out at Thomas Farriner's bakery in Pudding Lane. Farriner, who baked ship's biscuit for the navy, said he had raked out his oven the night before. Within hours his house was ablaze, and he and his family escaped by climbing out over the roofs. His maidservant did not make it, and is thought to have been the first victim. By the end of Thursday, the fire had consumed most of the walled City of London, the crowded medieval heart of the capital. It had all the ingredients for disaster: timber houses with overhanging upper floors, tar and pitch in warehouses by the river, a long dry summer, and a strong east wind that pushed the flames westward.
The Lord Mayor who said it was nothing
Samuel Pepys, a Navy Office official, was woken by a maid and watched from his window before heading to the Tower of London to get a better view. He then took a boat along the Thames and saw people throwing belongings into the river, and pigeons hovering around windows until their wings caught fire. Pepys went to Whitehall and told Charles II that houses needed pulling down to make firebreaks. The king sent him to pass the order to the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth. Pepys later wrote that Bloodworth seemed worn out and complained that people could not pull the houses down fast enough. Hesitation, partly down to worries over who would pay for demolished property, let the fire run on. Charles and his brother James, Duke of York, then took charge, and Charles was seen helping with the work himself. Gunpowder was used to blow up buildings and create gaps, and by Wednesday night the wind was dropping. The fire was finally halted near the Temple in the west and at Pie Corner in Smithfield.
Myths: the death toll, the Catholics and the golden boy
The most famous myth is that only six people died. That figure was simply what was officially recorded. Many poorer victims may have been cremated in the flames, leaving nothing to count, so the real number is unknown. Then there was the hunt for someone to blame. Rumours spread that foreigners or Catholics had started the blaze. A French watchmaker, Robert Hubert, confessed to starting it at Pudding Lane and was hanged at Tyburn in October 1666. Yet he had not even been in England when the fire began, as the ship he arrived on only landed afterwards. The confession was almost certainly false. The Monument once carried an inscription blaming a Catholic plot. It was added in 1681 and removed in 1830. And the little gilded figure on Pye Corner in Smithfield, the Fat Boy, was once said to commemorate the fire as a punishment for gluttony. It is a good story, but it is only a story.
Rebuilding the City
Within days, Christopher Wren, John Evelyn and others presented plans to redesign London with grand avenues and piazzas. None was adopted, mainly because property owners wanted to rebuild on their old plots and the Crown had no money to buy them out. But the Rebuilding Act of 1667 changed how the City looked. New houses had to be made of brick or stone rather than timber, and streets were widened. Wren was put in charge of rebuilding churches, designing 51 of them, and the new St Paul's Cathedral, finished in 1710, crowned the skyline. The fire also helped bring about fire insurance. Nicholas Barbon set up an early fire office in the years after the disaster, and insurers later employed private fire brigades marked by a badge on insured buildings.
What you can still see today
The Monument, designed by Wren and Robert Hooke, stands close to Pudding Lane. It is 202 feet tall, said to be the distance from its base to the spot where the fire began, and visitors can climb its spiral stairs to a viewing gallery. St Paul's Cathedral is the great monument in stone. Look also for surviving Wren churches such as St Stephen Walbrook and St Bride's on Fleet Street, whose layered steeple is said to have inspired the tiered wedding cake. London Museum, formerly the Museum of London, holds fire relics, including pottery fused by the heat. Its former London Wall galleries closed in December 2022. The street pattern of the City still follows its medieval layout, which is why the old lanes survive among the towers. Pepys buried his Parmesan cheese and wine in a pit in his garden to keep them safe, which says something about his priorities. The diary he kept is why we know so much about those four days.
Notable people
- Samuel Pepys
- John Evelyn
- Christopher Wren
- Robert Hooke
- Charles II
- James, Duke of York
- Thomas Farriner
- Sir Thomas Bloodworth
- Robert Hubert
- Nicholas Barbon
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