The Great Fire of London: The Four Days in 1666 That Burned a Medieval City to the Ground — And Built a Modern One in Its Place

 It started with bread.

In the early hours of Sunday September 2, 1666 — somewhere between midnight and two in the morning — a fire broke out in the bakery of Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane in the City of London. Farriner was the king's baker. His ovens had been lit the day before to bake ship's biscuits for the Royal Navy. Someone — Farriner himself always denied it was him — had left the ovens insufficiently damped before going to bed.

The fire spread to a pile of faggots stored next to the oven. Then to the rest of the bakery. Then to the house above it. Then to the houses on either side.

By morning it was out of control.

By the time it was extinguished — four days later, after burning through the heart of the oldest and most densely built city in England — the Great Fire of London had consumed approximately thirteen thousand houses, eighty-seven parish churches, most of the buildings of the City government, and the medieval cathedral of St Paul's, which had stood for centuries as the defining landmark of the London skyline.

It had left perhaps one hundred thousand people homeless in a city of half a million.

And it had killed — by the official count — six people.

That last number is the most contested and most troubling detail of the Great Fire. It is almost certainly wrong. But it is the number the authorities recorded, and the reasons why it may be wrong tell us something important about whose deaths were considered worth counting in seventeenth-century London — and whose were not.

The City That Was Ready to Burn

London in 1666 was a city that had been waiting to burn for centuries — a city whose physical form made catastrophic fire not a possibility but an inevitability.

The medieval city that had grown up within and around the old Roman walls was built almost entirely of wood. The houses were timber-framed structures packed tightly together, their upper stories jutting out over the narrow lanes below until the buildings on opposite sides of a street nearly touched at rooftop level. Many of the lanes were barely wide enough for two people to pass each other. The streets were crowded with warehouses and workshops that stored and used highly combustible materials — tallow, coal, timber, rope, oil, spirits.

There had been fires before — serious fires, fires that destroyed whole streets and neighborhoods. London had been burning intermittently for as long as it had existed. The city had developed a certain fatalism about fire that was not entirely irrational given that it had always managed to survive and rebuild. The fires had always been contained eventually.

What made September 1666 different was the weather.

The summer of 1666 had been extraordinarily dry. The timbers of the medieval buildings — which in a normal English summer would have retained some moisture — were bone dry after months without significant rain. The wind on the night of September 2 was strong and blowing from the east, directly into the city from the direction of Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane.

The Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, was woken in the early hours and informed of the fire. He went to look at it, reportedly said that a woman might piss it out, and went back to bed.

It was perhaps the single most consequential act of official complacency in the history of the city.

The Four Days

The fire moved west through the City with a speed and comprehensiveness that contemporaries found almost supernatural. Samuel Pepys — the naval administrator and diarist whose account of the fire is the most vivid and detailed we have — climbed to the top of the Tower of London in the early morning of September 2 and watched the fire consuming the city below him. He wrote that it was an arch of fire above a mile long, the churches, houses, and all on fire at once, and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruin.

Pepys went to Whitehall and reported what he had seen directly to King Charles II. The king was alarmed. He sent orders for houses to be pulled down in the fire's path to create firebreaks — the standard method of controlling urban fires in the era before organized fire brigades. The Lord Mayor, still apparently unwilling to grasp the scale of what was happening, was slow to act on the orders. By the time sufficient demolition was being carried out, the fire had already jumped the gaps.

The problem with firebreaks in a strong wind is that burning embers carry far ahead of the main fire front. The wind was carrying sparks and burning fragments of roofing material hundreds of yards ahead of the flames, starting new fires that then merged with the main blaze as it advanced. Every firebreak that was created was outflanked before it could do its work.

The fire burned through Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and into Wednesday. It consumed Cheapside — the main commercial street of medieval London, lined with the shops and businesses of the city's merchants and tradespeople. It consumed the halls of the great livery companies that had organized London's trade for centuries. It consumed the Old Bailey, Newgate Prison, the General Letter Office, Bridewell Palace, the Custom House, the Royal Exchange — the beating heart of the commercial and administrative life of the city.

And on Tuesday night it reached St Paul's Cathedral.

The old St Paul's — the medieval cathedral that stood on the site where Christopher Wren's famous dome now rises — was itself in a state of serious disrepair, its roof covered in wooden scaffolding from ongoing renovation work. Booksellers had stored enormous quantities of books and paper in the cathedral's crypt, believing that the thick stone walls would protect their stock.

The fire found the scaffolding first. Then the roof. Then the booksellers' paper, which transformed the crypt into a furnace of extraordinary intensity. The lead roof of the cathedral melted and ran in rivers down Ludgate Hill. The stones of the walls exploded from the heat. St Paul's — which had stood in some form on that site for nearly a thousand years — was gutted in a matter of hours.

Pepys watched it burn and wrote that the light of the fire was so great that he could read a printed book by its light at midnight.

The People in the Fire's Path

One hundred thousand people were displaced from their homes by the Great Fire. They fled the city carrying whatever they could — furniture loaded onto carts, valuables buried in gardens, possessions thrown into the Thames in the hope of recovering them later. The roads out of the city were choked with refugees. The open spaces outside the walls — Moorfields, Islington, Highgate — filled with tens of thousands of people who had nowhere to go.

Samuel Pepys buried his most valued possessions — his wine and his Parmesan cheese, both recorded with equal seriousness in his diary — in his garden in the Navy Office courtyard to protect them from the advancing flames.

The social disruption was immense. The poorest Londoners — those living in the most densely packed and most combustible parts of the city nearest the river, those who had no carts or boats or country estates to retreat to — had the least warning and the fewest options. They were the ones most likely to lose everything. They were also the ones least likely to appear in the records of the disaster.

The official death toll of six has been challenged by historians for generations. The arguments are not hard to understand: the fire destroyed the most densely populated part of one of the largest cities in Europe. It burned for four days through neighborhoods where thousands of people lived. The official count was based on bodies actually found and identified — but the fire burned hot enough in many places to consume human remains entirely. The poor, the sick, the elderly, the very young — those least able to flee — would have been most at risk, and their deaths would have been least likely to be formally recorded.

Whether the true death toll was dozens, hundreds, or thousands, we cannot say with confidence. What we can say is that six is almost certainly not the right number.

The Scapegoat

A city in shock needed an explanation. An accidental fire in a bakery — caused by carelessness or negligence or simply bad luck — was a psychologically unsatisfying explanation for an event of such catastrophic scale. Surely something this devastating had been caused deliberately.

The suspicion fell immediately on foreigners. London in 1666 was at war with the Dutch. France was also an enemy. The city's Catholic population — a minority viewed with deep suspicion in the overwhelmingly Protestant city — was also targeted. Rumors spread that the fire had been started deliberately by French or Dutch agents, or by Catholics, or by some combination of foreign and religious enemies.

A simple Frenchman named Robert Hubert confessed to starting the fire deliberately on behalf of a papist conspiracy. His confession was almost certainly false — he named a house as the starting point that had not even been built when the fire began, and his account contained numerous other inconsistencies that suggested he was mentally unstable rather than genuinely guilty. He was convicted anyway. He was hanged at Tyburn in October 1666, two months after the fire.

Thomas Farriner — on whose premises the fire had almost certainly started — testified at the inquest that the fire could not have begun in his bakery because he personally checked every oven before going to bed. He was believed. The official verdict, eventually recorded on the monument built to commemorate the fire, attributed it to the malicious hearts of the popish faction. This inscription was not removed until 1830.

Robert Hubert was almost certainly innocent. He was hanged anyway. The city needed someone to blame, and a confused Frenchman who confessed was close enough to what the city was looking for.

The Rebuilding — And the City That Rose From the Ashes

The Great Fire destroyed a medieval city. What replaced it was something fundamentally different — and in most respects considerably better.

The rebuilding of London after 1666 was one of the most significant urban transformations in European history. King Charles II and his government moved quickly to impose order on the reconstruction — issuing building regulations that required new houses to be built of brick or stone rather than timber, setting minimum street widths, establishing the basic framework of the city that would stand for the next three centuries.

Christopher Wren submitted an ambitious plan for a completely redesigned city — a rational grid of wide streets and open piazzas replacing the chaotic medieval street pattern that had made the fire so devastating. The plan was rejected. Property owners insisted on rebuilding on their existing plots, and the practical and legal difficulties of imposing a wholesale redesign on a city where thousands of people had property rights were too great to overcome.

But Wren got the churches.

He was appointed Surveyor of the King's Works and given responsibility for rebuilding the fifty-two parish churches destroyed by the fire, as well as the new St Paul's Cathedral. The churches Wren built — each one different, each one exploring different approaches to the problem of fitting a Protestant church into an irregular urban site — transformed the skyline of the city and represent one of the most extraordinary architectural achievements of the seventeenth century.

St Paul's Cathedral — the great dome that has defined the London skyline ever since — was begun in 1675 and completed in 1710. Wren was seventy-eight years old when it was finished. He had worked on it for thirty-five years.

The Monument to the Great Fire — a column designed by Wren and Robert Hooke, standing 202 feet tall and located exactly 202 feet from the bakery on Pudding Lane where the fire began — was completed in 1677. It stands there still.

What the Fire Made

The Great Fire of London is one of those historical events whose consequences were so extensive and so transformative that it is genuinely difficult to imagine the city — or in some respects the country — without it.

The rebuilding created the physical London of the Georgian and Victorian eras — the city of brick and stone that survived into the twentieth century, that withstood the Blitz better than the medieval timber city would ever have done, that became the template for how English cities were built for the next two hundred years.

The disaster also created something that had not existed before: the insurance industry. The destruction of thirteen thousand houses without any mechanism for the owners to recover their losses created an immediate and obvious demand for some system of financial protection against fire. Within a few years of the Great Fire the first fire insurance offices had been established in London. Within a generation the basic structure of property insurance — still recognizable in the policies sold today — had been developed.

The fire even changed medicine. The rebuilding of the city included the establishment of proper water supply infrastructure, improved street drainage, and building standards that reduced the damp and overcrowding that had made the old city such a fertile environment for disease. Some historians have argued that the destruction of the overcrowded medieval city contributed to the end of the great plague epidemics that had periodically devastated London — the Great Plague of 1665, the year before the fire, had killed approximately one hundred thousand people.

The city that burned in 1666 was a medieval city — crowded, wooden, dark, and extraordinarily vulnerable to both fire and disease. The city that rose from its ashes was the foundation of modern London.

It started with bread, in a bakery on Pudding Lane, on a dry September night when the wind was blowing from the east.

Four days later the medieval city was gone.

What replaced it changed the world.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Explore more untold stories from history at Ancient Echoes Tales.