"A woman might piss it out." That was the considered verdict of Sir Thomas Bloudworth, Lord Mayor of London, when he was woken in the small hours of Sunday 2 September 1666 and told that a fire had broken out in Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane. Farriner was a baker who supplied the King's navy; he insisted to his dying day that he had properly raked out his ovens. Whatever the truth, by the time the mayor went grumbling back to bed, sparks were already leaping between the tinder-dry, overhanging timber houses of one of the most flammable cities in Europe.
London in 1666 was a medieval firetrap: narrow lanes, houses of wood and pitch jettied out until upper storeys nearly touched across the street, warehouses along the Thames packed with tallow, oil, brandy and hemp. The summer had been long and dry, and a strong east wind was blowing. The standard remedy for fire — pulling down houses to make firebreaks — required decisiveness, and Bloudworth, worried about who would pay for the demolished buildings, hesitated at exactly the wrong moment.
We know the story so vividly because of a civil servant with a diary. Samuel Pepys climbed the Tower of London that morning, watched the fire spreading along the riverfront, and took a boat to Whitehall to tell King Charles II — carrying back a royal command that the mayor spare no houses. He found Bloudworth near collapse, crying that the fire outpaced any demolition. As the blaze advanced over the following days, Pepys recorded pigeons with singed wings dropping from the sky, the Thames crowded with goods-laden boats, and his own priorities: he dug a pit in his garden and buried his wine and his Parmesan cheese, then among the most prized and expensive of cheeses.
Four days of fire
The fire burned from Sunday into Thursday. The King put his brother James, Duke of York — the future King James II — in effective charge of the firefight, and both royals were seen working the fire posts in person. Sailors finally began blowing up houses with gunpowder to cut proper firebreaks, and when the east wind at last dropped, the fire could be halted. By then it had consumed about four-fifths of the walled City: contemporary surveys counted roughly 13,200 houses and 87 parish churches destroyed, along with the Guildhall, the Royal Exchange, and old St Paul's Cathedral itself — whose stones reportedly exploded in the heat and whose molten roof-lead ran in the streets. Perhaps 70,000 of the City's 80,000 or so inhabitants were made homeless, camping in fields around London.
The official death toll was astonishingly small — only a handful of deaths were recorded, traditionally put at fewer than ten. Many historians suspect the true number was higher, since the fire burned hot enough to leave little trace and the deaths of the poor often went unrecorded. Another popular belief — that the fire mercifully burned out the Great Plague, which had killed perhaps 100,000 Londoners the year before — is doubted by historians too, not least because plague was already declining and the worst-affected suburbs largely escaped the flames.
Fear demanded a culprit, and England, at war with the Dutch and the French, looked for foreign arsonists. It found Robert Hubert, a French watchmaker who confessed — bizarrely and falsely — to starting the fire. His story shifted constantly and fitted no evidence, but he was hanged at Tyburn in October 1666. It later emerged that he had not even arrived in London until after the fire began. For over 150 years, an inscription on the Monument blamed the fire on "the treachery and malice of the Popish faction"; the words were not chiselled away until 1830.
The city that rose
Christopher Wren, then a rising architect, presented the King with a dazzling plan for a new London of piazzas and grand avenues within days of the fire. It was never built — property owners wanted their old plots back too urgently — so the street plan of the City today still largely follows its medieval tangle. But the rebuilding transformed London anyway: new laws required brick and stone instead of timber, streets were widened, and special Fire Courts settled thousands of landlord-tenant disputes with remarkable speed. Wren got his monuments instead of his street grid — he rebuilt St Paul's Cathedral and dozens of City churches, and with Robert Hooke designed the Monument to the Great Fire: a column 202 feet tall, standing exactly 202 feet from the site of Farriner's bakery. One more legacy smoulders on quietly: the disaster gave birth to the fire insurance industry, whose earliest firms ran their own private fire brigades. Pudding Lane still exists — and its name, fittingly for the story, referred not to dessert but to the offal, or "pudding", that once tumbled down it from the butchers of Eastcheap.
Quiz nuggets
- The fire began on 2 September 1666 in Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane.
- Diarist Samuel Pepys famously buried his wine and Parmesan cheese to save them from the flames.
- Roughly 13,200 houses and 87 churches burned, including old St Paul's Cathedral, yet only a handful of deaths were recorded.
- Frenchman Robert Hubert was hanged after a false confession — he had arrived in London only after the fire started.
- Wren and Hooke's Monument is 202 feet tall and stands 202 feet from where the fire began.