THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON, A 3-DAYS TRAGEDY IN 1666

Today, The Grandma is relaxing at home. She has been reading about the Great Fire of London, a terrible historical fact that happened on a day like today in 1666.

The Great Fire of London was a major conflagration that swept through the central parts of London from Sunday, 2 September to Thursday, 6 September 1666.

The fire gutted the medieval City of London inside the old Roman city wall. It threatened but did not reach the City of Westminster, today's West End, Charles II's Palace of Whitehall, and most of the suburban slums.

It destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, St Paul's Cathedral, and most of the buildings of the City authorities. It is estimated to have destroyed the homes of 70,000 of the City's 80,000 inhabitants.

The fire started in a bakery shortly after midnight on Sunday, 2 September, and spread rapidly. The use of the major firefighting technique of the time, the creation of firebreaks by means of demolition, was critically delayed due to the indecisiveness of the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth.

By the time large-scale demolitions were ordered on Sunday night, the wind had already fanned the bakery fire into a firestorm which defeated such measures. The fire pushed north on Monday into the heart of the City.

Order in the streets broke down as rumours arose of suspicious foreigners setting fires. The fears of the homeless focused on the French and Dutch, England's enemies in the ongoing Second Anglo-Dutch War; these substantial immigrant groups became victims of lynchings and street violence.

On Tuesday, the fire spread over nearly the whole City, destroying St. Paul's Cathedral and leaping the River Fleet to threaten Charles II's court at Whitehall. Coordinated firefighting efforts were simultaneously getting underway. The battle to put out the fire is considered to have been won by two key factors: the strong east wind dropped, and the Tower of London garrison used gunpowder to create effective firebreaks, halting further spread eastward.

More information: Museum of London

The death toll is unknown, but generally thought to have been relatively small; only six verified deaths were recorded. Some historians have challenged this belief, claiming the deaths of poorer citizens were not recorded and that the heat of the fire may have cremated many victims, leaving no recognizable remains.

A melted piece of pottery on display at the Museum of London found by archaeologists in Pudding Lane, where the fire started, shows that the temperature reached 1,250 °C. The social and economic problems created by the disaster were overwhelming.

Flight from London and settlement elsewhere were strongly encouraged by Charles II, who feared a London rebellion amongst the dispossessed refugees. Various schemes for rebuilding the City were proposed, some of them very radical. After the fire, London was reconstructed on essentially the same medieval street plan, which still exists today.

By the 1660s, London was by far the largest city in Britain, estimated at half a million inhabitants.  John Evelyn, contrasting London to the Baroque magnificence of Paris in 1659, called it a wooden, northern, and in artificial congestion of Houses, and expressed alarm about the fire hazards posed by the wood and the congestion.

By inartificial, Evelyn meant unplanned and makeshift, the result of organic growth and unregulated urban sprawl. 

London had been a Roman settlement for four centuries and had become progressively more crowded inside its defensive city wall.

It had also pushed outwards beyond the wall into squalid extramural slums such as Shoreditch, Holborn, and Southwark, and had reached far enough to include the independent City of Westminster.

By the late 17th century, the City proper -the area bounded by the City wall and the River Thames- was only a part of London, covering some 2.8 km2, and home to about 80,000 people, or one sixth of London's inhabitants.

The City was surrounded by a ring of inner suburbs, where most Londoners lived. The City was then, as now, the commercial heart of the capital, and was the largest market and busiest port in England, dominated by the trading and manufacturing classes.

The aristocracy shunned the City and lived either in the countryside beyond the slum suburbs, or in the exclusive Westminster district (the modern West End), the site of King Charles II's court at Whitehall. Wealthy people preferred to live at a convenient distance from the traffic-clogged, polluted, unhealthy City, especially after it was hit by a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague in the Plague Year of 1665.

The relationship between the City and the Crown was often tense. The City of London had been a stronghold of republicanism during the English Civil War (1642–1651), and the wealthy and economically dynamic capital still had the potential to be a threat to Charles II, as had been demonstrated by several republican uprisings in London in the early 1660s.

 More information: Historic UK

The City magistrates were of the generation that had fought in the Civil War, and could remember how Charles I's grab for absolute power had led to that national trauma. They were determined to thwart any similar tendencies in his son, and when the Great Fire threatened the City, they refused the offers that Charles made of soldiers and other resources. Even in such an emergency, the idea of having the unpopular Royal troops ordered into the City was political dynamite. By the time that Charles took over command from the ineffectual Lord Mayor, the fire was already out of control.

The City was essentially medieval in its street plan, an overcrowded warren of narrow, winding, cobbled alleys. It had experienced several major fires before 1666, the most recent in 1632. Building with wood and roofing with thatch had been prohibited for centuries, but these cheap materials continued to be used.

The only major stone-built area was the wealthy centre of the City, where the mansions of the merchants and brokers stood on spacious lots, surrounded by an inner ring of overcrowded poorer parishes whose every inch of building space was used to accommodate the rapidly growing population. These parishes contained workplaces, many of which were fire hazards -foundries, smithies, glaziers- which were technically illegal in the City but tolerated in practice.

Fires were common in the crowded wood-built city with its open fireplaces, candles, ovens, and stores of combustibles.

 

There was no police or fire brigade to call, but London's local militia, known as the Trained Bands, was available for general emergencies, at least in principle, and watching for fire was one of the jobs of the watch, a thousand watchmen or bellmen who patrolled the streets at night. Self-reliant community procedures were in place for dealing with fires, and they were usually effective. Public-spirited citizens would be alerted to a dangerous house fire by muffled peals of the church bells, and would congregate hastily to fight the fire.

A fire broke out at Thomas Farriner's bakery in Pudding Lane a little after midnight on Sunday, 2 September.

The family was trapped upstairs but managed to climb from an upstairs window to the house next door, except for a maidservant who was too frightened to try, who became the first victim.

The neighbours tried to help douse the fire; after an hour, the parish constables arrived and judged that the adjoining houses had better be demolished to prevent further spread. The householders protested, and Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth was summoned to give his permission.

The fire spread quickly in the high wind and, by mid-morning on Sunday, people abandoned attempts at extinguishing it and fled. The moving human mass and their bundles and carts made the lanes impassable for firemen and carriages. Pepys took a coach back into the city from Whitehall, but reached only St Paul's Cathedral before he had to get out and walk.

Pedestrians with handcarts and goods were still on the move away from the fire, heavily weighed down. They filled parish churches not directly threatened with furniture and valuables.

More information: London Fire Brigade

Only a few deaths from the fire are officially recorded, and deaths are traditionally believed to have been few. Porter gives the figure of eight and Tinniswood as in single figures, although he adds that some deaths must have gone unrecorded and that, besides direct deaths from burning and smoke inhalation, refugees also perished in the impromptu camps.

An example of the urge to identify scapegoats for the fire is the acceptance of the confession of a simple-minded French watchmaker named Robert Hubert, who claimed that he was an agent of the Pope and had started the Great Fire in Westminster. He later changed his story to say that he had started the fire at the bakery in Pudding Lane. Hubert was convicted, despite some misgivings about his fitness to plead, and hanged at Tyburn on 28 September 1666. After his death, it became apparent that he had been on board a ship in the North Sea, and had not arrived in London until two days after the fire started.

Allegations that Catholics had started the fire were exploited as powerful political propaganda by opponents of pro-Catholic Charles II's court, mostly during the Popish Plot and the exclusion crisis later in his reign.

Abroad in the Netherlands, the Great Fire of London was seen as a divine retribution for Holmes's Bonfire, the burning by the English of a Dutch town during the Second Anglo-Dutch War.

More information: History

There's nowhere else like London.
Nothing at all, anywhere.

Vivienne Westwood