The Great Fire of London started in the bakery of Thomas Farriner, the king’s biscuit-baker, in a narrow street called Pudding Lane just north of Old London Bridge. The first alarm came around 1 AM on Sunday 2 September 1666. Farriner’s family escaped over the rooftops with the maid; the maid (who was afraid of heights) refused to follow and was the first recorded fatality. The fire then jumped to the neighbouring stables of the Star Inn, where the hay caught immediately, and from there into the substantial timber-and-thatch warren of the medieval City of London.
For the next five days it burned approximately 1.5 km² of the metropolitan core.
How it spread
The summer of 1666 had been substantively the driest in living memory. The City’s predominantly timber-and-plaster building stock — substantially overhanging upper storeys (the jetty construction that brought houses close enough to touch across the narrow streets), pitch-sealed roofs, thatch in the poorer districts — was primed to burn. A easterly wind picked up around dawn on 2 September and continued substantively gusting through the substantive next three days, carrying burning embers across distances and igniting roofs hundreds of metres downwind.
The conventional London firefighting technique was demolition of buildings in the fire’s path to create firebreaks. The decision to authorise the demolitions belonged to the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, who had been roused from sleep around 3 AM with reports of the Pudding Lane outbreak. Bloodworth dismissed the danger (“A woman could piss it out”) and returned to bed. By the time he had substantively reconsidered around midmorning, the fire had established itself across approximately twenty streets and the firebreak window had closed.
The five days
Sunday 2 September: Fire spreads from Pudding Lane westward along Thames Street, igniting the riverside warehouses (full of substantively flammable hemp, pitch, oil, and brandy). Samuel Pepys watches from his Navy Office position at Seething Lane and digs a hole in his garden to bury his wine and Parmesan cheese.
Monday 3 September: Fire jumps the Walbrook valley and substantively reaches the Royal Exchange, which burns to its stone foundations within hours. The Lord Mayor capitulates and the King and his brother James, Duke of York (the future James II), substantively take personal command of the firefighting operation.
Tuesday 4 September: Fire reaches St Paul’s Cathedral. The medieval St Paul’s had been under repair, with scaffolding lashed to its exterior; the scaffolding ignites immediately; the lead roof melts and runs down Ludgate Hill in a molten river. The body of the cathedral — including the tombs of medieval English bishops back to the Norman Conquest — substantively burns out by nightfall.
Wednesday 5 September: The wind drops. The Duke of York’s firebreak demolitions (using Royal Navy gunpowder to substantively blow up entire streets in advance of the fire) begin to substantively work. The westward advance of the fire substantively halts at Pye Corner near Smithfield.
Thursday 6 September: Fire extinguished. Substantial isolated cellars continue to burn for weeks afterwards.
What it destroyed
The damage assessment: approximately 13,200 houses; 87 parish churches; the medieval Guildhall; the Royal Exchange; the Custom House; the city gates of Ludgate, Newgate, and Aldersgate; 44 livery-company halls; the old St Paul’s Cathedral; substantively all of the public records of the City of London Corporation through 1666. The homeless population — approximately 70,000 people, or three-quarters of the pre-Fire City population — substantively camped in tents in the fields north of Moorgate for the subsequent winter.
The official death toll was substantively six. Modern scholars substantively suspect the real figure was substantively higher — perhaps a few hundred — including the elderly and poor whose deaths the overstretched parish-clerk system failed to record.
The fire also substantively ended the 1665 plague outbreak by substantively destroying most of the plague-affected housing stock and the rat population that had substantively sustained the epidemic.
The Hubert prosecution
The political demand for a scapegoat substantively produced one. A French watchmaker named Robert Hubert — mentally ill and substantively visibly so — substantively confessed to having started the fire on the orders of the Pope. The confession was substantively transparently false (Hubert claimed to have started the fire by throwing a fireball through a Pudding Lane window — an action substantively impossible to execute and substantively inconsistent with the physical evidence). The court substantively hanged him anyway, on 27 October 1666.
The subsequent parliamentary inquiry substantively concluded that the fire had been an accidental bakery accident. The Hubert prosecution had been a miscarriage. The anti-Catholic political element of the fire myth persisted in English popular memory for the subsequent two centuries (the inscription on the Monument to the Great Fire, substantively erected in 1677, substantively blamed “the treachery and malice of the Popish faction” until the inscription was scraped off in 1830).
The rebuilding contract substantively went to Christopher Wren, whose post-Fire London — constructed in brick rather than timber, with wider streets, with 51 substantively new Wren parish churches and the new St Paul’s — substantively defined the face of London for the subsequent three centuries.