The Bakery Fire on Pudding Lane That Burned Four-Fifths of the City of London in Four Days and Killed Only Six Documented People

The City of London in the late summer of 1666 was approximately 400,000 people densely packed into a square mile of mostly timber-framed and pitch-sealed buildings. The 1664–1665 Great Plague had killed approximately 70,000 of the previous population; the city was just recovering. Summer 1666 had been unusually hot and dry. The Thames was at low summer level. The prevailing September wind was from the east-northeast.

The fire began at approximately 1 a.m. on Sunday 2 September 1666 at the bakery of Thomas Farriner at the southern end of Pudding Lane, near London Bridge. Farriner was the king’s baker — he supplied bread to the navy’s Tower victualling office. The proximate cause was an inadequately raked oven that had been used to bake biscuits the previous evening; the heat had ignited firewood stacked against the chimney wall. Farriner, his daughter, and his manservant escaped across the rooftops to the adjacent house. A maidservant who had been afraid to climb was the first documented death.

What did not work

The Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, was woken at approximately 3 a.m. on 2 September. He inspected the fire briefly, dismissed it as a routine bakery blaze that the parish would extinguish, told the watch officer “Pish! A woman might piss it out,” and returned to bed.

The standard 17th-century London fire-control method was firebreak demolition — pulling down houses immediately downwind of a fire to create a gap the flames could not cross. The technique required either the Lord Mayor’s order or the householder’s consent. Bloodworth had refused to authorise the demolitions before retiring. By the time Samuel Pepys sailed down the Thames at dawn on 2 September and reported the spreading fire personally to Charles II at Whitehall, approximately 300 houses had already burned. The king ordered Bloodworth, in writing, to begin demolitions.

By the time Bloodworth received the order — at midday on 2 September — the fire had spread across the eastern City and into Thames Street, where the riverside warehouses held stocks of tallow, oil, pitch, tar, and timber. The warehouse contents ignited. The fire was no longer extinguishable with the available 17th-century technology.

The four days

On Sunday 2 September the fire moved north and west across the eastern City. Old St Paul’s Cathedral was visible burning by Sunday evening from the river.

On Monday 3 September the fire crossed Cornhill and reached the Royal Exchange — the city’s commercial heart, the seat of the merchant guilds. The Exchange burned by Monday afternoon. The fire’s western edge had reached Cheapside by Monday evening.

On Tuesday 4 September the fire reached St Paul’s Cathedral. The cathedral had been under scaffolding for restoration; the scaffolding ignited from windblown sparks. The lead roofs melted. Lead poured down the cathedral walls and ran in streams down Ludgate Hill. The medieval St Paul’s — which had stood since the 11th century, with the tallest spire in Europe before its 1561 lightning strike — was destroyed. Pepys recorded that the fire was so intense that the printers’ stocks of books that had been moved into the cathedral crypt for safety burned through. By Tuesday evening the fire had reached Fleet Street.

On Wednesday 5 September the wind dropped. Charles II personally led the firebreak demolitions on the western edge from the rooftops. The royal household and the Royal Navy artillery wing brought up gunpowder; whole blocks were blown up to create wider firebreaks. The eastern edge was contained at Tower Street; the western edge was contained at Temple Bar.

By Thursday 6 September the fire was out.

What was destroyed

The fire destroyed approximately 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, 52 livery company halls, the Royal Exchange, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Guildhall, and parts of the city walls. Approximately 175 hectares — about 80 percent of the inhabited area of the City of London inside the walls — were reduced to rubble. The City’s secondary commercial districts west of the walls (Westminster, Whitehall, Holborn) were undamaged.

The documented death toll was six: Farriner’s maidservant, an elderly Westminster Abbey official who died at the Lyon Tavern, and four others identifiable in surviving parish records. The figure is almost certainly partial. Bodies that had been completely consumed in the heat would not have been recoverable; bodies of poor people unconnected to formal parish networks would not necessarily have been registered. Modern historians estimate the actual death toll at between 30 and several hundred, but precise reconstruction is impossible.

What followed

Approximately 70,000 of the City of London’s population of 80,000 had been made homeless. Charles II’s emergency response included opening the royal parks and Moorfields to refugee camping, requisitioning the stocks of corn at Greenwich for the displaced population, and issuing royal proclamations against price-gouging on building materials.

The xenophobic political response identified a French scapegoat: a French Catholic watchmaker named Robert Hubert confessed under interrogation to having started the fire on behalf of the Pope. Hubert had not been in London when the fire began — his ship had been at Sweden — and the confession was inconsistent with the physical evidence. He was hanged at Tyburn on 27 October 1666 nonetheless. The 1681 inscription on the Monument to the Great Fire blamed the fire on a “Popish Plot” and remained in place until 1830, when it was finally chiselled out.

The Rebuilding Act 1667 required new construction in the City to use brick and stone rather than timber, mandated wider streets, and prohibited overhanging upper storeys. Christopher Wren was appointed Surveyor of the King’s Works and designed 51 new parish churches and the new St Paul’s Cathedral (foundation laid 1675, structure completed 1710). The rebuilt City was less fire-prone than the medieval one had been. London has had no comparable fire since.

The Monument to the Great Fire — a 61-metre Doric column at Pudding Lane, completed 1677 — is the same height as the distance from its base to the site of Farriner’s bakery. Visitors can climb its 311 steps to a viewing platform. The platform was enclosed in a metal cage in 1842 after six suicides from it.