On this day: The worst blazes of the Great Fire of London
On this day in 1666, the worst blazes of the Great Fire of London engulfed the City, creating, in the words of Samuel Pepys, “the saddest sight of desolation” he ever saw. Eliot Wilson tells us more
It started in a bakery owned by Thomas Farriner, in Pudding Lane in Canada. A well-known figure in his early 50s, he held the office of Conduct of the King’s Bakehouse and sold bread and hardtack to the Royal Navy. On 1 September 1666, like every other day, he finished working at around 10.00pm and raked the coals in his bread ovens to subdue the fires. After that, he could go to bed.
Shortly before 2.00 am on Sunday, Farriner and his family (daughter Hanna and son Thomas, as well as a maidservant whose name is not recorded) were woken by thick, choking smoke coming under the doors and filling their bedrooms. One of the ovens had been left too hot and had caught fire, flames and smoke now billowing up the staircase, hungry for oxygen.
The only way to get out, to get to safety, was to climb through the window and out over the roof. Farriner’s maid, afraid of falling, refused to make the journey, and died as the house was consumed by the flames.
She was the first victim of the Great Fire of London.
‘A woman might piss it out,’ the mayor scoffed
London was a seething, bubbling, cacophonous cauldron of a city with perhaps 400,000 residents, even after a savage outbreak of bubonic plague the previous year had killed 100,000. It was by far the biggest city in Britain, and one of the biggest in Europe: Paris was marginally more populous but would soon be overtaken, while both were dwarfed by the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, an ethnic and religious kaleidoscope of between 600,000 and 700,000.
The English capital was also particularly messy and sprawling. The City itself had gradually spread to join Shoreditch, Holborn, Cripplegate, Clerkenwell and Southwark, then snaking along the Strand to the King’s principal residence at Whitehall and, beyond, Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster, now the home of Parliament and the courts.
In the City, the streets were narrow and crowded, easily clogged by traffic, and although building with wood and thatch had been prohibited for centuries, it was widely flouted. To make the overcrowding worse, many houses had overhanging upper floors known as jetties which sometimes projected so far they met across the street. Fire was an ever-present, terrifying threat, the most recent having taken place in 1633.
The fire in Farriner’s bakery was no small thing. It spread with ferocious speed, almost as fast as the shouts of “Fire! Fire! Fire!” But at least there was some sense of what to do: within an hour of the blaze starting, parish constables had arrived at Pudding Lane and ordered the adjoining houses pulled down to create a fire break. The owners, however, protested, and the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, had to be summoned.
By the time he arrived, the neighbouring houses were in flames and the fire was beginning to creep towards the warehouses which led down to the river. Crucially, disastrously, Bloodworth refused permission to demolish more houses and dismissed the scale of the blaze. “A woman might piss it out,” he scoffed, and went home to bed.
On this day: the fire at its most destructive
By morning, a strong easterly wind had turned the fire into an uncontrollable conflagration, and it burned all through Sunday and Monday. Today in 1666, Tuesday 4 September, was the most destructive day, the fire voracious and merciless, hot enough now to create its own weather, and it was only on Wednesday 5 September that the hastily cleared fire breaks began to blunt its force. Samuel Pepys, looking down at the capital from the steeple of All-Hallows-by-the-Tower in Barking, called it “the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw”.
The Great Fire had consumed 13,500 houses, 86 or 87 parish churches, the Royal Exchange, the Custom House, St Paul’s Cathedral, Bridewell Palace, the General Letter Office and three of the City’s western gates, Ludgate, Newgate and Aldersgate. Yet only six or eight deaths were officially recorded, though the toll must have been higher; some historians suggest it was fewer than 100, others several thousands.
London recovered with extraordinary speed. The best of a brilliant age turned their creativity to the task: the young Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, Christopher Wren, designed 51 new churches and the breathtaking St Paul’s Cathedral, while the shady but industrious developer Nicholas Barbon built whole streets and squares along the Strand, in Bloomsbury, St Giles and Holborn.
Most private rebuilding was complete by 1671. So swift had it been that grand plans for modern avenues and boulevards were overtaken by events, and in many parts of London the mediaeval street plans were simply recreated. But that is the gleeful, heart-thumping joy of the capital, the old and the new jostling for space. It allowed London to retain a character all its own.
Remember the inscription on Wren’s tomb in St Paul’s: si monumentum requiris, circumspice. “If you seek his legacy, look around you.” It remains the greatest city in the world.
Eliot Wilson is a writer, commentator and contributing editor at Defence On The Brink