Shortly after midnight on the morning of Sunday, September 2, 1666, a fire broke out in a bakery on Pudding Lane in the City of London. Within hours it had grown into a conflagration. Over the next four days it burned through the medieval heart of the city, consuming churches, guild halls, warehouses, and thousands of homes before the wind dropped and firebreaks finally halted its advance. The Great Fire of London destroyed the old Roman walled city and spilled beyond it to the west, gutting approximately 373 acres of the most densely developed urban landscape in England and fundamentally reshaping one of Europe's great capitals.
To understand why the fire spread so rapidly and so far, it helps to understand what London was in the mid-seventeenth century. By the 1660s it was the largest city in Britain and the third largest in the Western world, home to an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 people. The poet and diarist John Evelyn, comparing London unfavorably to Paris in 1659, described it as a "wooden, northern, and inartificial congestion of Houses" — unplanned, makeshift, the product of centuries of unregulated organic growth. The City proper, the roughly 700 acres bounded by the old Roman wall and the River Thames, housed about 80,000 people. Its streets were narrow, its buildings constructed overwhelmingly of timber, and its houses pressed so tightly together that neighbors could nearly shake hands across upper-floor windows. It had recently survived a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague in 1665, the Plague Year, which had killed perhaps 100,000 Londoners and left the city shaken and somewhat depopulated.
The fire started in the bakery of Thomas Farriner — or Farynor, as the name also appears — in Pudding Lane, not far from the northern end of London Bridge. Whether it began from an unattended oven or some other source was debated at the time and never conclusively resolved. What is clear is that the fire caught in the dry timber of the bakehouse and spread to neighboring structures within minutes. A strong east wind, which had been blowing for several days, carried embers rapidly across the closely packed rooftops.
The early hours were critical and were mismanaged in ways that later invited bitter criticism. Sir Thomas Bloodworth, the Lord Mayor, was summoned from his bed to observe the fire and reportedly dismissed it with the contemptuous assessment that a woman could put it out. The primary firefighting technique available was the creation of firebreaks — pulling down buildings in the path of the fire to deny it fuel and create a gap too wide to jump. But Bloodworth hesitated to order the demolitions, reluctant to bear the financial liability and legal responsibility for destroying private property. By the time he accepted the necessity, the wind had transformed the bakery fire into a firestorm too powerful for piecemeal demolition to check.
By Monday, the fire had pushed north into the commercial heart of the City. The Exchange, the great center of London's financial life, burned. Warehouses along the river poured their flammable contents — tallow, pitch, oil, timber, coal — into the inferno. The Thames itself was filled with boats carrying refugees and salvaged goods, while the northern and western roads out of the city clogged with carts and handbarrows heaped with household possessions. Order began to break down as rumors spread that foreigners were deliberately setting fires. The fears of the displaced focused particularly on French and Dutch residents, whose nations were England's enemies in the Second Anglo-Dutch War then underway. Members of both communities were attacked in the streets.
On Tuesday, the fire reached its greatest extent. St Paul's Cathedral, then still the old medieval structure that predated Christopher Wren's famous replacement, was consumed despite the massive stones of which it was partly built. The lead on the roof melted and ran in rivers down the adjacent streets. The flames leaped the Fleet River — a significant natural barrier — and began threatening the neighborhood of Whitehall, where King Charles II maintained his court. Charles himself took an active role in the firefighting efforts, riding through the streets with his brother James, Duke of York, distributing money to the laborers pulling down buildings and encouraging the work directly.
The battle against the fire is generally considered to have been won by two converging factors. The strong east wind that had driven the fire for three days finally dropped, slowing its advance. And crucially, the garrison of the Tower of London employed gunpowder to create large and effective firebreaks to the east of the main fire front, blowing apart whole sections of buildings faster and more thoroughly than any conventional demolition could achieve. These explosions stopped the fire's eastward spread and allowed it to die for lack of fuel.
When the smoke cleared on Thursday, September 5, the reckoning was staggering. The fire had destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, and most of the major buildings of the City including the Royal Exchange, the Custom House, Guildhall, and dozens of livery company halls. The official death toll was recorded as remarkably small — a handful of confirmed fatalities — though some historians have argued that deaths among the poor, whose remains might have been incinerated without record, were likely much higher.
The rebuilding of London became a subject of immense architectural ambition and political calculation. Several grand plans were submitted to Charles II, including proposals from Christopher Wren and John Evelyn for rational grid-planned cities with broad avenues and classical monuments. Charles, acutely aware of the danger of a dispossessed urban population nursing grievances, encouraged rapid rebuilding and settlement. In the end, however, practical realities — the impossibility of resolving competing land claims quickly, the urgent need to restore commerce, and the conservatism of the City's merchant class — meant that London was rebuilt largely on its old medieval street pattern. That pattern, with its idiosyncratic lanes, courts, and alleys, still defines the City today.
The new London that rose from the ashes was meaningfully different in one crucial respect: it was built of brick and stone rather than timber. The Rebuilding Act of 1667 mandated fire-resistant construction standards and set minimum street widths. And it gave Christopher Wren the canvas on which he painted his masterwork: the new St Paul's Cathedral, completed in 1710, whose dome still dominates the City's skyline.
