The Great Fire of London 1666: Disaster and Reconstruction
Pudding Lane, 2 September 1666
Just after one o’clock in the morning of Sunday 2 September 1666, a fire broke out in the bakery of Thomas Farriner in Pudding Lane, near London Bridge. London had survived dozens of small fires; this one became the Great Fire. Three things made it different: a long dry summer that had baked the timber houses, an unusually strong easterly wind, and the densely packed warehouses near the Thames full of pitch, oil, hemp, brandy and coal — all highly flammable.
Bloodworth’s Fatal Indecision
When the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, was woken before dawn and asked to authorise the demolition of houses to make a firebreak, he reportedly snorted, ‘A woman might piss it out.’ By the time he changed his mind on Sunday afternoon, the wind had carried the fire halfway up Cannon Street. Houses in seventeenth-century London were timber-framed, jettied (each storey overhanging the one below), and packed against each other with thatch in poorer streets. Once a row caught, the whole row went up.
The Great Fire broke out at Thomas Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane in the early hours of 2 September 1666. Lord Mayor Bloodworth refused to authorise demolitions early enough; by the time he agreed, an easterly wind had spread the flames across the City.
The King and the Duke of York Take Charge
By Monday 3 September Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York, had taken personal command of firefighting from the Lord Mayor. They worked the leather-bucket lines themselves and authorised the use of gunpowder to blow up rows of houses ahead of the flames and create firebreaks. James personally directed gunpowder demolitions on Pudding Lane, Tower Street and elsewhere, and the king himself rode to Smithfield to organise water carts. Their visible leadership was politically important: Pepys recorded crowds cheering them, in marked contrast to royal absence during the Plague of the previous year.
The Scale of Destruction
By the time the fire died on Thursday 6 September, the cost was staggering. About four-fifths of the walled City was destroyed: 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall, the Custom House, three of the City’s gates and old St Paul’s Cathedral. Officially only six people died (the real toll was probably higher among the poor and uncounted). Around 70,000 of the City’s 80,000 inhabitants were made homeless overnight. They camped on Moorfields, Tower Hill and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Charles II personally rode out to reassure the refugees.
The Second Dutch War was being fought, and Catholic France had recently joined the Dutch side. Many Londoners refused to believe a city could burn by accident. Stories spread of French and Dutch agents firing the city deliberately. A French watchmaker, Robert Hubert, confessed under questioning to starting the fire and was hanged at Tyburn in October 1666; the privy council itself privately doubted the confession (Hubert had been at sea on 2 September). The Monument to the Fire, completed in 1677, was given a Latin inscription in 1681 blaming ‘the treachery and malice of the Popish faction’; it was chiselled off in the reign of James II and recut after 1689. The rumour that the Fire had been Catholic arson endured, feeding the Popish Plot panic of 1678.
The Rebuilding Acts
Within a fortnight Charles II had appointed a commission to plan reconstruction. Rebuilding Acts were passed in 1667 and 1670. They required all new houses to be built in brick and stone, not timber. Streets were widened and pavements added. House heights were standardised by class of street, with four set types of dwelling. A new tax on coal coming into the port of London paid for the rebuilding of public buildings and parish churches.
Wren’s Plan and What Was Actually Built
Within days of the fire, the architect Sir Christopher Wren presented Charles II with a sweeping plan for a baroque London of broad avenues, piazzas and rationalised land plots. So did John Evelyn, Robert Hooke and others. None of these plans was adopted. The reason was simple: too many private freeholders held the medieval plots and the Crown had no money to compensate them. London was rebuilt on its old street pattern. Wren’s real triumph was the St Paul’s Cathedral (1675–1710) and 51 of the 87 lost parish churches, designed in his office between 1670 and 1700. Funded largely by a coal tax voted by Parliament, they gave the rebuilt City a unique horizon of white-stone steeples crowned by Wren’s dome.
The 1667 Rebuilding Act required houses to be built in brick or stone with standardised heights, on wider streets. Wren’s grand street plan was rejected because of private property rights, but he designed 51 new City churches and the new St Paul’s Cathedral, finished in 1710.
Samuel Pepys is the historian’s gift on the Fire. His diary entry for 2 September 1666 records being woken at three in the morning by his maid Jane to see the glow over the river. Pepys took a boat downstream to inspect the spread, returned to inform Charles II in person at Whitehall, and recorded the king’s order to demolish houses. Over the next four days he saved his own goods (including a parmesan cheese, famously buried in the garden), watched the fire from boats and rooftops and recorded conversations with refugees on Moorfields. Other eyewitnesses included John Evelyn, who walked through the smoking ruins on 7 September and recorded the heat of the stones rising through his shoes.
Effects on London
The Fire’s effects pulled in different directions. The trauma was real: thousands lost everything, and London paid for the reconstruction for forty years. But the rebuilt City was fireproof in a way the old one had not been; the Plague did not return on the 1665 scale, though historians still argue about why; and Wren’s churches and cathedral became one of the world’s most admired urban skylines. The Fire also pushed wealthy Londoners west to Covent Garden, St James’s and the developing West End, accelerating a long-term shift in the city’s social geography. The Catholic arson rumour, meanwhile, refused to die, and would resurface in the Popish Plot panic of 1678.