On 14 June 2017, Londoners woke up to a morning marked by news of a fire in a 24-storey residential tower block. Its residents had been warning the authorities about the fire risk for several years, but no one had done anything. Sixty-eight people ended up in hospitals, some in critical condition. More than ten have lost their lives. Firefighters could not confine the fire to a single floor, but they did not have to worry about it spreading to neighbouring buildings. Just over 350 years earlier, nearly a quarter of London had burnt down because of the unstoppable leaping of flames from one building to another.
It was 1666 and Londoners were already exhausted. They had decades of political and religious turmoil behind them, and they had just fought the Dutch for commercial superiority at sea. The Protestant King Charles II had only taken the throne six years earlier, but from then on they breathed a little easier, although there was still no real harmony between Catholics and Protestants.
The hatred of foreigners, especially the Dutch and the French, who had to fight on their side because of the 1662 treaty with the Dutch, did not die down either. It has subsided a little, but the flames of xenophobia still smoulder beneath the surface.
But in London, flames of fire were also a constant. The city was more or less built of wood, and for years the townspeople had warned the authorities that if one day the conditions were right for a big fire, it would be in danger of total destruction.
Daniel Baker had predicted that the city would be engulfed in fire a hundred years earlier, in 1559, and fifteen years earlier, in 1651, his ominous prediction was joined by astronomer William Lilly. He painted England’s future with images of London in the teeth of fire and scenes of naval battles, rodent attacks, mass deaths and famine.
King Charles II was not deaf to warnings. In April 1665, he pointed out to the Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, what he should have noticed himself: the streets were too narrow and the houses too close together, making the city a fire risk. In the autumn of 1666, he was particularly concerned. The summer was long and extremely hot. The houses, which were then more or less made of wood, were parched, and the lack of rain meant that the water supply was almost scarce.
Yet Londoners weren’t exactly thinking fire at the time. The plague had killed more than 68,000 people in the previous two years, so they feared it more than the firebrands, and perhaps they feared the chariots more than they feared the chariots, under whose wheels they were dying like flies.
London was simply not a safe place to be in that year, 1666, especially after a strong easterly wind blew. They knew that, combined with the dry and dusty air, it carried the plague successfully, but they had no idea that it would also be a sacrificial accomplice to the threatening flames.
Ah, a woman can put that out
All it took was a spark to start the fire, and on 2 September 1666 at 2am it did. They were fast asleep in the home of the King’s baker, Thomas Farriner, on Puddington Lane near London Bridge. At least, that was the case until recently, when a re-examination of ancient plans of the city revealed that his bakery stood not on Puddington Lane at all, where the memorial now stands, but 18 metres away, in Fyer Yard.
A few metres up or down, at 2am Farriner’s employee smelled smoke. It woke up everyone in the house, including the master’s daughter Hanna. In a panic, they crawled out of the window, onto the neighbour’s roof and onto safe ground, leaving behind the maid, who was so frightened she couldn’t move.
She became the first victim of a fire that spread with unimaginable speed and ferocity. The narrowness of the streets meant that the flames jumped easily from one wooden house to another, and woke up the mayor about an hour after the fire had started to spread. He cynically replied to the news broadcasters: “A woman can put it out with her screech.” Later, he got up and went to the scene, but even then he remained dead cold. He turned around and went back to bed.
He didn’t think Paddington Lane was special. It was lined with shops selling things that burned easily, such as tar, rope, oil and alcohol. It was one of those streets where a fire really should not have broken out, but the Mayor was sleeping soundly when, at dawn, the flames had reached nearby London Bridge.
In 1632, a fire started in the open space separating two groups of houses, and the same thing happened this time, but fortunately only a third of the bridge was burnt and the fire did not spread to the northern bank.
Chronicler Samuel Pepys, 33, lived near the scene. He walked to the Tower of London that Sunday morning and watched the fire spread westwards, helped by the strong wind. He described “pigeons … hovering over windows and balconies until their wings burned and they fell”.
In London that day, there were no firefighters, no water hoses and no protective clothing. The ordinance only said that every parish had to have a fire kit, which meant that they had to keep leather baskets and hooks to hang them on.
The parish of St Botolph, which was about half a kilometre from where the fire started, had 36 baskets and a ladder. This would have been enough for a burning house, but it was useless for a roaring fire.
When Samuel Pepys went to Whitehall Palace to inform King Charles II and his brother James, then Duke of York, of what was happening, chaos reigned everywhere. “No one that I saw made any effort to put out the fire, everyone was just withdrawing their belongings and leaving everything else to the fire,” he reported.
The mayor was useless, but the king and his brother proved to be so much more effective. They started to organise the fire brigade. They called in royal advisers and other aristocrats to supervise the work of the fire brigades they organised.
They built eight so-called fire stations. Each was manned by 30 soldiers, called in from the surrounding districts by the King, and 100 local volunteers. The firemen were paid one shilling for their dangerous work, and the King stocked their stations with bread, cheese and wine so that they would have enough food and drink for the exertions that lay ahead.
Still, he did not expect the fire to be so uncontrollable. He immediately ordered as many houses in the affected Blooworth area to be destroyed as necessary to create a clear space beyond which the fire could not spread. But the wind worked hand in hand with the flames.
He was so strong that they easily jumped over empty spaces and moved to new houses on his wings. By the end of Sunday, the flames were so fierce that they could travel into the wind. As they turned towards the Tower, Samuel Pepys began to pack up.
St Paul’s Cathedral on fire
By the next morning, the fire was also raging to the north and west. Pepys looked around the city and saw “tens of thousands of houses all in one blaze, noise and cracking and crashing of people, towers, houses and churches falling down, it was like a horrible neitha”.
“The air was so hot and burning that no one could get near it,” he said of the firefighters’ plight. The soldiers helped to extinguish the fires and to control thieves who took advantage of others’ misfortune to enrich themselves. They were more successful than the firefighters. The flames were untamable. They were spreading more and more towards the wealthy area of Cheapside.
Smoke rose high into the sky. By the afternoon, it could be seen from Oxford. Panic reigned in London. Citizens fled to the suburbs, to Moorfeilds and Finsbury Hill. By evening, carriages filled every available road and the fire spread down towards St Paul’s Cathedral.
But the worst was yet to come. Even as everyone who could fought the fire was now fighting it, the flames were beginning to engulf Cheapside, London’s widest and richest street. Pepys began to evacuate his house. Among other things, he dug a hole in the garden and put in his precious Parmesan cheese, wine and a few other things.
As he worked, he got a flash of light. “Blowing up the houses… stopping the fire where it is, demolishing the houses where they stand, and then it was easy to fight with what little fire was left in them.” While some believe that the idea of blowing up the wooden houses with gunpowder came from King Charles II, it was certainly he who decided to distribute the food supplies kept in the eastern part of the city for the navy to those who were left without anything.
By the fourth day, ash was already falling on Kensington and flames surrounded St Paul’s Cathedral. Just weeks earlier, architect Sir Christopher Wren had submitted plans to rebuild it. It was about 500 years old, had been neglected and had even been used as a stable for horses at one time, so it was in real need of restoration.
Now, flaming sparks rained down on its roof, carried around by the wind. The roof caught fire, and soon after, the scaffolding that surrounded it. But the fire still had unexpected food supplies at its disposal. The Londoners, hoping that at least the churchyard would be safe from the flames, took refuge there, bringing their furniture with them, thinking it would protect them. They leaned it against the walls of the church and lined it neatly with combustible material.
A company has put its books and documents in a tomb. It may have been sealed in the end, but it is possible that when the roof collapsed, it fell on the tomb below. It must have burst, and afterwards the books burned with all their fierce power.
The heat must have been extreme, say the experts. The cathedral’s collection still contains a few stones from that period. The fire changed their colour, and a witness reported that the stone used to make the cathedral exploded like bombs.
Chronicler John Evelyn added that the lead from the roof had flowed in streams onto the streets, causing the pavements to glisten a wild red. A few hours later, all that was left of the cathedral was rubble.
That day, the fire reached its peak. Samuel Pepys climbed up into the old church by the Tower and saw “the saddest scene of destruction I ever saw; great fires everywhere, cellars and brimstone and everything else, all on fire.”
On Wednesday morning, fire hit the brick wall of the Middle Temple. It stopped short, but the workers seized the moment and hurriedly blew up the buildings to destroy as many as possible and to make the void as large as possible. Then, they hoped, the fire would stop.
Now, fortune has finally smiled on them. The wind died down, reversed direction and pushed the flames back to where they came from, but also towards the river. This time, even the Mayor of London proved helpful. He managed the Cripplegate demolition perfectly.
By Thursday, the fire had been extinguished. It destroyed 1800 square metres of the city before it sank in. Some 13,200 houses, 87 churches and 44 factory halls were burnt.
Only six dead?
Six people have officially died in the fire. Even a few years afterwards, Edward Chamberlyne insisted that “only six or eight people were burnt”, while the priest Ralph Josselin mentioned that “few perished in the fire”. The authorities undoubtedly ensured that a large proportion of Londoners from the affected areas were able to leave their homes in time, but there were certainly those who could not.
For example, St Giles Cripplegate parish recorded one third more funerals than before. The official explanation was that the townspeople from the destroyed parishes were going to those that had survived. But a suspiciously large number of deaths, nearly two-thirds, were due to old age, and there was also a rise in deaths due to ‘fear’.
In another parish, the average age of the deceased suddenly rose by 12 years, from 18.8 to 31.3. Was it true that the elderly were dying more often that September, and for some unknown reason?
Maybe not. John Evelyn, in his diary, reported a stench in the streets “coming from the bodies of some wretches. The real price was probably much higher and rose in the months that followed.” The poet John Dryden was not in London at the time, but he wrote about helpless children in the midst of the fire.
Reports of it reached France, with which England was at war at the time. “Letters from London tell of horrific scenes of people being burned to death. Their limbs were cremated, making it easy to imagine the horror, even if it is impossible to describe it accurately. The elderly, the frail children and many of the sick and helpless were burned in their beds and were food for the fire.”
When he was finally defeated, it was time to find the culprit. Everyone agreed that they had started the fire too late and had fought too long. Pepys blamed the Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth. “People all over the world are crying foul over the general stupidity of my Lord Mayor, and especially over this fire which rests on his conscience.”
Now the people were furious, just as the fire had been furious in days gone by. The old xenophobia has been given new impetus. On Sunday, schoolboy William Taswell saw “a dumbfounded and blinded crowd … venting their fury on Roman Catholics and Frenchmen, while his brother saw a Frenchman almost being quartered”, Pepys reported.
On Tuesday, King Charles II travelled to Moorfields to address more than 100,000 homeless people. That was about a sixth of Londoners. Many spent the next eight years in makeshift huts set up there.
On that Tuesday, the King proclaimed that the fire was not started by strangers, but was the work of God. His words were completely without effect. England was at war with France and Holland, and there were rumours that the fire had been started by foreigners. Such was the paranoia about them that the Spanish ambassador opened his house to all foreigners, whether Protestant Dutch or Catholic French, to save their lives.
Dutch merchants were particularly hard hit, as the English fought the Dutch for commercial superiority. News spread that the fire was Dutch revenge for the English attack on the Dutch islands of Vlieland and Terschelling. The battle for them had been fought only a month earlier.
The attack on the Dutch merchants was led by Sir Robert Holmes, who was known for his defiance and unpredictability. It ended with the men destroying around 150 Dutch merchant ships and burning the town of West-Terschelling.
In London, the arson was celebrated with bonfires and bell-ringing, while in the Netherlands, people were shocked. In Amsterdam, there were protests. At the time, the English spy Aphra Behn was also based in Antwerp. She reported that she had seen a letter from a merchant’s wife telling her husband to come home because ‘never had there been such devastation and mourning’. Behn should have travelled to Dorth and continued to spy for the English there, but she could not now. She wrote that she would rather see herself hanged than go.
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The papists are to blame
King Louis XIV of France heard the news of the fire a week after it happened. When it arrived at court, it was all anyone was talking about. The Venetian Ambassador then prophetically announced that “this disaster … will be remembered for centuries to come”.
Privately, King Louis XIV probably had little sympathy for Londoners. Indeed, the report also falsely stated that the arms depot had been destroyed by fire and that the English navy would have to surrender. Louis XIV only took part in the war because he was obliged to under the 1662 agreement, even though he did not happen to have a navy and did not fight in the war.
But he publicly announced correctly that he would not tolerate “any rejoicing at this [fire] because it is a very tragic accident in which so many unfortunate people have been injured”. He also offered to help. Boats, he announced, could bring food and everything they needed to ease the suffering of those who had lost everything.
Some have also blamed parliamentarians for the arson. A few months earlier, in April 1666, a group of MPs led by John Rathbon and William Saunders were tried at the Old Bailey. They were found guilty of conspiring to kill King Charles II, overthrow the government and burn the city. The London Gazette reported at the time that the conspirators were allegedly aided by someone from Holland and that they intended to carry out their infernal plan on the anniversary of Oliver Cromwell’s death, or 3 September 1666. The fire had started one day earlier.
The age-old disputes between Catholics and Protestants have also brought the Papists, as Protestants derogatorily refer to Catholics, under attack. One Mr Light assured us how, a few weeks before the fire, he had been approached by a ‘fiery Papist’ who had threateningly warned him to expect ‘great things in 1666’. You think Rome will be destroyed. But what about London?”
In 1678, Titus Oater thus announced that London had been burned by Jesuit priests to make the city Catholic in their own way. In 1685, the Duke of Monmouth, who had rebelled against the new king, the Catholic James II. As the Catholics were in the thick of it, he accused him of setting the fire nearly 20 years earlier.
At the end, a memorial plaque was erected, blaming the fire on “traitors and villains of the Papist section”. It was not removed until 1832, which means that the Catholics were blamed for the fire for 150 years.
The French did not escape without suspicion of guilt. Five months before the fire, Elizabeth Style claimed that a Frenchman had told her that sometime between June and October “not a house would stand between Temple Bar and London Bridge”.
Of course, they also heard from the astronomer William Lilly, who predicted the future of England in 1651 and also predicted the fire. It was seriously believed that he had set the fire himself, presumably because he wanted his predictions to come true and his fame to grow. Fearing that he would not really be hanged, he now claimed that the predictions were wrong.
When a parliamentary commission started investigating the causes of the fire at the end of September, another suspect emerged. French Protestant watchmaker Robert Hubert voluntarily confessed that he had deliberately set the fire, adding that he had 23 other colleagues. His watchmaking colleagues claimed that he was mentally unbalanced, but he stood his ground.
Count Claredon commented on the events as follows: “Neither the judges nor those present at the trial believed him guilty, but he was a poor disturbed mess, tired of life, and had made up his mind to part with it.” He was assisted by a jury of three. They visited him in Tyburn, and the investigation showed that Hubert could not have set the fire under any circumstances.
The final report of the Parliamentary Commission in January 1967 stated that so far nothing had been found “to contradict the fact that the fire was sent upon us by God, by strong winds and by a desperately dry season”.
A new beginning
Baker Farriner is acquitted. He claimed that on the night of the London fire, the fire in all his stoves was completely out, although it seems that one of them continued to smoulder and the spark jumped to nearby wood. He was believed, even though he had a police record.
In 1627, when he was 10 or 11 years old, he was found by a city policeman wandering alone in the streets inside the city walls. He had escaped from his master, he said, although it is not known why he had him at the time. He was taken to Bridewall Prison, where his detention was recorded.
This prison was then a kind of reformatory for young offenders. From there, they were often sent to apprenticeships in basic trades, and the best of them were given protectors.
Young Thomas was not one of them. During the interrogation, it turned out that he had run away from his master three or four times, but had been released and had to go back to a place where he could not live. A year later, he found himself back in the House of Correction, again for running away, only this time he was more fortunate and soon became the apprentice of Thomas Dodson, the baker.
Thomas Farriner lost everything, as did around 100,000 other people living in more than 13,000 homes. One quarter of London was destroyed, but there was at least one positive consequence: the fire wiped out the plague-ridden parts of the city, as open sewers and slums were also burned.
Now, the restoration has been undertaken in an organised way. Five proposals were submitted to a kind of call for tenders, and Sir Christopher Wren’s was chosen. He envisioned wide streets extending outwards from where the fire broke out, so that it would never be forgotten. But he could not realise his idea.
Neither the King nor Parliament had the money to rebuild it. The land on which the burnt houses stood was still in the hands of the landlords. If they wanted to radically change the district, they would have had to buy it, but they could not.
Thus, the road map has remained largely the same. The burnt houses had to be demolished before they could be rebuilt. In the end, 52 churches and 36 factories were built.
To get to the bottom of ownership disputes, they set up a kind of fire court. This decided who should pay compensation to whom. There was so much work that the court continued to operate for a decade after the fire.
The reconstruction took ten years, while criminals managed the ruins. They pretended to offer protection to passengers, then robbed and killed them.
Many of those who lost their homes built temporary shacks and shops in their place, but had to demolish them when the new laws were passed. In 1667, they really got to work, this time with the idea that nothing like this could ever happen again.
Thus, the upper floors of houses were no longer allowed to protrude above the ground below, and houses were no longer allowed to be built of wood. It was legally forbidden to build with any material other than bricks or stones. If anyone broke the law, their house was demolished.
But at the time of the fire, it was not only the houses that were made of wood, but also the water mains, which meant that most of them were destroyed. Part of it was destroyed themselves, because at that time there was not a single place on the roads where they could get water. So, in the panic that gripped them when they tried to put out the fire, they broke the pipes, destroying the water mains, but also losing precious water when they triggered the flood. Now they wanted to fix it, and so the beginnings of the water hydrant system were born.
St Paul’s Cathedral was also restored to the designs of Sir Christopher Wren. Wrena did not bother to preserve the ruins. Although he loved symmetry and mathematics, he now conceived the asymmetrical shape of the church from east to west just to avoid the old foundations. He did not trust them.
St Paul’s was the first cathedral to be built in Protestant England, so it is a little different from those built in earlier times. If Wren had had to rebuild an old church that was in such a bad state that it would have collapsed on its own sooner or later, he would have had to respect a number of constraints, but now he was free to let his ideas run wild.
But ideas also came from Nicholas Barbon, a doctor. When the fire broke out and insurance was unknown in England, he founded the first insurance company in 1667. His company even had its own fire brigade for those who paid for insurance.
Policy holders were given a special plaque on which the policy number was printed. They had to attach it to their house so that firefighters knew which one to put out and which one to leave alone.
After that, insurance companies grew like mushrooms after the rain. One of them was Sun Fire Office, founded in 1710. Today, it is the oldest insurance company in the world. The Great Fire of London was the catalyst for the modern insurance business as we know it today.
Rebuilding London was expensive, but neither the King nor Parliament had the money. So where did they get the money? It came from the African slave trade. Six years before the fire, Charles II had already authorised the creation of the Royal African Company, headed by his brother, the Duke of York. Two years after the fire, this company set up another, Gambia Adventures, specialising in the African slave trade. The profits flowed to London in the same way as the East India Company’s slave trade. Most of this money ended up in real estate.
Londoners didn’t care at the time, but they nearly gasped with fright when they heard that a fire had broken out near Whitehall Palace on 9 November 1666, or two months after the Great Fire. An overturned candle had apparently fallen into the hay and set it alight.
Samuel Pepys reported that the whole town was on its feet in “terror of a great conflagration” and that ladies were losing consciousness from fear. At 10pm they could breathe again – the fire had been put out and there was almost no damage.
It wasn’t the first time
But the Great Fire of London was not the first fire to rock the city in history. In the 1960s, Boudica, Queen of the Celtic Iceni tribe, led a revolt against the Romans in Britain. On her way, she also stopped in Londinium.
The soldiers who should have been defending it were either dead or on the march. So the Governor decided he could not defend the city and left it to its fate. Finally, Baudice arrived. She burned the town to the ground and excavations show that the temperature reached around 1000 degrees Celsius.
London was rebuilt, but only enough to be hit by a new fire every time. There had been a major one in 982, but the one in 1087 was more fatal. St Paul’s Cathedral was not spared, nor were other churches.
Around 1133, a fire broke out in Chepasid, the centre of the wealthy and important in 1666, and destroyed the wooden London Bridge before spreading east and west. A new fire followed 20 years later, but the one that took the greatest death toll was the one that broke out in the middle of the night on 10 July 1212 in Southwark, south of the Thames.
A strong southerly wind carried burning particles through the air to the north end of London Bridge. Today, it is believed that around 3 000 people lost their lives. Some burned to death, others drowned.
After the fire, thatched houses and other combustible materials were banned, but fires continued to rage in London. In 1630, for example, 50 houses were lost in the fiery fury. Three years later, a butler placed a pan of boiling ash under the steps of a house on London Bridge. It started a fire that reduced 42 houses on the bridge and 70 in the surrounding area to ashes.
In 1650, several barrels of gunpowder exploded when a fire broke out in a shop on Tawer Street. More than 60 people died and 40 houses were destroyed.
Of course, there were no firefighters until 1666. Each parish had only axes, leather baskets, hooks and ladders. They were often stored in the churches and the inhabitants were expected to play an exemplary role in fire-fighting.
At that time, they tried to demolish houses with special sticks to create an empty space across which the fire could not spread. The hooks were so long and heavy that only several people could lift them together.
There were already a few water pumps in London, but they had to be hand-powered and were as useless as later fire engines. They were essentially giant barrels on wheels. They held far too little water for serious firefighting, they were difficult to operate and they were completely unreliable. The London Metropolitan Fire Brigade was not established until 1865, and with it London got five firehouses, new uniforms and a new system of operation.
