The Great Fire of London

The year was 1666. John Farynor was the royal baker for five years to King Charles II. One evening after a long and weary day, he climbed the stairs to bed above his Bakery in Pudding Lane. He snuffed out the flame of his candle and settled down for his nights sleep. But as he slept, a flame still flickered in the bakery beneath. He had failed to damp down his bread ovens.

The flame grew. And at 2 o clock in the morning, on September 2, 1666, the fire in the Bakery sparked off one of the worst conflagrations in History, the Great Fire of London.

Sparks rising from Faynors establishment set fire to a pile of hay stacked in the courtyard of the nearby Star inn and lit up the sky. Pudding Lane lay at the center of an overcrowded area of London, and thousands of the local inhabitants were soon out in the streets watching the Blaze. They were not unduly alarmed. Fires were common in this city of pitch-soaked timbers and lathe-and-plaster constructions. Only the year before, King Charles had written to the Lord Mayor urging him to enforce more stringent fire regulations. But previous fires had fizzled out, and there was no reason to think that this one would be any different.

Pudding lane was a dumping ground for offal from nearby Eastcheap Market, and no one of any note lived there. But it was close to the main road running down to London Bridge, son in the early hours of the morning the mayor was informed. When he arrived at the scene he was singularly unimpressed. 'Pish', he said. ' A woman might piss it out.'

Diarist Samuel Pepys was no more impressed. He was awoken by his maid at 3 a.m. at his house about three quarters of a mile to the east near Tower Hill. He wrote of the fire in his diary: 'I rose and slipped on my nightgown and went to her window and thought it to be a backside of Mark Lane at the farthest, and so to bed again and asleep.'

Pepys carried the news of the fire to the court, and thereby to the king, when he arrived at his office in Whitehall shortly before midday. No one had bothered to tell the king before then. It was Sunday after all.

But any idea that the fire would fizzle out was soon dispelled. On Sunday afternoon, the blaze reached the River Thames, and the warehouses loaded with timber, oil, brandy and coal exploded like bombs, one after another.

A steady dry wind blew continuously from the east, so that although the fire barely reached Pepys's house a short distance away, it spread uncontrollably to the west. There was one stage on the Sunday when the blaze might have been halted. But the firefighters smashed up the water pipes to fill their buckets more quickly and cut off the areas water supply.

The inferno swept on the unabated from Sunday to Wednesday. By then, 13,000 houses had been destroyed, 8 parish churches burned down and 300 acres blackened. The shops built on London Bridge caught fire. Sparks carried across to the opposite bank of the Thames River and started small fires in Southwark. The Guildhall and the Royal Exchange- the city's financial center-were reduced to ashes.

The great conflagration was at St. Paul's Cathedral, where the heat caused the stonework to explode and ancient tombs too burst open, revealing mummified remains. The cathedral's roof melted, and molten lead flooded down neighboring streets.

Remarkably, only 8 people died in the Great fire of London. Most citizens had plenty of time to flee. The roads were crammed with handcarts piled with belongings, and the surrounding countryside was one vast refugee camp. Pepys was among those who left the city. With ones face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of fire drops [from this] most horrid, malicious flame...[above it all was] a smoke so great as darkened the sun at midday. If at any time the suns peeped forth it looked red like blood.'

By Wednesday night the fire had been virtually contained, largely due to the personal intervention of the king, who organized the firefighters in knocking down the buildings to create a firebreak. But London smoldered for weeks afterwards. Cellars were still burning six months later.

The blunder of Baker Farynor did some good, however. The shameful slums of central London were wiped out in a single week. And the fire purged the last vestiges of London's previous disaster, the Great Plague of 1665, which had claimed over 100,000 victims. But the damage it had done to property was immeasurable.