In the early hours of Sunday 2 September 1666, a small fire broke out in a bakery on Pudding Lane in the City of London. Within four days, it had destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 churches, and the original St Paul's Cathedral. The Great Fire of London remains one of the most dramatic and consequential events in British history — and it began, most historians agree, because someone forgot to put out the oven.
The baker was Thomas Farriner, who supplied bread to the Royal Navy. He later insisted that he had checked the oven before going to bed, and that the fire could not have started there. Most accounts, however, contradict him. Whatever the true cause, by two o'clock in the morning the flames had reached the tinder-dry timbers of the surrounding streets, and the city was waking to catastrophe.
London in 1666 was a city perfectly designed to burn. Its streets were narrow — some barely wide enough for two people to pass — and its buildings were constructed almost entirely from oak timber, with the upper storeys of neighbouring houses jutting out so close to one another that people could shake hands from opposite windows. A strong easterly wind was blowing that night, pushing the fire westward through the oldest and most densely packed part of the city at terrifying speed.
The Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, was woken in the early hours and told of the fire. His reaction has become notorious. Looking at the flames from a safe distance, he reportedly said: 'A woman might piss it out.' He returned to bed. By the time the true scale of the disaster was understood, it was too late to contain it.
The most effective measure available to firefighters of the 17th century was the firebreak: demolishing buildings in the path of the fire to remove the fuel it needed to spread. However, this required the permission of the buildings' owners, and many refused. It was only when King Charles II himself rode through the streets and ordered houses to be pulled down without consent that organised firebreaks began to slow the blaze. The King and his brother, James, Duke of York, reportedly fought alongside citizens, passing buckets and directing demolition crews.
The fire burned for four days before it was finally brought under control on the night of Thursday 5 September. The human cost was, surprisingly, small — official records list only six deaths, though historians believe the true number was higher, as the deaths of the poor were rarely recorded. The economic cost, however, was enormous. An estimated £10 million of property was destroyed — equivalent to billions of pounds today.
Out of the ashes rose a new city. The surveyor Christopher Wren was appointed to oversee the rebuilding of London's churches, completing 51 of them over the following decades, including the magnificent new St Paul's Cathedral, which took 35 years to build and was finally completed in 1710.
The Great Fire changed London forever. New building regulations required houses to be constructed from brick and stone rather than timber. Streets were widened. The city that rose from the rubble was, for the first time, built to resist fire — though it had taken one of the most devastating blazes in European history to make it happen.