The Great Fire of London — *Fire! Fire! A contemporary painting of the fire of 1666*

London is many things: ancient, modern, beautiful, bustling, cultured, fascinating… and flammable. The nation’s capital city has suffered many fires since its founding by the Romans almost 2,000 years ago, and in this part of my A to Z of London, we are going to take a look at some of the most famous and disastrous.

*The extent of the Great Fire of London, shown on Hollar’s 17th-century map*

As soon I say “London” and “Fire”, most people are going to immediately think of the most famous conflagration of them all: the Great Fire of London, in 1666. In a city seemingly destined to burn at semi-regular intervals, you know that it must have been spectacularly destructive to earn the moniker “Great” – and so it was. In one blaze, 80% of the City of London was destroyed, including over 80 churches, 13,500 houses, and the stone hulk of the old St Paul’s Cathedral. But how did it start, and what made this fire so deadly?

In the evening of the 1st of September, 1666, Thomas Farriner was closing up his bakery for the night. He lived and worked on the aptly named Pudding Lane, near London Bridge, and had been running his own bakery since 1649. He was an accomplished and well-known baker, who really ought to have known better than to shut up shop without thoroughly checking that the fire in his oven was out. However, it seems that that is exactly what he did. He, his family, and their maid retired to bed for the night, and sometime in the early hours of the 2nd of September, they were woken by the smell of burning, as smoke rose into their bedrooms above the shop.

The household went into a panic, realising that they couldn’t leave the house by the main door as flames had taken hold of the entire ground floor. Farriner and his daughter clambered to safety from an upstairs window, but the maid – paralysed by fear – refused to climb out, and she perished in the bakery, the first recorded victim of the Great Fire of London. The fire leapt onwards to consume the buildings all around, and began to spread its way through the heart of the City. It burned for four days, only being brought to a halt in the night of the 5th and 6th of September.

Half-timbered Tudor building — *A typical Tudor timber-framed building*

Starting as it did in the autumn, the fire was helped by the long, hot summer that London had just had – in a city famous for its rain, that year was exceptionally dry, and most of the buildings of that time were built not of stone or brick, but of timber, plaster, and thatch. There was also a strong and steady wind blowing across the city, and this combination of readily combustible fuel and a fanning of the flames led to the greatest fire the city has ever seen.

In the aftermath of the fire, thatched roofs were made illegal in London, and many other regulations were brought in to try to limit the chance of something similar ever happening again. To this day, the only thatched roof in the whole of London is on Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, on the southern bank of the Thames; when it was erected in the 1990s, the builders had to seek a special law in Parliament to allow them to include this authentic 16th-century detail.

A model of Old St Paul's Cathedral — *A model of Old St Paul’s Cathedral*

I mention above that the previous incarnation of St Paul’s Cathedral was also destroyed in the fire, despite it being built of stone as the present one is – and that is very curious. It ought to have been able to withstand the fire, but for two factors. The first was that it was undergoing renovations at the time, and was covered in wooden scaffolding – dried by months of summer sun, this became the perfect kindling and fuel. And secondly, the area around the Cathedral was known for its printers, paper makers, and bookbinders; as soon as they heard news of the fire spreading towards them, they rushed to pile their highly flammable goods in the churchyard of the Cathedral, believing the open space and God’s grace would save them from the flames. Unfortunately, combined with the wooden scaffolding above, they had inadvertently built the world’s largest bonfire, and as soon as the fire leapt the gap of the churchyard and caught hold of the paper, it was too late to stop. Contemporary accounts tell us that the heat in the church was so intense that blocks of stone exploded in the heat, and the lead roof melted and ran down the streets in a river of molten metal.

Painting of Christopher Wren — *Sir Christopher Wren, architect of London*

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom – surprisingly, we have very few records of people dying in the fire, save for poor Thomas Farriner’s maid. Contemporary accounts suggest only a dozen people lost their lives, although modern scholars have suggested the figure may be more close to 200. Whichever is the true figure, it is incredible that so few people were hurt in a disaster that caused so much material destruction. And for some, the fire presented great opportunity: the most notable of these is Sir Christopher Wren, perhaps London’s most famous architect. Before the fire, he had already been making a name for himself, and was in fact in charge of the renovations to Old St Paul’s, but in the wake of it, he found himself in charge of the rebuilding of not only the cathedral, but the whole City of London. He rebuilt over 50 churches, laid out streets, and oversaw the huge effort to remake the city – in many ways, the Great Fire was the making of Christopher Wren.

A statue of Queen Boudicca on Westminster Bridge — *The statue of Boudicca on Westminster Bridge, beside Big Ben*

There are three other particularly famous fires in London’s history: one at its very beginning, and two in the Victorian era. The first took place in 60AD, in the early days of the Romans’ conquest of Britannia, when Boudicca, queen of the local Iceni tribe, descended on London in fury after the Romans had murdered her husband and assaulted her daughters. At the head of a small but bloodthirsty force of warriors, she burned first the Roman capital at Colchester, and then the city of London itself. The fires she set were so devastating, that there is a layer of blackened earth in the ground beneath Colchester to this day.

MW Turner's painting of fire at the Houses of Parliament — *‘The burning of the Houses of Parliament’, by JMW Turner*

Of the two great Victorian fires the first was on 16th October 1834, and it destroyed the Houses of Parliament and most of the ancient Palace of Westminster, which had stood on that site since the reign of King Edward the Confessor in the 11th century. The origins of the fire were in financial reorganisation taking place at the Treasury. Up until the 19th century, debts had been tracked using the ancient method of tally sticks: when one person owed another money, a wooden stick would be marked with a unique series of notches (“tallies”), and then split in two. Each party received half of the stick, and when calling in a debt, you would prove that you were the intended recipient by matching your tally stick to the other person’s. The Victorians recognised that this method, in use since prehistoric times, was now outdated, and called in the sticks from everyone in the country, issuing paper proofs of debt instead. However, they were now left with the problem of what to do with these many unwanted pieces of wood, and decided to burn them in the furnaces beneath the House of Lords. Overnight, the heat grew so great, that the wooden panelling in the Lords caught fire, and after that the flames ripped through the entire complex, reducing it to ash and rubble by the next day. The artist JMW Turner witnessed the blaze, and produced several paintings of the event over the following months.

The Great Fire of Tooley Street - etching — *A contemporary etching of the Great Fire of Tooley Street*

The other great Victorian fire happened in 1861, and is known as the Great Fire of Tooley Street. In terms of duration, this was the worst fire London ever experienced – it started on 22nd June 1861, and burned for two weeks before being brought under control, causing around £2 million of damage. Part of the reason for the fire’s ferocity was where it happened: Tooley Street in Southwark is in the heart of London’s historic dock district, and the fire first started in Cotton Wharf, which was full to the rafters with flammable goods, including tallow, hemp, and jute – all perfect fuels for a fire. Once the first warehouse was ablaze, it did not take long for the fire to spread to nearby Depot Wharf and Hay’s Wharf, and even to boats moored in the river beside them.

The fledgling London Fire Engine Establishment was called in to tackle the blaze, under the leadership of James Braidwood, who had founded the world’s first municipal fire service in Edinburgh in 1824. Sadly, Braidwood himself died on the first day of the fire, when a warehouse wall collapsed on him. In the aftermath, the city decided that a properly funded, city-wide firefighting service was required, and in 1865 the London Fire Brigade was founded by an act of parliament, providing fire protection for the whole of London.