By the late 17th century, the City of London—the area bounded by the City wall and the river Thames—was only one part of London, covering 700 acres and home to about 80,000 people, or one sixth of London’s inhabitants. The City was surrounded by a ring of inner suburbs, where most Londoners lived. The City was then, as now, the commercial heart of the capital, as well as the largest market and busiest port in England, dominated by the trading and manufacturing classes. The aristocracy shunned the City and lived either in the countryside beyond the slum suburbs, or further west in the exclusive Westminster district (the modern West End), which was also the site of King Charles II’s court at Whitehall. Wealthy people preferred to live at a convenient distance from the traffic-filled, polluted, unhealthy City, especially after it was hit by a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague in 1665.
London was a busy city in 1666. It was very crowded. The streets were narrow and dusty in summer. Houses were close together and many of them had thatched rooves. Inside their homes, people used candles for light and cooked on open fires. Shops, workshops and businesses were located among the houses on every street and also used open fires. Artisans kindled braziers in the streets. Warehouses contained combustible materials like paper, pitch and alcohol. You can see how a fire could easily get out of control.
The City was also surrounded by walls, built along the lines of the old Roman walls. The City was bounded to the south by the river, but there were only 8 exit gates through the walls – making traffic thick at the best of times.
The authorities were aware of the danger, but had little power to act. In 1664, Charles II urged London's lord mayor to enforce them 'to preserve that great and prosperous City from Fire'. However, in 1666, London was less prosperous than it had been, as it was still struggling to recover from the ravages of the previous year's Great Plague, so the lord mayor did not have much money to spend on fire prevention.
London in 1666 was also a lot smaller than it is today. What people called London, we call the City of London today. This is the area inside the old Roman walls. Today, this area is mostly office buildings, but in the 17th century, houses, businesses, worskshops and food sellers were all jammed together. You might find a bakery next to a house, next to a tailor, etc. On Pudding Lane, where the fire started, there was a bakery, a barrel maker, a glazier, a tailor, a hook and eye maker and a plasterer, in addition to many houses.
The only major stone-built area was the wealthy centre of the City, where the mansions of the merchants and brokers stood on spacious lots, surrounded by an inner ring of overcrowded poorer parishes whose every inch of building space was used to accommodate the rapidly growing population. These parishes contained workplaces, many of which were fire hazards—foundries, smithies, glaziers—which were theoretically illegal in the City, but tolerated in practice.
The human habitations mixed in with these sources of heat, sparks, and pollution were crowded to bursting-point and designed with uniquely risky features. “Jetties” (projecting upper floors) were characteristic of the typical six- or seven-storey timbered London tenement houses. These buildings had a narrow footprint at ground level, but would maximise their use of a given land plot by encroaching on the street with the gradually increasing size of their upper storeys. The fire hazard posed when the top jetties all but met across the narrow alleys was well perceivedwell recognised. In 1661, Charles II issued a proclamation forbidding overhanging windows and jetties, but this was largely ignored by the local government. Charles' next, sharper, message in 1665 warned of the risk of fire from the narrowness of the streets and authorised both imprisonment of recalcitrant builders and demolition of dangerous buildings. It too had little impact.
Did you know?
At the time of the fire, there were 28 houses in Pudding Lane, with 68 hearths or fireplaces between them.
Following the Norman Conquest in 1066, King William the Conqueror insisted that all fires should be put out at night to reduce the risk of fire in houses with straw 'carpets' and thatched roofs. William's law of couvre-feu (literally - cover fire) became the modern term curfew.
A huge fire destroyed a large part of the city in 1212 and was said to have killed some 3,000 people. This fire was known as the Great Fire of London - until September 2nd 1666.
Fires were common in the crowded wood-built city with its open fireplaces, candles, ovens, and stores of combustibles. When a fire broke out, there was no police or fire department to call. London’s local militia, known as the Trained Bands, was at least in principle available for general emergencies, and watching for fire was one of the jobs of the Watch, the watchmen or “bellmen” who patrolled the streets at night.
Each community had procedures for dealing with fires, and these usually worked, especially with small fires (this is why bellmen were needed, to spot the fires early). The main strategy for firefighting was to use water and to pull down buildings in the fires’ path so it could not spread.
Citizens would be alerted to a dangerous house fire by muffled peals on the church bells, and would quickly gather. By law, the tower of every parish church had to hold fire-fighting equipment: long ladders, leather buckets, axes, and firehooks for pulling down buildings. Sometimes taller buildings were levelled to the ground quickly and effectively by means of controlled gunpowder explosions.
Water was available from a system of elm pipes which supplied 30,000 houses via a high water tower at Cornhill, filled from the river at high tide, and also via a reservoir of Hertfordshire spring water in Islington. It was often possible to open a pipe near a burning building and connect it to a hose to play on a fire, or fill buckets and form a bucket brigade. If a fire was close to the river, double rows of firefighters would line the street, passing full buckets up to the fire and empty buckets back down to the river.
London also possessed advanced fire-fighting technology in the form of fire engines, which had been used in earlier large-scale fires. These were not trucks, like we have today, but were pumps that could pump water up to a fire very quickly under pressure. However, unlike the useful firehooks, these large pumps had rarely proved flexible or functional enough to make much difference. Only some of them had wheels, others were mounted on wheelless sleds. They had to be brought a long way, tended to arrive too late, and, with spouts but no delivery hoses, had limited reach.
Unit 3: The fire begins
How the fire began and the first few hours. What decisions were made that affected the course of the fire?
Saturday night, September 2nd 1666, the home and bakery of Thomas Farynor. As Faynor and his family slept, embers from one of the bake ovens set alight the nearby stacked firewood. By one o'clock in the morning the house and shop in Pudding Lane were well alight. Farynor’s assistant woke to find the house full of smoke and the roused the household. Farynor, his wife and daughter and one servant escaped by climbing through an upstairs window and along the roof tops. The maid was too frightened to climb along the roof and stayed in the house - becoming the first victim of the fire.
Sparks from the burning house fell on hay and straw in the yard of the Star Inn at the nearby Fish Street Hill. Like most buildings in 1666 London, the Star Inn was made of timber and and covered in pitch – a flamable type of tar used as waterproofing. Most of the houses also had thatch rooves. In the strong winds that blew that morning, the sparks spread rapidly from bulding to building. From the Star Inn, the fire engulfed St. Margaret’s church and was threatening Thames Street where there were warehouses and wharves packed with flammable materials - oil, spirits, tallow, hemp, straw, coal and wine.
Around 2am, the parish constables arrived and judged that the houses in Pudding Lane and adjoining streets needed to be demolished to prevent further spread. But the householders protested, so Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth, who alone had the authority to override their wishes, was summoned. By the time Bloodworth arrived, the flames were already consuming the adjoining houses and creeping towards the paper warehouses and flammable stores on the riverfront. The more experienced firefighters were clamoring for demolition, but Bloodworth refused, on the argument that most premises were rented and the owners could not be found.
When the firefighters argued with him about the need to demolish houses, Bloodworth made the famous comment, “Pish! A woman could piss it out”, and left. In the end, much of the blame for the fire getting out of control was laid on Bloodworth.
Thomas Farriner’s story
It was an ordinary night for me. The day before the fire had been very busy, being Saturday, and as I had the good fortune to be baker to the king, we were also engaged in preparing buns for the king’s household. That night, I ordered the servants to douse the fire in the oven as usual, and stacked some cordwood against the side of the oven to dry overnight.
At around 1am I was woken by the smell of smoke which, being a baker, I am familiar with. I got out of bed and went downstairs and could see that flames had already consumed the ground floor bakery and shop. I hurridly woke my family and servants and, grabbing my cashbox and a few other valuables, instructed them to crawl through an upstairs bedroom window and onto the neighboring roof. From there we could enter the neighbors house and exit to the street.
My family and most of the servants managed to climb out of the window and to safety, but one foolish girl, a maidservent, was afraid of the heights and was overcome by smoke before she could be induced to leave the house.
Once in the street, all we could do was stand and watch our house and bakery burn. Soon, the houses on either side also caught fire. The neighbors set up a bucket brigade and used hose pumps to try and douse the fire but it continued to spread to neighboring houses on the street. We helped with the brigade as best we could, but I could see it was hopeless, we had lost everything and soon our neighbors would loose everything too.
Someone ran up and said that sparks had ignited stable materials out in a yard at the Star Inn in Fish Street. A few minutes later we were told that the Church of St. Margaret was alight and the fire was spreading to the buildings in Thames Street—riverside warehouses packed with products like timber, coal, oils, tar, spirits and other combustibles.
At 2am, the parish constables arrived and judged that the adjoining houses had better be demolished to prevent further spread. The householders protested, and the Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth, who alone had the authority to override their wishes, was summoned. He arrived on the scene at 4am. By this time all the neighbors were out in the streets, some in their bedclothes, and many were loading their possessions onto carts and horses.
Any fool could see that the houses between Pudding Lane and the Thames street would need to be demolished if the fire were to be contains, but the Lord Mayor was afraid of what the householders would say. Many of the houses were rented and the owners away in the country. The mayor took one look at the fire, and said “Pish! A woman could piss it out", and left. I noticed that he left in a great hurry.
I turned to my wife and told her to hurry along, our house was gone and there was naught to do here. We headed towards ?? and safety, and I was already thinking of the new bakehouse I would build when the fire had been extinguished.
