The Great Fire of London 1666: Destruction, Survival, and Rebuilding

Four Days That Erased a Medieval City

In the early hours of Sunday, September 2, 1666, a fire ignited in the bakery of Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane in the City of London. Fanned by a strong easterly wind and spread through a city still largely built of timber and thatch after a summer drought, the fire burned continuously for four days. When it was extinguished on September 6, approximately 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, 44 guild halls, and St. Paul's Cathedral had been destroyed. The fire consumed roughly 373 acres — about 80 percent of the City of London within its Roman walls. Remarkably, the confirmed death toll was only six, though historians believe it may have been higher among the poor and those whose deaths went unrecorded.

The Night the Fire Began

Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane, near London Bridge, had not fully extinguished its ovens when the household retired on the night of September 1. Sparks ignited straw in an adjoining pile of fuel, and fire spread quickly to neighboring wooden structures. Farriner escaped with his family through an upstairs window; a maidservant refused to leave and became one of the few documented victims. When the fire was reported to Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bludworth at around 2:00 a.m., he famously dismissed it, reportedly declaring that a woman could extinguish it. His failure to order immediate demolition of surrounding buildings — which could have created firebreaks — allowed the fire to gain an insurmountable foothold.

• The summer of 1666 had been unusually dry; London had received almost no rain since mid-June
• A strong northeast wind of approximately 15–20 mph drove the fire westward through the city for four consecutive days
• The densely packed medieval street layout, with overhanging upper stories nearly touching across narrow lanes, created ideal fire conduits
• St. Paul's Cathedral, initially thought safe due to its stone construction, caught fire when surrounding wooden scaffolding (from restoration work) ignited on September 4

The Scale of Destruction

Firefighting Methods in 1666

London had no professional fire brigade in 1666. Firefighting relied on volunteer bucket brigades, hand-operated water squirts (small syringes), and the controversial practice of creating firebreaks by demolishing structures in the fire's path. The primary obstacle to this last technique was legal: householders had to give consent or be compensated, and this delayed authoritative action. King Charles II eventually took personal charge on September 2, ordering houses demolished by soldiers and ordering the use of naval gunpowder to blast firebreaks — the decisive intervention that finally halted the fire at Pye Corner and elsewhere.

The Scapegoating of Robert Hubert

Public anger demanded a culprit. A French watchmaker named Robert Hubert confessed to deliberately starting the fire at Pudding Lane as part of a Catholic plot. He was hanged at Tyburn on September 27, 1666. The confession was almost certainly false — investigators established that Hubert had not arrived in England until two days after the fire started, and the Monument to the Great Fire, completed in 1677, bore an inscription blaming "the treachery and malice of the Popish faction" that was not removed until 1831. Subsequent parliamentary inquiry found no evidence of deliberate arson; the cause was determined to be accidental.

• The fire coincided with the Second Anglo-Dutch War and the aftermath of the 1665 plague year, creating a political atmosphere of suspicion
• Anti-Catholic sentiment ran high following the Restoration; conspiracy theories linked the fire to Jesuit plots
• Hubert's execution reflected the scapegoating dynamics common to disasters before scientific investigation methods existed

Rebuilding and Christopher Wren's London

Parliament passed the Rebuilding Act of 1667, mandating brick and stone construction for all new buildings and widening key streets. The rebuilt City became one of the first large-scale urban planning exercises in British history. Architect Christopher Wren submitted a comprehensive replanning proposal — a grid layout with broad avenues — that was rejected because property rights could not be restructured quickly enough. Instead, streets were rebuilt largely on their medieval alignments but with uniform facade regulations.

The rebuilding created a cleaner, more fire-resistant city, and the new building standards effectively ended the pattern of catastrophic urban fires that had characterized medieval London. Wren's new St. Paul's, completed in 1710, dominated the London skyline for more than two centuries.