The fire began in a bakery. In the early hours of Sunday 2 September 1666, an oven in Thomas Farynor's bakehouse on Pudding Lane in the City of London failed to be properly extinguished. A spark caught, the timber building ignited, and within hours the fire had spread to the adjacent streets where the buildings, largely of wood and plaster, stood close together in the cramped medieval pattern of the old city. A strong east wind drove the flames westward through the city with a speed that overwhelmed all attempts to contain it.
The medieval firefighting techniques available — demolishing houses to create firebreaks, beating out flames with buckets, wet cloths and branches — proved utterly inadequate against a fire of this scale. The Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, had been woken in the night to assess the situation and reportedly dismissed it as something a woman might piss out. By the time the full scale of the catastrophe became apparent and more drastic measures authorised, the fire had developed a momentum that made it almost unstoppable.
Samuel Pepys, whose diary provides the most vivid contemporary account of the disaster, climbed the steeple of All Hallows by the Tower on the first day and observed the fire with horrified fascination: a mile-wide wall of flame consuming the city. He rushed to inform the King, Charles II, who ordered houses to be blown up with gunpowder to create firebreaks — a decision that, executed more promptly and on a larger scale, might have stopped the fire much sooner. Instead it burned for four days, finally brought under control on the night of 5 September when the wind dropped.
The scale of destruction was extraordinary even by the standards of an era accustomed to urban fire. The fire destroyed approximately 373 acres of the city — roughly 80 percent of the medieval walled area. Some 13,200 houses were consumed, leaving an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 people homeless. Eighty-seven churches were destroyed, along with the Royal Exchange, the Custom House, the Guildhall and dozens of other civic buildings. St Paul's Cathedral, the great medieval church that dominated the skyline, was gutted — its lead roof melting and flowing through the ruins in rivers of liquid metal.
Remarkably, the recorded death toll was tiny — only six deaths are officially recorded, though the actual toll was certainly higher among the poor whose deaths were less likely to be documented. The comparatively low mortality reflects the relatively slow spread of the fire through the daylight hours of its first day, which gave most inhabitants time to evacuate with their moveable possessions, and the absence of the firestorm conditions that produce mass casualties in modern urban fires.
The rebuilding of London gave Christopher Wren — then a 34-year-old astronomer who had recently turned architect — the greatest commission in English architectural history. He designed fifty-one new churches for the rebuilt city, each with a distinctive tower or steeple that created the famous skyline that defined London until the twentieth century. His masterpiece was the new St Paul's Cathedral, begun in 1675 and substantially completed by 1710 — the great dome dominating the city as its medieval predecessor had never quite managed, an assertion of confidence in London's resurgence from catastrophe.
