On This Day: The Great Fire of London rages

September 2nd to 6th, 1666: The Great Fire rages across London destroying four-fifths of the city.

In the early hours of September 2nd, 1666, a fire had broken out in Thomas Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane, near London Bridge. At the time blazes were fairly common, which might explain the Lord Mayor of London’s reaction (right). Unfortunately for Sir Thomas and his fellow Londoners a long, hot, dry summer had turned the city’s largely wooden infrastructure into a tinderbox. Within hours 300 houses had been consumed and the fire had spread rapidly, whipped up by a strong easterly wind. Flames leapt easily from one timber-framed building to the next as the fire blazed through London’s narrow warren of streets. Efforts to fight the fire using buckets of water soon failed compelling many people to flee onto the River Thames or out to Hampstead and Moorfields.

By September 3rd, the city’s residents were in despair as the conflagration continued its inexorable spread. Scapegoating began almost immediately with rumours proliferating amid the chaos accusing (wrongly) Dutch and French residents of arson. Xenophobic attacks soon followed. That night brought little respite and as the fire crept eastward, there was genuine fear that the gunpowder stores in the Tower of London would be ignited. Diarist Samuel Pepys (pictured), overcome by witnessing his city’s destruction, wrote: “it made me weep to see it.”

As an aside, we know from his famous diary that on the morning of Tuesday September 4th, Pepys was rudely woken by a servant telling him to get up and get out of his house because the fire was fast approaching his home in Seething Lane on Tower Hill, near to the Tower of London. According to that day’s diary entry Pepys was “[u]p by break of day to get away the remainder of my things; which I did by a lighter at the Iron gate and my hands so few, that it was the afternoon before we could get them all away.” He managed to get most of his belongings to Bethnal Green and safety on September 3rd, but not everything. Pepys’ diary reads:

“…the fire coming on in that narrow streete, on both sides, with infinite fury. Sir W. Batten [1] not knowing how to remove his wine, did dig a pit in the garden, and laid it in there; and I took the opportunity of laying all the papers of my office that I could not otherwise dispose of. And in the evening Sir W. Pen and I did dig another, and put our wine in it; and I my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things.”

Some today may wonder why Pepys buried his cheese. The simple answer is that in the 17th-century Parmesan cheese was worth a great deal of money. Even today, it is still pretty valuable. There are reportedly over 300,000 wheels of Parmesan cheese stored in bank vaults in Italy, which are worth over $200 million. Parmesan cheese takes so long to mature that they’re held as collateral against loans to assist the cheesemakers’ cash flow. Cheese is practically a currency. Sadly, the fate of Pepys’ cheese remains unknown, though his diaries describing the incident remain. As far as we know it was never recovered and could still be buried in the garden of Seething Lane just waiting to be found.

Despite the demolition of houses to create firebreaks, on September 4th half of London was burning. King Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, joined the firefighting efforts but the conflagration overwhelmed all attempts to contain it. That evening the city’s cathedral, St Paul’s, was engulfed in flames. As its roof melted, flowing off in a torrent of molten lead, the building collapsed. It was not until September 6th, the fifth day of the Great Fire, that the flames were brought under control. Just one-fifth of London remained untouched. More than 87 parish churches, 13,000 homes and numerous civic buildings had been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of Londoners were left homeless but remarkably only six deaths were recorded.

One positive outcome emerged, in the long term at least: the Great Fire had razed the city’s most overcrowded, disease-ridden quarters. While Christopher Wren’s ambitious plans to replace London narrow streets with wide boulevards (as a form of fire prevention) never came to fruition, his masterpiece, the reborn St Paul’s Cathedral, stands today as a testament to the city’s resilience. Meanwhile, the Monument was erected in Pudding Lane to commemorate the Great Fire of September 1666.

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References:

Bird, D. (2024), “The Great Fire of London rages” in Anniversaries, BBC History magazine, September 2024 edition, pp. 8-9.

Oxbow Books blog, (2017), “Why did Samuel Pepys bury his cheese, and other pressing questions?”, available online (accessed 12 January 2025).

Gyford, P., (2025), “The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Tuesday 4 September 1666”, www.pepysdiary.com, available online (accessed 12 January 2025).

Endnote:

1. Sir William Batten was Master of Trinity House and Surveyor of the Navy. The Corporation of Trinity House was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1514 to regulate pilotage on the River Thames and provide for aged mariners. The Corporation’s mandate has expanded considerably since then. Today it is the UK’s largest-endowed maritime charity, the General Lighthouse Authority (GLA) for England, Wales, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar and a fraternity of men and women selected from across the nation’s maritime sector. ▲