Great Fire of London

6 Key excerpts on "Great Fire of London"

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  Events that Changed Great Britain from 1066 to 1714

  • Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling, Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Some 80 per- cent of the city was burned out, including St. Paul's cathedral and 87 other churches, as well as many government buildings, private businesses, and more than 13,000 houses. Although some, like the architect Christopher Wren, wanted to take advantage of the devastation by creating a new street plan for London, this did not happen, and most streets were left as they had been. A few streets were widened, and the riverfront was improved, with a long dock between the Tower of London and London Bridge. More important, however, were the regulations put in place that man- dated the use of brick or stone instead of wood as the building material of choice, and a code establishing four classes of houses that could be built in the city. Most of London, except for St. Paul's and some other significantly large buildings, was rebuilt in a decade, with homeowners footing the bill for their houses in a day before fire insurance and federal disaster relief programs. A coal tax paid for much of the cost of rebuilding public prop- erty—streets, prisons, gates, and government buildings. INTERPRETIVE ESSAY Robert Landrum Insofar as this volume is concerned with transformation, the devastating visitation of plague on London in 1665 and the "Great Fire" of 1666 are unlikely choices for discussion. While the outbreak of 1665 took more than 50,000 lives, it simply accelerated demographic trends that had long been at work in England and the city. Likewise, though the fire ravaged most of London proper and large swaths of the suburbs, Londoners responded with the resiliency they are famous for, rebuilding their houses, shops, and churches on the old street pattern. London endured the pestilence and rose from the ashes, never surrendering its role as the unchallenged center of the English economy, the seat of government, law, and trade, and (soon) the largest city in Europe.

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  Fighting Fires

  Creating the British Fire Service, 1800–1978

  • S. Ewen(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Historically, ‘great fires’ were necessary to trigger major organizational reforms to firefighting. A ‘great fire’ involved extensive property dam- age, loss of life and, most significantly, public outrage and recognition at the failures of the existing system of fire protection. It both demanded 30 Constructing Modern Fire Brigades 31 and legitimized reform in a single sweep. As much a discursive con- struction as a quantifiable event, a ‘great fire’ can be traced qualitatively through print culture, inasmuch as it involved more than material loss. It thus differed from a ‘major fire’, defined by Jones, Porter and Turner in their study of English fire disasters between 1500 and 1900 as one which destroyed ten or more properties in a single outbreak. 2 Indeed, the greatest values of fire loss in the nineteenth century were increas- ingly confined to fires in single premises, especially warehouses and factories stocked with flammable raw materials and finished goods. Even when insured, businesses were also directly affected by disruption to their day-to-day trading activities, and employees to a loss of work with not inconsiderable effects on their families, compounded by the pos- sibility that emotional and physical scars resulted from fire damage to private households. A ‘great fire’ also challenged the resilience of a city and necessi- tated responsive disaster management and reconstruction. Scale is not everything; context is almost certainly more significant. The complete destruction of a city is not a pre-requisite. Indeed, historically most west- ern cities have not burnt down in their entirety. This is especially so in British cities where the combination of fireproof building materials, increased lot size and improved firefighting services and water supplies have each contributed to an emergent ‘fire gap’ between the size of urban population and the number of major fires ravaging towns and cities during the nineteenth century.

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  The Eighteenth-Century Town

  A Reader in English Urban History 1688-1820

  • Peter Borsay(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In London 13 200 houses were destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666, a large proportion having been wholly or mainly of wood. In their stead over 9000 standardized brick houses were erected (Buer, 1926, p. 78: Reddaway, 1951, p. 129). The Great Fire was not, however, the end of destruction in London by fires. There were serious outbreaks in eighteenth-century London, one at Change Alley in 1748, which burned 118 houses (Ash, 1964, p. 93). Much of eastern, unfashionable, workaday London escaped regulation even after 1666 and remained crowded with timber houses, of which still more were actually put up. Only from the mid-1780s were these substantially replaced by brick, and often then only when fire had made the opportunity, the biggest single chance coming in 1794 when over 600 houses in the East End were destroyed by a fire (George, 1966, p. 346). But the City and western districts of London were never again so devastated after the time of the Great Fire. Many smaller towns were less fortunate: East Dereham (Norfolk), 1679; Newmarket (Suffolk), 1683; New Alresford (Hampshire), 1689; Warwick, 1694; Woburn (Bedfordshire) and Buckingham, 1725; Blandford Forum (Dorset), 1731; and Tiverton (Devon), as late as 1794 were among those severely burned, some almost totally leveled. There were several towns that suffered two or three or even up to ten or twelve major conflagrations between the Restoration and the beginning of the nineteenth century, including Tiverton as an extreme case. Such towns were, however, exceptional in continuing to suffer the high fire incidence of earlier centuries.

  So frequent had fires been in the Middle Ages that some leases contained the phrase ‘usque ad primam combustionem’ since landlords wished to be able to recover the building plot from any tenant who might not be able to afford to rebuild after a fire or keep up the rent (Stacpoole, 1972, p. 257). Thatched roofs mixed unhappily with the naked flames used for lighting and heating and the open fires for manufacturing or processing tasks carried on in the middle of towns. Medieval corporations tried, and their successors tried, to banish crafts that used open fires, such as smithery, pottery making, dyeing, tanning, tallow chandling, and malting. The workshops of these trades were all too often the origin of serious fires. At Andover, Hampshire, in 1668, the tanners were ordered to shift their kilns to the riverside ‘and sufficiently tile them’ because it had been found ‘by sad experience’ that they had several times nearly set the whole town on fire (Child, 1972, p. 23). Regulations of this kind lapsed as often as they were promulgated, for business premises and dwellings remained one and the same and new businesses were constantly starting up inside the towns. Further, it was impossible to cut the fire risk drastically when open fires were needed for domestic heating and cooking and when stacks of hay and straw and firewood continued to be stored close to every house. Given that the materials of the buildings themselves remained highly combustible, no mere administrative or legislative action could be wholly effective in preventing the outbreak and spread of fires.

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  Charles II's Favourite Mistress

  Pretty, Witty Nell Gwyn

  • Sarah-Beth Watkins(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Pen and Sword History

    (Publisher)

  While the city tried to get back to normal, the Anglo-Dutch War was continuing. At the beginning of June a ferocious and devastating four-day naval battle took place. The English fleet of fifty-six ships under the command of General Monck was outnumbered by an eighty-four strong Dutch fleet with superior guns. Thousands of Englishmen lost their lives. Eight ships were sunk with nine more captured. It was a humiliating defeat with many losses of men and young boys. Some died in battle and many more returned wounded or were taken prisoner.

  War was an expensive business and one that the Crown could not sustain. Ships were destroyed, others needed repair and the sailors wanted their wages, but the King was low on funds. England could not afford to lose more men’s lives, but at another skirmish on St James Day 300 Englishmen died. The Dutch, however, lost in the region of 5,000 men and for now it put an end to more hostilities. The wounded and broken returned home and walked the streets of London. Nell’s heart went out to them and the plight of the soldiers would forever stay in her mind.

  One of the most devastating events to affect London was yet to occur. In the early hours of 2 September, as people lay sleeping, cries of ‘Fire! Fire!’ rang out. In a city of wooden houses, it wasn’t unusual for the peace to be broken by such a call of alarm and many rolled over in their beds and pulled the blankets tighter. This fire, however, would be the greatest conflagration to sweep across the city. Initially it started at a bake house close to Pudding Lane, near London Bridge, but it wasn’t thought to be especially high risk. The Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bludworth, declared that ‘a woman might piss it out’2 but he was so terribly wrong.

  Fanned by an easterly wind, the fire spread to adjoining houses. As people finally realised the risk and hurried from their beds, it grew out of control, fed by the tar and pitch that was stored in riverside warehouses. As the sun rose, people could see London Bridge was aflame. A gap between the buildings stopped it from spreading south and instead it spread eastwards, marching through the city and destroying all in its wake. People fled for their lives as the flames grew higher. Gathering up their children and their belongings and carrying what they could, they ran. Some tried to hastily bury their valued possessions or hide them but the flames moved too quickly, urging them on.

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  Hubbub

  • Joel F. Handler(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  32 Without careful site preparation and management, properties built on these substandard plots could have suffered subsidence and eventual collapse. ‘When thy neighbour’s house doth burn, be careful of thine own’ 33 City houses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were generally narrow but tall, and became taller during the period to maximise the use of precious urban space. Following the Great Fire of London in 1666, the Building Act of 1667 went some way to ensuring vertical separation in an attempt to stop fires migrating, but not all tenancies were neatly contained upwards. Some spread sideways and tenants could occupy rooms laterally through buildings in an ad hoc fashion. 34 London was not the only city to be devastated by fire in the period. In October 1644, as Royalist Oxford billeted Civil War refugees and militia, the citizens suffered a major catastrophe. Nearly one-sixth of the houses were lost in a blaze rumoured to have started when a stolen pig was roasted. A high demand for victuals kept the fires of bakers stoked longer than normal. Fuel and munitions were stored in makeshift sheds across the city. 35 The conditions suited a flaming disaster. Oxford had long enshrined laws to reduce the oppor-tunities for fire to spread, but these were extraordinary circumstances. The blaze started outside the city walls, in the area now occupied by George Street. 134 HUBBUB It spread quickly to the south, bursting through the city wall and the North Gate, to destroy properties around Cornmarket Street. A row of butchers’ shops was gutted as the fire leapt towards the parish of St Ebbe’s. Here it wrought extraordinary damage to the streets filled with the premises and houses of tradesmen and craftsmen, all with supplies of stacked gorse (for fuel) that the fire consumed greedily. 36 Urban authorities across the country periodically reminded citizens of their obligation to reduce the risk of fire.

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  Insuring the Industrial Revolution

  Fire Insurance in Great Britain, 1700–1850

  • Robin Pearson(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  11

  As Thomas has pointed out, Protestantism taught men and women to try such methods of self help in the face of calamities, before invoking supernatural aid. From this developed a ‘nascent statistical sense’, an awareness of patterns in apparently random behaviour.12 The search for quantifiable patterns in nature was reinforced by a burgeoning reportage. Bernstein has remarked that probability judgements are attached not to events but to descriptions of events. The more vivid and accurate the account, the greater the propensity to assign a probability value to the event described.13 The eyewitness reports of earthquakes, floods and fires, given wide publicity by a growing pamphlet and newspaper press from the late seventeenth century, drove these events into the popular consciousness, as well as raising awareness among the educated and propertied classes of the need for preventive or remedial action.

  The ideology of private property, whose primacy was acknowledged in the constitutional settlement of 1688, underlined this search for pattern and predictability, by emphasising the need to reduce uncertainty for the property- owning classes and to bolster the social order. The rise of humanitarianism was also a factor, for efforts at fire prevention can be seen as part of a wider movement which included projects for reviving victims of drowning accidents and suicide attempts, the building of hospitals and dispensaries, and schemes for rescuing destitute children and ‘penitent’ prostitutes.14 Fire, of course, frequently provided a tool for individual vengeance, a means of collective social protest, and a vehicle for social discipline. Arson had long been associated with malevolent spirits, most notably witches, and with society’s marginal groups, vagrants, beggars, and the economically and politically disaffected. Deliberate fires were commonly started by burglars and aggrieved employees.15 During the second half of the eighteenth century the incidence of arson rose in conjunction with growing labour unrest, especially during wartime, and there was a tangible increase in the sense of the threat to property, which made the search for protection from fire more urgent. Indeed, it has been suggested that one of the characteristic institutions of this period, the associations for prosecuting felons, may have helped spread the fire insurance habit in their local areas.16

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