Great Fire of London

In the seventeenth century, the City of London had closely packed buildings, many with timber frames, and limited organized firefighting. On Sunday, 2 September 1666, a fire began in the bakery of Thomas Farriner (also spelled Farynor) on Pudding Lane, east of London Bridge. It was initially treated as one of many ordinary fires, but the blaze grew and moved through the narrow streets. A long dry summer had left timber especially vulnerable, and a strong easterly wind helped the flames spread.

The fire reached the Thames-side warehouses, where stored commodities such as oil and tallow supplied additional fuel. Officials and residents tried to halt the spread by pulling down buildings with fire hooks and creating gaps between structures. The Navy used gunpowder to demolish houses in the fire's path, an early form of a firebreak. The blaze was mostly under control by Wednesday, 5 September, although small fires continued and the ground remained hot for days. London had no organized fire brigade in 1666; leather buckets, axes and water squirts were among the available tools.

The fire devastated the historic City of London, not the whole modern metropolis. Historian Ian Archer estimates that it destroyed about 85 percent of the area within the city walls, plus land beyond them; roughly 13,200 houses were lost and an estimated 70,000–80,000 people were made homeless. Churches and civic landmarks, including the medieval St Paul's Cathedral, Guildhall and Royal Exchange, were also destroyed or badly damaged. Residents fled with what they could carry, and temporary shelter and the winter that followed added to the hardship.

London's reconstruction took decades. Christopher Wren and other designers submitted ambitious plans for a redesigned city, but property boundaries, compensation costs and practical constraints limited how much of the proposed street plan was adopted. Rebuilding brought new building regulations and large-scale construction, but brick had been used in London before 1666; the fire did not introduce it to the city. Nor did the fire end the Great Plague of 1665–66: London Museum notes that plague deaths were already declining before the fire and continued afterward. These corrections distinguish the documented disaster from later stories that connected the two events or treated the fire as the start of brick construction.