The City of Wood and Pitch

The warehouse timbers groaned. Late August 1666, and the building on the riverfront near Pudding Lane had reached its limit. Inside, barrels of train oil stood stacked against walls lined with bales of hemp and sacks of sea-coal. The cargo had arrived that week from the docks downstream, part of the commerce that made London the greatest port in England. The weight pressed down on oak beams blackened by decades of smoke. Outside, the afternoon sun heated the shingles. The structure held, but barely. Here was the city in miniature: a medieval frame loaded with modern traffic, packed to bursting with the materials of its own prosperity. The city was essentially medieval in its street plan, an overcrowded warren of narrow, winding, cobbled alleys. It had experienced several major fires before 1666, the most recent in 1633.

Three hundred yards away, in the Guildhall, Sir Thomas Bloodworth surveyed his domain. He had become Lord Mayor that year, appointed to govern a square mile of dense habitation that housed nearly eighty thousand souls. The plague had emptied the streets twelve months prior. Charles II and his court had fled to Salisbury in July 1665 as the death carts multiplied; Parliament had convened in Oxford. Now the King had returned, and the city pretended to breathe again.

Bloodworth inherited a watch system older than memory. Each parish maintained constables and watchmen who patrolled from ten at night until dawn, calling the hours and checking for flame. They carried staves and lanterns. They possessed no engines, no axes, no authority to pull down a wall without the owner’s consent.

The Lord Mayor knew this. He also knew that most warehouses along the Thames were rented, their owners scattered across Kent and Essex, unreachable in the night when sparks might fly.

Samuel Pepys walked through the narrow lane that connected Thames Street to Eastcheap. He was Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board, a man of rising station who kept a house on Seething Lane. He noted the overhang of the upper floors, the jetties that projected into the street space above his head. The timber-framed tenements leaned toward each other like tired giants. At ground level each house presented a narrow face, sometimes only twenty feet across, but above, the floors extended outward, encroaching on the sky. This maximized land use. It also meant that fire could leap across the gap without touching earth.

Pepys stepped around a pile of tallow barrels left outside a chandler’s shop. The smell of rendered fat mixed with the tang of pitch from the ropewalks nearby and the sulfuric bite of sea-coal dust. He entered his doorway.

He did not write about the danger that evening. He wrote about his dinner and his wife’s new dress. The risk was too familiar to mention.

The architecture of London had not changed since the reign of Elizabeth. The city remained essentially medieval in its plan, a warren of cobbled alleys that turned back on themselves without logic or breadth.

Building regulations existed on paper. In 1189, the city had banned thatch; in 1212, after a fire that killed thousands on London Bridge, the authorities prohibited jetties and demanded stone party walls. The rules had been ignored for four centuries.

Timber was cheap. Stone was heavy. The typical merchant’s house rose four or five stories on a foundation of oak posts, the walls filled with lath and plaster, the roofs covered with wooden shingles or lead sheeting. The jetties increased the floor space by a third. They also created continuous wooden canopies over the lanes, trapping heat and smoke. From above, the city resembled a dense forest of interlocking branches, ready to kindle.

The human habitations were crowded, and their design increased the fire risk. The typical multi-storey timbered London tenement houses had ‘jetties’ (projecting upper floors). They had a narrow footprint at ground level, but maximised their use of land by ‘encroaching’ on the street with the gradually increasing size of their upper storeys.

John Evelyn had seen this clearly five years before. In 1661 he published Fumifugium, a pamphlet addressed to Charles II that described the cloud of sea-coal hanging over the capital. He calculated that every household burned this fuel, sending sulfurous particles into the air that coated the buildings with a greasy film. He noted the concentration of noxious trades along the riverbank—breweries, limekilns, salt and soap boilers—all burning coal, all depositing residues on the timber frames. Evelyn proposed moving these trades beyond the city walls and planting gardens to purify the air. The King had praised the pamphlet. Nothing changed. By 1666 the breweries still belched smoke among the warehouses. The greasy film remained. It acted as a wick.

The physical vulnerability extended to the water supply. London had no organized fire brigade. It relied instead upon parish pumps and the Thames itself. The waterwheels at London Bridge lifted river water into wooden pipes that fed cisterns in the principal streets, but the pressure failed in the upper stories where the jetties crowded out the sky. Some parishes owned squirt engines, heavy barrels on wheels fitted with hand pumps that could throw a jet twenty feet. They required six men to operate. They weighed half a ton. In narrow lanes like Pudding Lane, turning such a machine was impossible. The fire hooks—long poles with iron claws for pulling down burning thatch—hung in church porches, unused for years. The axes were blunt. The buckets leaked.

The human fabric was equally frayed. The Great Plague had killed one fifth of the population between 1665 and 1666. Those who remained were suspicious, exhausted, and armed. Rumors circulated that foreigners had poisoned the wells during the epidemic; now similar whispers targeted Catholics, suggesting they plotted to burn the Protestant city. The Dutch war raged at sea, inflaming hatred of any accent that sounded like the Low Countries. Pepys recorded in his diary the tension in the taverns, the readiness to see conspiracy in any accident. The watchmen who patrolled at night were often old men or infirm paupers paid a few pence by the parish. They carried fire bells but no authority. If they spotted smoke, they could only shout. They could not enter a house without permission. They could not tear down a wall to make a gap. Property rights held absolute sway.

Bloodworth understood this legal thicket. As Lord Mayor he possessed the theoretical power to command demolition in an emergency, but the liability fell upon the city if the fire did not spread. A merchant whose warehouse was pulled down to stop a blaze that died naturally could sue for damages. The owners of the rented buildings along Pudding Lane—where bakers and chandlers paid annual leases—lived in the country. Finding them at midnight was impractical. The Mayor’s authority stopped at the threshold of private interest. He governed a city designed to maximize commercial space and minimize public interference. The timber frames touched each other across the lanes. The warehouses touched the tenements. The oil touched the timber.

On the last Sunday of August, Thomas Farriner raked his oven in Pudding Lane. He was a baker and churchwarden, a respectable tradesman who supplied ship’s biscuit to the Navy. His house stood where the lane met Thames Street, a timber building with jettied upper floors that housed his family above the bakehouse. He kept faggots of wood beside his ovens and sacks of flour in the adjoining room. The heat in the basement was constant. The neighborhood around him contained similar establishments: chandlers storing tallow, coopers with piles of shavings, oilmen with barrels of pitch. Each was a legitimate trade. Each was a repository of combustion.

Farriner extinguished his fires that evening and climbed to bed. He did not know that his maidservant slept in the kitchen below.

Pudding Lane was a small street in London, widely known as the location of Thomas Farriner’s bakery. It ran between Eastcheap and Thames Street in the historic City of London.

The weather had been dry. No rain had fallen for three weeks. The wooden shingles on the roofs had baked to the consistency of parchment. The thatch remaining on older outbuildings crackled when touched. Dust rose from the streets in clouds when carts passed. The Thames stood at low water, exposing the muddy banks where refuse accumulated and dried. The air smelled of hot stone and tar. In the Royal Dockyard at Deptford, carpenters complained that the timber was seasoning too fast, splitting along the grain. Everything waited.

Evelyn walked from his house at Sayes Court toward the river. He observed the glory and pomp of the rebuilt city after the plague, but he noted also the continued accumulation of combustibles. He saw the bales of cotton stacked on wharves, the hemp rope coiled in open sheds, the coal heaps smoking in the yards. He had warned of this in Fumifugium. He had described the bellows of the trades, the sooty particles that fell like snow upon the wooden eaves. He watched a lighter unload barrels of train oil at Bear Quay, rolling them within feet of a cooper’s shop where shavings lay ankle-deep. The laborers laughed. They worked without shirts in the heat. Evelyn turned away. He would write later that the city was an accident waiting for its moment.

Pepys attended church that Sunday at St. Olave’s. He dined well. He visited a friend in Westminster and returned by boat to Tower Stairs. He noted the ships at anchor, their rigging slack in the windless evening. He did not note the watchman who passed his door at ten o’clock, nor the constable who checked the baker’s shutters on Pudding Lane. The mechanisms of vigilance were in place. They were rusted. The watchman carried a lantern with a candle that could itself spill wax and flame. He checked for visible light but not for smoldering embers. He walked past Farriner’s house without entering. The bakery was dark. The oven was supposedly cold.

The city was full of such darknesses. In the parish of St. Margaret’s, New Fish Street, the churchwardens had recently fined a resident for keeping a forge in his cellar. In Bread Street, a candlemaker had been ordered to remove his drying racks from the attic window after a spark had scorched the neighbor’s casement. These were minor enforcements against a major condition.

The very wealth of London—its Baltic hemp for ropes, its Russian tallow for candles, its Newcastle coal for fires—created a stockpile of fuel that no parish regulation could reduce. The merchants demanded speed. The lighters brought goods directly to the wharves behind Pudding Lane, bypassing the open quays where fire might be isolated. The warehouses rose against each other like cards stacked by a careless hand.

But independent of the question of fire-proof buildings, it is imperatively necessary that the legislature should interfere with the reckless manner in which all kinds of combustibles are stored within the heart of the metropolis. Is it absolutely essential that hemp and tallow should be stored together, and is turpentine a safe neighbour to such materials?

The cooper’s shop at Bear Quay exemplified how commerce had outpaced caution. Coopers worked in open sheds along the waterfront, shaping staves for barrels that would hold the very oil and pitch that surrounded their workplaces. The shavings accumulated faster than they could be cleared, drifting into corners and against timber posts where a single spark could transform them from nuisance to kindling. The trade demanded proximity to the warehouses; the warehouses demanded proximity to the river.

No regulation had successfully separated the makers of containers from the substances they contained. The coopers’ apprentices, boys of twelve or fourteen, swept the floors each evening, but the dust of years had settled into the cracks between the boards, into the gaps where wall met floor, into the very grain of the oak frames. This was not negligence in any simple sense. It was the geometry of profit pressed against the physics of combustion.

The parish of All-Hallows-the-Less, which contained Pudding Lane and its surrounding streets, maintained the legal apparatus of fire prevention with the same patchwork authority that governed the rest of London. The churchwardens, men like Thomas Farriner himself, were responsible for inspecting hearths and enforcing the ancient prohibitions against dangerous practices. They had the power to levy fines, and they exercised it sporadically. But their jurisdiction ended at the parish boundary, and fire knew no such limits. A blaze that began in All-Hallows-the-Less could race through St. Margaret’s, New Fish Street, and into St. Dunstan-in-the-East before any coordinated response could be organized. The very density that made the city prosperous—parish pressed against parish, ward against ward—fractured the authority needed to protect it. Each vestry looked to its own; the whole looked to no one.

The water supply, such as it was, reflected these same territorial divisions. The New River Company, the London Bridge Waterworks, and various smaller enterprises competed to supply the city’s cisterns, their wooden pipes running under the streets in patterns that followed private investment rather than public need. A parish that maintained its pumps diligently might find itself surrounded by neighbors who had let theirs fall into disrepair. The cistern in Pudding Lane itself had been rebuilt in 1659, a stone chamber fed by lead pipes from the Thames, but its capacity was measured in hundreds of gallons when thousands might be required. The squirt engines, when they could be brought to bear, drew from these same limited sources. They were designed to extinguish a kitchen fire, a chimney blaze, a mishap contained within four walls. No one had imagined a conflagration that would outpace the water itself.

The social memory of fire shaped behavior in ways that both helped and hindered. Londoners knew that their city burned; the history of conflagration was written in the stone replacements that stood among the timber, in the rebuilt sections of London Bridge where the 1212 fire had killed so many. Parents taught children the cry of “Fire!” and the route to the nearest church porch where the hooks and ladders waited. But this same familiarity bred a fatalism, a confidence that fires could be contained because they always had been. The Great Fire of 1633, which had destroyed forty houses on Thames Street, had been stopped by the traditional methods: pulling down buildings to create gaps, using wet cloth and leather to beat out sparks, relying on the river as the final barrier. That fire had confirmed the adequacy of the system. It had not prompted reform.

The condition of the watchmen themselves revealed how thinly the city’s defenses were stretched. In many parishes, the duty fell by rotation upon householders, who could pay a substitute rather than serve in person. The substitutes were drawn from the pool of the elderly, the disabled, the desperate—men who could not refuse a few pence for a night’s work.

They walked their beats with staves that served more as symbols of authority than tools of intervention. If they discovered a fire in its early stages, their instructions were to raise the alarm and await the arrival of the constable. They had no training in the use of the engines, no practice in the coordinated demolition that serious fires required. The system assumed that fires would be small and that neighbors would respond before professional help was needed. It assumed, in other words, that the city would burn in the way it always had, not in some unprecedented configuration of wind and fuel and failed response.

Thomas Bloodworth’s position as Lord Mayor embodied these contradictions. He was simultaneously the chief magistrate of London and the first servant of its commercial interests, elected by the livery companies whose wealth derived from the very trades that endangered the city. The Vintners’ Company, to which he belonged, maintained warehouses along the river for the storage of wine and spirits—additional combustibles in a landscape already saturated with risk. Bloodworth had risen through the hierarchy of city governance, serving as sheriff before his mayoralty, and he understood the delicate balance between authority and consent upon which his power rested.

To pull down a merchant’s warehouse without clear justification was to invite litigation, political opposition, and personal ruin. The law offered him protection only if his judgment proved correct; it offered none if he acted and the fire spread regardless, or if he failed to act and the fire consumed what he might have saved.

The particular vulnerability of Pudding Lane derived from its function as a node in the city’s maritime economy. The lane ran from Thames Street, where the lighters unloaded, up a slight rise toward Eastcheap and the markets beyond. This gradient meant that goods moved by gravity as much as by labor, barrels rolling from the riverfront to the warehouses that lined the upper reaches. The bakers, chandlers, and oilmen who occupied the ground floors served the ships directly, supplying the Navy and the merchant marine with the necessities of voyage: bread that would not spoil, candles for the dark hours below deck, tar and pitch for the endless maintenance of wooden hulls. The Navy Board, Pepys’s own employer, was among the largest customers of this district. The efficiency of the arrangement was undeniable; the danger was equally apparent. The same concentration that made Pudding Lane profitable made it explosive.

The physical structure of Farriner’s house, typical of its neighbors, multiplied these risks through its very design. The bakehouse occupied the ground floor and basement, where the ovens required constant tending and the heat rose through the timber floors to the chambers above. The family slept on the first floor, the servants in the garret or, in this case, the kitchen itself. The vertical integration of domestic and commercial space—common to most London trades—meant that fire in the workplace immediately threatened the home.

Bloodworth retired to his house in Mincing Lane. He was a wealthy man, a member of the Vintners’ Company. He had seen fires before; London had burned in 1633, and again in smaller conflagrations that took single parishes. The city always rebuilt in wood. Stone was for churches and the houses of the very rich. The rest clung to their timber frames because timber was fast and cheap and the leases were short. The Lord Mayor locked his door. He did not walk the watch that night. He left the city to its own devices, governed by ancient customs that assumed fire would be rare and containable.

The night fell warm. The clouds that Pepys had noted hung low over the river, trapping the heat rising from the day’s commerce. In the warehouses, the oil settled in its barrels. The hemp released its oily dust into the air. The timbers of the houses contracted slightly as the temperature dropped, joints creaking against each other. In Pudding Lane, Farriner’s maidservant stirred in her sleep below stairs. A spark—whether from the oven or a forgotten candle or a thousand other sources—settled among the faggots stacked for Monday’s baking. It smoldered. The city was primed; the pressure now shifted to the governance system that must manage this latent crisis.