The City of Wood and PitchThe 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 h…
The King’s Peace and the Mayor’s Watch…selves forced the decision and removed the burden of choice. Bloodworth would be condemned for this rationality. When first informed of the Pudding Lane fire, he was reported to have dismissed it as something a woman might extinguish with her own water. The words read as incompetence or indi…
A Baker on Pudding Lane…er raked them level across the oven floor. The final act of his Saturday, and the habit of twenty-seven years in the baking trade. Outside, Pudding Lane ran dark between Eastcheap and the Thames. The tide was low. The night smelled of river mud and the faint sweetness of burned flour that ne…
The City of Wood and Pitch…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…
The King’s Peace and the Mayor’s Watch…e existing arrangements would suffice until they demonstrably failed. The demonstration would be brutal and swift. The fire that started in Thomas Farriner’s bakehouse would spread faster than any messenger could ride, faster than any order could be formulated and transmitted through the layers…
A Baker on Pudding LaneThe coals still held their heat when Thomas Farriner raked them level across the oven floor. The final act of his Saturday, and the habit of twenty-seven years in the baking trade. Outside, Pu…
The City of Wood and Pitch…obbled 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 th…
The King’s Peace and the Mayor’s Watch…ed to be tested was the machinery of response. Who could act, at what cost, with what certainty? On a September morning in 1666, Lord Mayor Thomas Bloodworth sat at his desk in the Guildhall with a leather-bound precedent book open before him. He was fifty-five, a vintner worth perhaps twenty tho…
A Baker on Pudding Lane…the face of flame. The authority to tear down buildings, to create firebreaks, to command labor and materials, lay with the Lord Mayor. Sir Thomas Bloodworth, awakened at his house in Lombard Street, would ride to the scene, view the fire, pronounce it negligible, and return to bed. This sequence…
The City of Wood and Pitch…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 stati…
The King’s Peace and the Mayor’s Watch…ked well enough for ordinary times. It had no provision for extraordinary ones. The fire would find this gap and widen it into catastrophe. Samuel Pepys occupied a unique position in this divided system. As Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board, he lived in Seething Lane within the City walls,…
The Watchman's Cry…ry spell extended back through the harvest, the east wind establishing itself as a persistent feature rather than a passing weather system. Samuel Pepys, whose diary would record the fire’s progress, noted the wind’s character independently of fire-related observation. Contemporary correspon…
The City of Wood and Pitch…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 returne…
The King’s Peace and the Mayor’s Watch…. The oak desk held only paper, only precedents for deliberation. The spark would meet this. The Restoration had built this machinery. When Charles II rode into London on 29 May 1660 (his twenty-ninth birthday, his father’s birthday, the anniversary of his own deliverance), he found a capi…
The Moment the Catastrophe Entered…. He was called for. The King received him in a room that looked eastward, though from this distance and angle the fire remained invisible. Charles II was thirty-six years old, restored to his father’s throne six years before. He had learned patience in exile and urgency in power. His brot…
A Baker on Pudding Lane…did not settle the question. Alternative theories circulated immediately. Some blamed Catholic arsonists, a foreign plot, the Dutch enemy. Robert Hubert, the French watchmaker who falsely confessed to starting the fire at Farriner’s bakery, would be hanged at Tyburn on 27 October 1666, his b…
The Duke's Wager at Pie Corner…uld unfold in the inquiries and recriminations of the months ahead, in the arguments about cause and responsibility that would culminate in Robert Hubert’s false confession and the parliamentary investigation. For now, the immediate task was survival and the first steps toward reconstruction.…
The Smoldering City…or publish any false and scandalous reports. The denial acknowledged what it could not prevent. That same Friday, a French watchmaker named Robert Hubert, recently arrived in London and wandering the ruins, found himself detained by citizens who took his foreign speech and his presence in the…
The Pivotal Hour…on started in 1666. It runs between Eastcheap and Thames Street in the historic City of London, and intersects Monument Street, the site of Christopher Wren’s later memorial to the disaster. At this hour, the narrow way was impassable with heat and falling timbers. The fire had already crossed t…
The Historical Content…demolitions, required years of cleansing and enclosure. The houses that had been pulled down or blown up left gaps in the urban fabric that Christopher Wren and his competitors would later fill with new construction, wider streets, the stone architecture of a rebuilt London. The firebreak had be…
The Fall of a Cathedral (Tuesday Afternoon, 4 September 1666)…ior by thick masonry. What the faithful could not see, or chose not to see, was the wooden skeleton that now shrouded the entire structure. Christopher Wren had surveyed the cathedral in 1665 and found it in dangerous decay. The king had authorized repairs, and for months scaffolding had climbed…
The City of Wood and Pitch…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 se…
The Wind as a Mechanism…released vapors that ignited in rolling bursts. This was not arson. This was chemistry and physics, proceeding according to their own laws. John Evelyn, the diarist and royal courtier, would later describe what he saw when he came to the scene. He had been awakened by the noise and light, t…
The River as Battleground (Daylight Hours, 2 September 1666)…h citizens and their possessions. The Thames was a working artery, not a floodwall, and it could not hold back what the wind drove forward. John Evelyn, observing from the river that evening, reported that it was ‘covered with barges and boats making their escape piled with goods.’ Samuel P…
The Pivotal Hour…where the Great Fire of London started in 1666. It runs between Eastcheap and Thames Street in the historic City of London, and intersects Monument Street, the site of Christopher Wren’s later memorial to the disaster. At this hour, the narrow way was impassable with heat and falling ti…
The Hunt for a Culprit…late. The watchmaker’s death left its traces in the city’s memory, though they were soon overlaid by other concerns. The inscription on the Monument, when it was completed a decade later, would include the accusation that Popish frenzy had wrought the horrors of the fire. The inscription…
The King’s Commission and the City’s Survey…that had survived the fire at the foot of London Bridge. His bakehouse site, on the eastern side of Pudding Lane, would become part of the Monument’s foundation, the column that would mark where London burned. While the commissioners gathered testimony, other men measured the ground its…