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their goods there”. Food was scarce and any tradesmen who escaped the devastation were quick to cash in on the catastrophe by selling their wares to the displaced masses at inflated prices. Unscrupulous landlords with p ro p e r t i e s b e yo n d the f i re zone immediately raised their rents — a phenomenon which, as late as 1668, caused the Venetian ambassador to complain of the “grasping habits” of Londoners, with their “severe and exorbitant rents”. HE xenophobia that emerged during the fire is also depressingly familiar. In 1666 England was at war with Holland and France, and immigrants from both countries — many of them Protestants asylumseekers — were quickly blamed for starting the fire as an act of terrorism. The shop of a French painter was looted, and another Frenchman was attacked with an iron bar in the street. A Dutch baker with a shop in We s t m i n s t e r w a s arrested and imprisoned. At the height of the crisis a rumour circulated that an army of 50,000 French and Dutch troops was preparing to invade.

The poignancy of many of these facts is now brought home by an installation called Of All the People in All the World at the Inner Temple. Here the artists’ collective Stan’s Café will represent the statistics of the fire using grains of rice in contrasting piles — with 80,000 grains for displaced people, for