Greed and ineptitude that turned bakery blaze into a Great Fire
It began in Thomas Farriner’s bakery, just after midnight.
The fire trapped Farriner and his family in their upstairs rooms but they managed to climb from a window to the house next door – except for a maidservant who was too frightened to try and who became the Great Fire of London’s first casualty.
Neighbours tried to put out the blaze, and after an hour, the parish constables decided the adjoining houses should be pulled down to prevent further spread – then a standard fire-fighting practice.
People living in those houses protested, so London’s Lord Mayor was summoned to give his permission.
Tragically, Sir Thomas Bloodworth was not up to the responsibilities his position brought. Faced with a difficult decision, Bloodworth refused to give the order, saying the buildings’ owners could not be found, and left. What followed became a catastrophe.
A strong easterly wind fanned the flames and the blaze spread. By mid-morning on Sunday, attempts to put it out had been abandoned.
The diarist Samuel Pepys went to the Tower of London and watched from a turret.
By then it had burned down several churches and around 300 houses and had reached the Thames waterfront, hindering one possible escape route.
Pepys wrote that he could see “everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another.”
London’s agony was in part the fault of those who had ignored regulations for their own gain. Wooden construction and thatched roofs had long been outlawed, but that ban was widely ignored.
Meanwhile, buildings’ upper stories frequently jutted out above the street below, to maximise floor space – a practice which allowed flames to easily jump from one to another.
By late Sunday afternoon, 18 hours after the alarm was first raised, the blaze had become a firestorm that created its own weather – sucking in air which further fanned the flames.
By Monday morning the fire was spreading north and west. It had destroyed the houses on London Bridge and was threatening to cross the river and take hold in Southwark.
Tuesday was the worst day, with the blaze claiming the fashionable shops of Cheapside and St Paul’s Cathedral. The cathedral, with its stone walls, had been thought safe but it was covered in scaffolding which caught fire, spreading to the roof. Within hours, it was a ruin.
The fire continued to spread until Tuesday evening, when the wind dropped, allowing the breaks which had been hastily created to take effect by the following morning.
On the following Sunday rain extinguished the remaining blazes, although coal was still burning in cellars two months later.
In all, it destroyed 13,200 houses – home to 70,000 people – 87 parish churches, St Paul’s Cathedral, and the Royal Exchange.
The official death toll was in single figures, but many historians believe it must have been much higher.