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Great Fire of London
The Great Fire of London was a major conflagration that swept through the central parts of the English city of London, fr om Sunday, 2 September to Wednesday, 5 September 1666. The fire gutted the medieval City of London inside the old Roman City Wall. It threatened, but did not reach, the aristocratic district of Westminster, Charles II's Palace of Whitehall, and most of the suburban slums. It consumed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, St. Paul's Cathedral, and most of the buildings of the City authorities. It is estimated that it destroyed the homes of 70,000 of the City's 80,000 inhabitants. The death toll from the fire is unknown and is traditionally thought to have been small, as only six verified deaths were recorded. This reasoning has recently been challenged on the grounds that the deaths of poor and middle-class people were not recorded anywhere, and that the heat of the fire may have cremated many victims, leaving no recognisable remains.
After two rainy summers in 1664 and 1665, London had lain under an exceptional drought since November 1665, and the wooden buildings were tinder-dry after the long hot summer of 1666. The bakery fire in Pudding Lane spread at first due west, fanned by an eastern gale.
A fire broke out at Thomas Farriner's bakery in Pudding Lane a little after midnight on Sunday, 2 September. The family was trapped upstairs, but managed to climb from an upstairs window to the house next door, except for a maidservant who was too frightened to try, and became the first victim. By Sunday afternoon, 18 hours after the alarm was raised in Pudding Lane, the fire had become a raging firestorm which created its own weather. A tremendous uprush of hot air above the flames was driven by the chimney effect wh erever constrictions such as jettied buildings narrowed the air current and left a vacuum at ground level. The resulting strong inward winds did not tend to put the fire out, as might be thought: instead, they supplied fresh oxygen to the flames, and the turbulence created by the uprush made the wind veer erratically both north and south of the main, easterly, direction of the gale which was still blowing. By dawn on Monday, 3 September, the fire was principally expanding north and west, the turbulence of the firestorm pushing the flames both further south and further north than the day before. The fire's spread to the north reached the financial heart of the City. The wind dropped on Tuesday evening, and the firebreaks created by the garrison finally began to take effect on Wednesday, 5 September. Pepys walked all over the smouldering city, getting his feet hot, and climbed the steeple of Barking Church, from which he viewed the destroyed City, "the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw." There were many separate fires still burning themselves out, but the Great Fire was over.