The Great Fire of London
2 Sep 1666 O.S. – 1677 O.S.39 items
disasterearly modernFour days in September 1666
At about one in the morning on Sunday 2 September 1666 a fire broke out in Thomas Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane. Driven by a dry east gale, it burned for four days and took most of the walled City with it: about 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Guildhall and the Royal Exchange. Some 70,000 of the City’s roughly 80,000 people lost their homes.
The four days are told hour by hour wherever Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn and the London Gazette give a time. A short aftermath follows: the scapegoat hanged at Tyburn, the plans for a new City, the Rebuilding Act and the Monument.
Julian dates, as written
England still kept the Julian calendar (Old Style), ten days behind Catholic Europe: Pepys’s Sunday 2 September was Sunday 12 September in Paris. Every date here is entered in the Julian calendar and shown as the diarists wrote it. England also began its year on Lady Day, 25 March, so the Rebuilding Act of February 1667 was passed in “1666”; the timeline places it in the right year.
Times are London clock time, set by the Sun, and within a few minutes of UTC. Where no diarist gives an hour, an item spans its whole day.
How it is laid out
Periods: one band for each day of burning, one for the fire as a whole, one for the east wind that drove it, and the building of the Monument.
Threads to filter by:
diaries,firefighting,architecture,evacuation,monarchyandscapegoats.
It made me weep to see it. — Samuel Pepys, watching from Bankside, 2 September 1666
Items
Fire at Farriner’s bakery
The Lord Mayor: “a woman might piss it out”
Pepys is woken, and goes back to bed
“Above 300 houses have been burned down”
Pepys watches from the Tower
London Bridge catches
Pepys tells the King
“Lord! what can I do?”
An arch of fire from Bankside
Pepys’s valuables leave by cart
The Duke of York takes charge
Mobs turn on foreigners
The Royal Exchange burns
Evelyn: “London was, but is no more”
Blowing up Tower Street
The fire leaps the Fleet
Pepys buries his parmesan
The Guildhall glows like burnished brass
St Paul’s burns
Pepys takes his gold to Woolwich
The fire stops at Barking church
Stopped at Pie Corner
Stopped at the Temple
Pepys walks among the hot coals
Panic in the camps
A new fire at Bishopsgate
Evelyn walks the ruins
Wren’s plan for a new City
Robert Hubert hanged at Tyburn
The Rebuilding Act
- ≈ 3 years, 10 months
First stone of Wren’s St Paul’s