A bakery fire and a city built to burn
The fire began shortly after midnight on Sunday 2 September 1666 at Thomas Farriner’s bakery on Pudding Lane and burned for four days before being brought under control by 5 September, with the Tuesday of that week marking the point of greatest destruction. It spread rapidly through London’s densely built medieval core, consuming more than thirteen thousand houses and eighty-six parish churches, aided by narrow winding streets, overhanging upper floors that nearly touched across alleyways, abundant combustible goods stored in riverside warehouses, and strong easterly winds that turned the blaze into what accounts describe as a firestorm.
Four days, one day of greatest destruction
The fire’s most detailed surviving eyewitness account comes from Samuel Pepys, a naval administrator whose diary, kept from 1660 to 1669, recorded the unfolding disaster in vivid, specific detail, including his own decision to climb the Tower of London for a better view and his direct advice to King Charles II that demolishing buildings ahead of the flames was necessary to stop its spread, advice the king accepted. John Evelyn kept a separate contemporary account, and the London Gazette issued official reporting at the time, though that official record notably failed to record a single fatality, a gap that has shaped much of the later historical debate over the fire’s true human cost.
A death toll built on almost nothing
The fire’s rapid spread reflected specific, well-documented conditions rather than simple bad luck: London’s medieval street layout had survived centuries of theoretical prohibitions on wooden construction, leaving much of the city built from combustible materials packed closely together, while Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth’s hesitation in ordering the demolition of buildings to create firebreaks delayed a response that might otherwise have contained the blaze earlier. Whether Bloodworth’s delay reflected genuine negligence or the practical difficulty of ordering the destruction of citizens’ property without clearer authority remains a point historians continue to weigh rather than resolve definitively.
One diary, extraordinary detail
The fire’s death toll is one of the more striking unresolved disputes in this set of episodes: traditional accounts, following the near-silence of official records, cite figures as low as eight deaths, or simply describe the toll as being in single figures, while the historian Neil Hanson has argued the real number was likely several hundred and quite possibly several thousand, once undocumented deaths among London’s poor, exposure deaths among those left homeless in winter, and bodies consumed entirely by the fire’s extreme heat are accounted for. The disagreement turns substantially on whether such indirect and undocumented deaths should be counted alongside the handful of deaths recorded directly at the time.
A scapegoat hanged for a fire he did not set
In the fire’s aftermath, London was rebuilt largely along its existing medieval street pattern rather than adopting the more radical grid-based redesigns proposed by Christopher Wren and John Evelyn, though new building codes mandated brick and stone construction in place of the wooden buildings that had fed the blaze. The disaster also produced new fire insurance companies, beginning with Nicholas Barbon’s Fire Office, and fed into a wave of anti-Catholic suspicion that culminated in the wrongful execution of Robert Hubert, a Frenchman who falsely confessed to starting the fire despite no credible evidence supporting either arson or a foreign conspiracy.
Rebuilt along the old lines
This is worth close attention precisely because the low, officially recorded death toll long treated as settled fact turns out to rest on very thin evidence, and Neil Hanson’s much higher estimate deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed. It is also an excellent illustration of how heavily a single diary, Pepys’s, can shape posterity’s understanding of an entire disaster. It leaves genuinely open, rather than resolved, the question of how much blame belongs to Bloodworth’s hesitation versus the unavoidable constraints of the era he was operating in. Readers wanting a firm verdict on his individual culpability will need to weigh the surviving evidence themselves rather than expect the material to hand one down.