On a warm Summer’s night 344 years ago tonight the Great Fire of London started in the the bakery of Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane, in the then heart of London.
The great fire has become one of the iconic events of London history – not that the city is exactly short on history – but the sheer scale of the destruction and the mystery of exactly how it started* seem to captivate the imagination of many to this day.
We do know for a fact that the fire did start in the bakery and that the fire destroyed a section of central London, although Westminster and Charles II’s Palace of Whitehall were amongst the areas spared from destruction.
The sum total of area damaged was relatively small in reality with the fire stopping around 200 yards from the bakery, but due to the massive overcrowding in the city it’s estimated that around 70,000 or the 80,000 city residents were made homeless along with 87 parish churches and St. Paul’s Cathedral which wasn’t completed again for 32 years.
There were many plans to rebuild the city, a number based on the central Paris design of straight wide avenues with John Evelyn’s being the favourite. However due to wranglings between greedy land owners looking for compensation and to rebuild quickly, the schemes never came to fruition.
* General folklore claims it started from a spark in the bakery, however there’s also suspicion that it was actually started by either Dutch or French activists. However we will never know the true reason.
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