London Burns: The Great Fire of 1666
1666 · event
From one bakery on Pudding Lane, fire consumed 13,000 homes and 87 churches in four days. Yet from the ashes rose a new city, and St Paul’s Cathedral, built to outlast every fire to come.
Samuel Pepys buried his parmesan cheese and wine in the garden before fleeing, his diary is the reason we can follow the fire hour by hour. The Lord Mayor, woken at 3 a.m., dismissed it: "a woman might piss it out."
Astonishingly, the recorded death toll was in single digits, but 70,000 of the city's 80,000 inhabitants lost their homes. Christopher Wren rebuilt 51 churches, crowned by St Paul's; the Monument he built still stands exactly 202 feet from where the fire began.