The Great Fire of London

Four days in September 1666 that destroyed medieval London and created the modern city.

What happened

The fire started around 1 AM on Sunday, September 2, 1666, in Thomas Farriner’s bakery on Pudding Lane, near London Bridge. A combination of drought, timber buildings packed tightly together, strong east winds, and a slow official response turned a small fire into an inferno that burned for four days.

The damage

• 13,200 houses destroyed
• 87 parish churches, including Old St. Paul’s Cathedral
• Most of the City of London inside the Roman walls
• An estimated 70,000 of the City’s 80,000 residents made homeless
• Remarkably few confirmed deaths (officially 6, though the real number was certainly higher — many poor and transient victims went uncounted)

Timeline

• Sunday, Sept 2: Fire starts. Lord Mayor Thomas Bloodworth dismisses it: “A woman could piss it out.” He’s wrong.
• Monday, Sept 3: Fire reaches the Royal Exchange. Samuel Pepys buries his wine and Parmesan cheese in his garden. Charles II personally joins firefighting efforts.
• Tuesday, Sept 4: Old St. Paul’s Cathedral burns. Lead from the roof melts and runs through the streets. The fire reaches the Temple.
• Wednesday, Sept 5: Wind drops. Firebreaks — buildings blown up with gunpowder on the King’s orders — finally halt the advance.

Why it matters for the novel

The fire is a hinge point. It destroys the medieval city where Daniel grew up and creates the blank canvas on which Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren will rebuild — the London of coffeehouses, the Royal Exchange, and the new St. Paul’s that forms the backdrop for much of Books 2 and 3. Charles II’s personal bravery during the fire (he really did work bucket brigades alongside commoners) is one of the few moments where the novel shows him as genuinely admirable.

The fire also arrives in 1666 — the year Drake Waterhouse and many Puritans believed would bring the Apocalypse (because 666 is the Number of the Beast). The fire looked like divine judgment. It wasn’t, but the coincidence fueled apocalyptic fervor that shaped Daniel’s childhood.

The rebuilding

Within days, both Hooke and Wren submitted plans for a completely redesigned city with wide boulevards and grand plazas. Neither plan was adopted — property owners insisted on rebuilding on their original plots. But the building codes changed: brick and stone replaced timber, streets were widened, and the new St. Paul’s Cathedral (Wren’s masterpiece, completed 1710) became the defining structure of London’s skyline. Hooke, as the City’s official surveyor, personally oversaw the reconstruction of thousands of buildings — work that consumed decades of his life and kept him from the scientific research that might otherwise have rivaled Newton’s.