The Great Fire of London (Tara Olivero)
What came to be known as the Great Fire of London started in the early hours of September 2, 1666, in Pudding Lane near London Bridge, at the house of a baker named Thomas Farynor. His family fled when they discovered the flames; the fire soon spread towards warehouses housing flammable goods near the Thames. The mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, received news of the fire but didn’t take it seriously, and flames continued to spread north but were luckily stopped from spreading south across the river by an open space on the London Bridge. The most viable solution to fighting a fire of this size was to destroy the buildings in its path as the fire moved north, but the mayor wavered because of his concerns over the cost of rebuilding. Samuel Pepys, a diarist of the time period and a clerk of the Royal Navy, recommended to King Charles II that the buildings should indeed be pulled down; unfortunately, the strong wind allowed the fire to jump gaps of up to twenty houses, so bringing down single buildings didn’t help much. Londoners began to panic and started to flee as the fire continued to move through different neighborhoods of the City of London, towards the wealthy Cheapside and even towards St. Paul’s Cathedral, built in the Middle Ages. Pepys then suggested that widespread demolishment of the houses in the fire’s path might be more efficient to widen the gap and stop the fire from jumping so far from house-to-house, so the Navy began using gunpowder to demolish huge blocks of buildings in the fire’s future path. The demolition plans widened the break between flames when the fire reached a brick wall and a now-slowing wind began blowing the fire back south towards the river. The fire that began on a Sunday wasn’t fully extinguished until Thursday. With an official death toll of four, over 1/6th of the population of London was left homeless and 373 acres of the City were destroyed. The one positive effect of the fire is that many of the plague-infested rats were destroyed, slightly slowing the spread of the disease. Who was at fault for the fire was highly contested; it was blamed on foreigners at first and on Roman Catholics during the Popish Plot a decade later, though most now agree it was a result of the original baker or his maid not properly raking the ashes in their oven.
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