When London Burned: The Great Fire and Its Fallout

Billy Galligan

Imagine waking up at one o'clock in the morning on Sunday, September 2, 1666, with the smell of woodsmoke thick in your throat. Now, if you are the Lord Mayor of London, a man named Sir Thomas Bloodworth, and you are dragged out of bed to look at a growing blaze in Pudding Lane, you have a choice. You can take it seriously, or, uh, well, you can do what Bloodworth did. He took one look at the fire spreading from Thomas Farriner's bakery and muttered, "Pish! A woman might piss it out!" And then, I, I, I am not making this up, the man went back to bed. He actually went back to sleep. That single quote, that massive bit of complacency, is probably the most disastrously wrong assessment in the history of civil protection.

Billy Galligan

But, you see, to understand why that was so incredibly foolish, you have to look at what London actually was in 1666. The writer John Evelyn called it a "wooden, northern, and inartificial congestion of Houses." It was a giant timber tinderbox. We are talking about a city that had just suffered through a brutally dry, hot summer. Everything was bone dry. On top of that, a strong easterly gale was blowing, shoving the air through these narrow, cramped medieval streets. And these houses, they had these overhanging upper stories called jetties. They jutted out so far over the streets that neighbors on opposite sides of the road could practically lean out their windows and shake hands. It was an absolute playground for sparks.

Billy Galligan

So, how do you fight a fire like that when you don't have high pressure hoses or fire engines? Well, the standard mechanism of the seventeenth century was simple but brutal. You used axes, leather buckets, and these massive iron "firehooks" to physically pull down houses in the path of the flames. You created a gap, a firebreak, so the fire ran out of fuel. But here is the catch, and this is really the central tension of the whole disaster. Sir Thomas Bloodworth refused to authorize those demolitions. Why? Because under the law, if he ordered a house pulled down, he, or the city, could be held financially liable for the cost of the property. He was terrified of the real estate bill. He literally chose to protect property values and avoid lawsuits rather than pull down a few wooden tenements to save the city. It was the tyranny of property rights that truly burned London to the ground, far more than the spark in the bakery.

Billy Galligan

By Tuesday, September 4, the fire had grown into a absolute firestorm. It leaped right over the River Fleet and headed straight for St Paul's Cathedral. Now, people thought St Paul's was completely safe. It was stone, right? Huge, heavy stone walls. Merchants and citizens actually packed the cathedral crypt full of their most valuable belongings, especially books and stationers' stock, thinking it was a vault. But the cathedral was undergoing repairs. It was surrounded by massive, dry timber scaffolding. Once those wooden scaffolds caught, the heat became so intense, we are talking over one thousand degrees Celsius, that the lead roof began to melt. Eyewitnesses described the lead running down the stone steps and pouring into the streets like a river of red hot lava. It was a complete apocalypse.

Billy Galligan

The only reason the eastern spread was finally halted on Wednesday, September 5, was because the Tower of London garrison took matters into their own hands. They ignored the Lord Mayor's hand wringing and used gunpowder. They just blew up whole blocks of homes to create massive firebreaks. It worked, but by then, eighty percent of the city inside the walls was ashes. And, of course, a traumatized, homeless public wanted someone to blame. They couldn't just accept it was a dry summer and bad planning. So they turned to xenophobia. They blamed a poor French watchmaker named Robert Hubert. Hubert was arrested, confessed under intense pressure, and was hanged at Tyburn for starting the fire. The tragic, absurd thing is, he wasn't even in London when the fire started. Records later proved he was on a ship at sea when the first spark flew in Pudding Lane. But the mob needed a scapegoat, and a foreigner was the easiest target.

Billy Galligan

And then there is the great lie of the Great Fire, the myth of the low death toll. The official record says fewer than ten people died. But think about it, the heat was so intense it melted lead and iron. It was hot enough to cremate human bodies completely, leaving nothing but ash. Plus, hundreds, if not thousands, of the poorest refugees died of exposure and disease in the miserable camps on Parliament Hill in the weeks that followed. They were never counted. And when it came time to rebuild, did they fix the layout? No. The Rebuilding of London Act 1666 banned timber houses, yes, we got brick, but the chaotic, cramped medieval street grid was preserved exactly as it was. Why? Because the landowners refused to compromise on their property lines. Even after losing everything, the sacredness of the plot boundary trumped any grand vision of a safer, wider city.

Billy Galligan

It makes you think about how we react when our physical history is wiped out. In Dublin, where I grew up, or here in Atlanta, neighborhoods aren't just bricks and mortar. They are the physical archives of our lives, the places where our loyalties and memories live. When you wipe that clean in three days, you don't just lose buildings. You lose the anchor of the community itself. And yet, the first thing those Londoners fought for wasn't a better future, it was the exact boundaries of their old dirt. Some things, it seems, never change. Alright, that is the story of the day. Talk to you soon.