London burned for four days. Nobody knows how many died

Sunday 2 September, 1 a.m.

A bakery on a street named after offal

The journeyman baker, Thomas Dagger, woke “after 1am” “with the choke of the smoke”, Sir Edward Harley wrote in a letter from which the historian Kate Loveman identified Dagger in 2023. The baker, Thomas Farriner, his daughter and his man escaped by an upper window; the maid died. The family later swore that the oven had been drawn at ten at night. London Museum, 2023

The hour depends on who tells it: the London Gazette, the official newspaper, says “one of the clock in the Morning”, the City's surveyors “between one and two”, the Monument's inscription “in the dead of night”.

The street was called Pudding Lane because the “puddings”, the offal of the Eastcheap butchers, were carried down it to the dung boats on the Thames, John Stow wrote in 1598.

Sunday, 3 a.m.

Pepys looks out of the window and goes back to bed

Samuel Pepys, an official of the Navy Office, lived a few hundred metres to the east. His maid Jane called him up at about three. He watched from the window, thought it far enough off, and went back to bed.

In the morning Jane told him that “above 300 houses have been burned down to-night” and that the fire was “now burning down all Fish-street, by London Bridge”.

Sunday morning

The Lord Mayor's famous line is not in Pepys's diary

From the Tower, Pepys saw the houses at the end of the bridge on fire. He took a boat: the fire “got as far as the Steeleyard, while I was there”. Along the river, Thames Street was lined with warehouses of pitch, tar, oil, wine and brandy.

He went to the King at Whitehall and said that nothing could stop the fire unless houses were pulled down. The King sent him to the Lord Mayor. Pepys found Thomas Bloodworth in Cannon Street, with a handkerchief about his neck:

“Lord! what can I do? I am spent: people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses; but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it.”

Pepys, 2 September

Bloodworth is remembered for saying that “a woman might piss it out”, a line sometimes credited to Pepys's diary, Wikipedia included. The diary does not contain it. The historian Stephen Porter says the mayor “was said to have remarked” it and leaves open whether he did. We found no contemporary source either, so the line stays unverified. Gresham College, 2016

Sunday evening

An arch of fire a mile long

A violent east wind was blowing after a long drought. The pigeons would not leave their houses and fell with their wings burned. On the Thames, Pepys noticed, hardly one boat in three carrying the goods of a house was without a pair of virginals in it.

In the evening he watched from the south bank, at Bankside:

“we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it.”

Pepys, 2 September

Showers of “firedrops” crossed the water and set houses alight three or four, even five or six houses away. By dawn the fire had spread up to Gracechurch Street and along the river to the Three Cranes.

Monday 3 September

On Monday the banks burn, and night is as light as day

At four in the morning Pepys sent his money and plate by cart to Bethnal Green. The fire entered Lombard Street, the bankers' street, on Monday; one banker told readers of the Gazette he had moved everything almost a day before. The Royal Exchange burned on Monday afternoon.

Evelyn wrote that the fire “kindled back against the wind”, towards Cornhill, and called the night one “which was light as day for ten miles round about”.

Tuesday 4 September

On Tuesday, the worst day, Pepys buries his parmesan

On Tuesday the fire crossed the west of the City: Fleet Street, the Old Bailey, Ludgate, Newgate, as far as the Inner Temple. The post house burned too, so Pepys's letter to his father could not go.

In the Navy Office garden a neighbour buried his wine, and Pepys the papers of his office. In the evening they dug another pit, and Pepys put in his wine and “my Parmazan cheese”.

Tuesday evening

The cathedral's stones fly like grenades

“the stones of Paul's flew like grenados, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them”

Evelyn, 4 September

St Paul's lead roof, “no less than six acres by measure”, Evelyn wrote, melted entirely. The vault fell into St Faith's chapel, where the Stationers had carried their books for safety. They burned for a week.

Wednesday 5 September, 2 a.m.

The fire stops at a church's clock dial

On Tuesday night they began blowing up houses with gunpowder in Tower Street, next to the Tower, where the powder magazine was kept. The wind slackened.

At two in the morning Pepys's wife called him up: the fire had reached All Hallows Barking, “which is the bottom of our lane”. He took her by boat to Woolwich, with his gold, about £2,350.

He came back to find it stopped there, “it having only burned the dyall of Barking Church, and part of the porch”.

Wednesday

Where it stopped

The Gazette lists where a stop was put to it: the Temple Church, near Holborn Bridge, Pie Corner, Aldersgate, Cripplegate, the lower end of Coleman Street, Bishopsgate Street, Cornhill, Fenchurch Street, Mincing Lane, the middle of Mark Lane and Tower Dock.

Evelyn wrote that seamen had proposed early on to blow houses up, making a wider gap than pulling them down, which would have saved nearly the whole City, but “some tenacious and avaricious men, aldermen, etc., would not permit”, because their own houses would have gone first.

Pepys climbed Barking steeple and saw “the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw”.

Wednesday afternoon

Moorfields, a twopenny loaf and a cat with no fur

Pepys crossed the City, “our feet ready to burn, walking through the towne among the hot coles”. Fenchurch Street, Gracechurch Street and Lombard Street were “all in dust”; of the Exchange nothing stood “but Sir Thomas Gresham’s picture in the corner”.

Moorfields, the open ground beyond the wall, was full of people with what they had saved. He paid twopence for a penny loaf. By the Exchange he saw a cat pulled out of a chimney “with, the hair all burned off the body, and yet alive”.

Thursday 6 September, and after

Beaten down, with Clothworkers' Hall still burning

On Thursday it was “wholy beat down”, though that evening it broke out again at the Temple and was mastered with gunpowder before day. Clothworkers' Hall, its cellar full of oil, had been burning for three days and nights.

The King sent biscuit from the navy's stores to Moorfields. The people, “being unaccustomed to that kind of Bread, declined it”, the Gazette reported, and it went back to the stores. On 7 September Evelyn reckoned some 200,000 people lay by their goods towards Islington and Highgate: an eyewitness impression, not a count. The London Museum puts the number made homeless at around 100,000. London Museum