Dan Snow's History Hit - The Great Fire of London

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

In the early hours of September 2, 1666, a small fire broke out on the ground floor of a baker's house in Pudding Lane. In five days that small fire would devastate the third largest city in the Western world.Adrian Tinniswood is a historian, teacher and writer, as well as a consultant to the National Trust. Adrian joins Dan to explore the cataclysm and consequences of the Great Fire of London. Together, they piece together the story of the Fire and its aftermath - the panic, the search for scapegoats, and the rebirth of a city.This episode was produced by Hannah Ward, the audio editor was Dougal Patmore.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. In the early hours of the 2nd of September 1666, a small fire broke out in a little bakery in Pudding Lane, London. Within five days that fire had destroyed the vast majority of one of the largest cities in Europe, if not the world. It was a catastrophe, the Great Fire of London. Exactly what happened that week in 1666? Well, here to tell you about it is Adrian Tinniswood. He's a historian, he's a teacher, he's a writer, he's a consultant to the National Trust over here in the UK. He has written a book called By Permission of Heaven, the story of the Great Fire of London, and we are going to get into it. We're going to find out why it happened how it happened and just how bad the damage was

and what it meant for london which actually was on the threshold of becoming pretty much the biggest and richest city on earth so that's pretty impressive from being obliterated to a position of global hegemony in the space of generation how does that work well learn all about it with adrian tinniswood. Enjoy. Adrian, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's great to be with you, Dan. You know what? Sometimes we feel a bit sorry for ourselves in the modern world, but then you think to yourselves,

well, we could be alive in the mid-1660s. I mean, it was a brutal time to be a Londoner. We forget, you know, the Great Plague, the year before the fire of London. That was appalling casualties. It was dreadful. And there was something like a 9 out of 10 mortality rate. If you got the plague, you died, basically. Certainly early on, the bills of mortality, they're dreadful to hear. And of course, anybody who was anybody

cleared out, leaving only the poor and the dedicated, certainly kind of dissenting ministers who hung around and took the place of Anglican clergy who were clearing off to Oxford or to the south coast. Those kind of dissenting ministers really came into their own then. They were the welfare system that looked after the plague victims. Tell me about the streets of London, even without plague festering in its crowded streets. What did London look like in the mid-1660s, and how big was it? Yeah, it was small, and that's the thing. The city of London itself, what we call the Square Mile,

was home to about 80,000 people. What we would think of as Greater London, the suburbs and some of the outlying areas, all together had a population of maybe 250,000, 300,000. It's hard to be precise, of course. That's about the same size as Coventry today. But packed in, unlike Coventry today. I mean, you're living cheap by child.

Most of the street's very narrow. You're living in mainly timber-framed, laugh-and-plaster houses. Typically, they're jettied out across streets so that on some of the narrower thoroughfares, you could lean out of your bedroom window and shake hands with your neighbour across the road. The sky is blotted out by these houses. And does that mean that fires are your sort of particular threat in these cities? I mean, there was a huge fire, isn't it? The Forgotten Fire of London in the 13th century, I think it is,

when a huge chunk of the city was burned. There were fires all the time, Dan. If you think, we're looking at a world that was lit by fire. People were always airing their clothes by putting them in front of an open fire. They were looking for a chamber pot with a lighted candle under the bed. And fires took place all the time in London, all the time. Was it a disaster waiting to happen? Yeah, but, well, I say yes. I mean, in retrospect, yes, of course it was. At the time, it was an accident.

It was a confluence. It was a meeting of three or four different events that any one of them wouldn't have done the harm they did. The August 1666 was hot, it was dry. There'd been a drought all summer, so the buildings were tinned to dry. Then there's this general sense of foreboding as well. It's weird that there have been rumors about Cromwellian Republicans mounting a coup. There was talk about a mysterious character called

the Precious Man who was mobilizing a militia to march on London. There was talk about a messiah from the east, a man called Sabbatai Levi, who was gathering followers and was marching on Europe. People were twitchy. But the big thing that was twitching people on the afternoon of September the 2nd, 1666, the big thing was the war. We were at war, and that's what mattered most. We were at war with the Dutch. The war had been going quite well. But that particular afternoon, what everybody was talking about was the fact that a huge English fleet, commanded by Prince Rupert and General Monk,

was converging on the Dutch off Boulogne. And they were going to whoop them. They were going to absolutely whoop them. That's what everybody cared about. That's what everyone was talking about in the streets. And it was as that fleet moved in on the Dutch that a wind blew up in the channel, just a breeze. And that breeze grew stronger and stronger.

And as the English engaged with the Dutch, all hell broke loose. A gale hit both fleets. Masts were blown over, Sails were blown out. And both fleets ran for home. There was no battle. They just ran for home. They were crashing into each other. They were colliding.

They were sinking. The English fleet ran for the Isle of Wight to lick its wounds. But the point about all this, if you're wondering what on earth I'm talking about, and what this has got to do with the Great Fire of London, the point about that is that that afternoon and evening, that gale moved up into Kent from the channel. And that night, it grew in strength as it moved up through Kent and it toppled chimneys and it lifted thatch. And it hit London at about one o'clock on the morning of the 2nd of September. And just as it hit London, a baker called Thomas Fariner

forgot to put his oven out in Pudding Lane. If those two things hadn't happened, if Fariner hadn't forgot to put his oven out, if that gale hadn't hit, there would be no fire of London. That is a beautiful description of what happened. But let me just, before we go on here, Adrian, you never need to apologise to me to give descriptions of what's happening in maritime history.

Let's be very clear about that. Long-time listeners of this show will know that 17th century naval history is something that we could talk about all day. Before we talk about Thomas Farriner and the fire, you mentioned it hadn't rained all summer, there was a drought. I'm very interested in the fact that I was reading Geoffrey Parker's magnificent, gigantic book about the 17th century climate catastrophe across the planet.

And he points out that many other fires, there was a great fire in what is now Tokyo that is thought to have killed 100,000 people in 1657, I think it was. So there's a climate change story. There's a climate breakdown story here as well. Yeah, I mean, there were big fires, not only. Yeah, I mean, and there were big fires, not only in London, you mentioned, but there were big fires all over England.

I mean, Dorchester burned down in the early 17th century, if I remember right. Northampton burned down in the 1670s, I think. To go back to what I was saying earlier, it was a world lit by fire. And that meant that fires broke out all the time. Most of the time, they weren't that serious, but occasionally were.

And there may be a climate story, a climate change story to talk about here, but I'm not sure that we can associate climate change with the fact that you've got an entire society that depends on open flame. You know, accidents happen. So Thomas Farriner, he's a baker. Embers just popped out of his oven today

and ignited what was nearby. Well, he always thought it wasn't his fault. But if I had just accidentally burned down the second largest city in Christendom, I'd probably say it wasn't my fault either. What seems to have happened, what we know, is that in the early hours of the 2nd of September, that Sunday morning, Farriner's manserv 2nd of September, that was Sunday morning,

Fariner's manservant woke him up, came upstairs, and said, there's smoke coming up from the basement, which is where the ovens were. And Fariner and his daughter Hannah and the manservant tried to get downstairs, and there was smoke. They couldn't get down to the ground floor. So they clambered out of a bedroom window and into their neighbour's

bedchamber, which must have been quite a shock for their neighbour at two o'clock in the morning. Their maidservant had a fear of heights, so the story goes, and she wouldn't jump. She wouldn't walk out onto the roof. She died. She died of presumably smoking inhalation. She was the first casualty of the fire of London. They raised the alarm. And it's not a big deal at this point. It's not a big deal. Certain things happened when a fire broke out. Neighbours would evacuate their houses usually. The parish wardens would be called.

You would get firefighting equipment. Most of it kept in the local church. And most effective firefighting equipment was actually long poles with hooks on the end for pulling down housesch and for pulling down houses, in fact, to form fire breaks. So everybody kind of milled around. The point is, though, that as they're milling around in Pudding Lane, as they're trying to put the fire out, this gale is blowing. And it's blowing from the east. It's blowing westward. And it's fanning

the flames. As it fans those flames, some of the thatch lifts those embers flying to the sky, and they land in streets next door. Famously, a glowing ember landed in the stable yard of an inn on Fish Street Hill and ignited the straw. That was then blown up into the air and spread. So the fire's spreading all the time. The gale is relentless. I mean, this gale will blow for three days. And it's the gale which causes the fire of London now, I think. this gale will blow for three days. And it's the gale which causes the fire of London now, I think. So tell me about the Mayor of London. He

wasn't super concerned, was he? Poor old Thomas Bloodworth. Thomas Bloodworth was one of the unluckiest London mayors, I think, in that he'd come into office in the middle of the plague. So there was no kind of Lord Mayor's show. There was no sort of big fuss. There was no pageant. He was sworn in a barber shop around the back of the Tower of London it was all a bit of a frost for him and then just as he comes to the end of his year of office he's called out two o'clock in the morning on this Sunday morning and told there's a fire because people are getting a bit anxious because the fire is starting to spread and they're starting to worry that maybe we need to do something dramatic. We need to start demolishing houses. So they call the mayor. And Bloodworth, who's not a great man, bless him, he's not a great man, he says he can't authorise the pulling

down of houses because he needs the permission of their owners. And because the vast majority of property in London is rented, the landlords could be anywhere. So he says, no, we can't demolish houses, even though the fire is spreading. And one of the wardens says to him, well, look, you know, this is getting serious. And Bloodworth, memorably, famously, brilliantly, says this fire's nothing.

A woman could piss this out. And he went back to bed. And a place in the history books. Yeah, that's it. That's it. He's in there forever. So what stage do we think it started? Literally, what time did it start? We know it started in the early hours of the morning of Sunday, the 2nd of September. And by what stage is it really a very serious situation? Well, on that Sunday morning, Samuel Peaks, who's living a few streets away,

Seething Lane, he's living to the east of the fire, east of Pudding Lane. His maid wakes him up and says that the smoke down on the quays, down by the river, it looks as if there's several hundred houses burning. And Samuel is quite anxious about this because he's got people coming for dinner. And he's a bit worried that they're not going to be able to make it. This is his initial reaction to the Great Fire of London. So he trots down to have a look. In fact, he goes up to the tower. He's friendly with the constable of the Tower of London,

so he goes up to the top of the Tower of London, and he sees that the fire is spreading along the wharfs and quays of London, where you've got timber and tar and flax all piled up. The flames are moving along. They're being pushed westward by this gale all the time. And they're moving steadily along the streets and wharves by the Thames. So Samuel realizes that this is going to be quite serious. He gets in a boat and he sails up to Whitehall to tell the king. The king offers to send his lifeguards. There's no standing army at this time, but he's got lifeguards. And he offers to send basically military help.

Pepys goes back into town. He finds Thomas Bloodworth, who's got up again by this point, and who is now running up and down Cheapside with a handkerchief on his head saying, oh Lord, what shall I do? What shall I do? So Pepys says, well, look,

the king has offered to send in the troops effectively. And Bloodworth says, oh, we can't have that. It's only a few years since General Monk has broken down the gates of the city and marched into the city of London. So there's an understandable fear of military might, if you like, in the city of London. But Bloodworth, again, makes this massively wrong decision. He says, we can handle this. We don't need the king's troops.

And then he goes back home. Poor old Thomas, eh? He just can't get it right. They did need the king's troops. And then he goes back home. Poor old Thomas, eh? He just can't get it right. They did need the king's troops, didn't they? What are the other, I mean, there were bucket chains. What other options do they have? Yeah, there were bucket chains. There were a couple of fire engines in the city.

They're not kind of bright red with bells on top. They're massive sleds with cisterns on top. And remember that at this point, the fire hose has not been invented, which means that you've got a kind of brass spout that you can spurt a dribble of water onto a fire, but you've got to get really close to it to do it. And it's not a good idea to get that close to a fire. But anyway, there's a fire engine that's brought down from Clerkenwell. It's dragged down by men who then move it to the bottom of Pudding Lane, to the riverbank, to fill up the cistern so they can start spurting water at the fire.

They get too close to the bank. The fire engine slides into the Thames and sails off down the river and no one ever sees it again. The important point about these initial stages, Dan, is that nobody's actually putting the fire out. Everybody's looking for themselves. Everybody's trying to evacuate their own goods. There's looting going on all the way down the north bank of the Thames. A merchant called Towswell, who's got a house just to the east of Pudding Lane, near Bishopsgate, he rushes out and finds some men and gives them money to evacuate his goods to safety. And they evacuate his goods to safety.

He never sees them again. Order is breaking down. I think that's the important thing to note. And it's accelerated by the rumour that's going around already by Sunday evening that this is a terrorist attack. This is an attack by the Dutch. They're setting fire to the city, and it's a prelude to an invasion. This isn't as crazy as it sounds.

A few weeks before this, a force of English Marines under the flamboyant Sir Robert Holmes, who used to wear a gold lace suit and carry a monkey on his shoulder, had burned 150 Dutch merchant ships and set fire to the town of Wester Schelling, a Dutch town, in what was called Robert Holmes' bonfire. And everybody cheered. Everyone thought this was great. We were burning out the Dutch. So it was natural for them to think,

crikey, it's happening to us now. They're getting their own back. Anyone who looked foreign was beaten up in the streets. They tried to lynch people. The rumours were spreading faster than the fire. Thomas Farriner's bakery suddenly became a Dutch baker who'd purposely burned his house. People were seen throwing firebombs through windows.

None of it was true. But the xenophobia and the fear just spread right through the city. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the Great Fire of London. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. Fire of London. More coming up. Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. When I go in to give talks at schools about the Great Fire of London,

the one thing kids always remember is Samuel Pepys burying his cheese. I know, I know. Tell me about that. Well, I mean, I think you've said it. He buried his pub's own cheese, wasn't it? He must have loved that cheese. Pepys is the best of all the narratives about the fire. His is the most vivid.

But there's that moment where he's sailing down the Thames to get to Whitehall, and he sees the pigeons that Londoners keep for food fluttering above their homes, their wings singed. They drop down into the flames. It's such a memorable image, that. These birds just fluttering and fluttering and then dying. Were many people dying?

It's a really good question. And I'm going to say I don't know. The fire, although it spread inexorably, it didn't spread that fast. It spread maybe 30 yards an hour, 30 meters an hour or so. It wasn't the flash fire. People were caught. We know of, I think there are 11 fatalities that we know of. I suspect there were quite a lot more than that. People who were just caught when fire broke out in front of them and behind them, as was happening in the streets of London. So people were caught, I would guess maybe 40 or 50. What we do know is that consistently in the aftermath of the fire, people were thanking God that there were so few casualties. The fire was seen as punishment, and it depended on whose side

you're on. It was either punishment because we had killed the king, Charles I, or it was God's punishment because the good old cause, the Commonwealth, we'd backed off. It depends on which side you're on, really, as to who God was punishing. But in spite of God punishing London, he had shown mercy. And everybody says this. So it's pretty clear, I think, there were surprisingly few casualties. Speaking of the king, he's slightly used to Sam the Duke of Monmouth, has got a bit of things to do, but Charles II's in there getting involved, isn't he? Well, yes and no.

I mean, he is in there getting involved. He's getting involved in a fairly kind of airy, fairy way. He's riding around on his horse with a saddlebag full of coins, kind of flinging them at people and urging them to help with the fire. In fact, it's his brother. It's James, Duke of York, the future James II of England, who is the absolute hero. Don't get me wrong.

James, Duke of York, as king, as James II, he has the political acumen of a chicken. He's useless as a king. We can all agree on that. Yeah, we can do that, can't we? We can do that. But as a man, he was a hero. I mean, this is a guy who the previous year, as Lord High Admiral of the fleet,

had gone into battle against the Dutch, had watched a round of chain shots. He was standing on the deck with all his senior officers, a round of chain shot hit the group. He was miraculously almost unhurt. His friends exploded around him. The only damage that James Duke of York had was a cut on his forearm from a skull splinter from his best friend.

And he didn't bat an eye. He didn't blink. I mean, this guy was a really brave man. And he's the fella who, with his lifeguards, rides down into the city and starts organising proper fire prevention. They organise cordons. They start to pull down the houses. They evacuate whole streets.

And he gets off his horse. He's not just kind of chucking money around. He gets off his horse, he gets his shirt off, and he starts throwing buckets of sand and water out it with the best of them. He's an amazing man in the fire. Shame he didn't last, but he was a good man, a good man. And which day is the peak of the fire? Is it the 4th of September? It's the Tuesday, yeah. And that evening, the Royal Exchange is gone, livery halls have gone,

a lot of the city. But that evening, a young Thomas Towswell, a schoolboy at Westminster, he looks up into the city, he looks across Lambeth Marsh, and he sees St. Paul's Cathedral, which is London. This is the spiritual centre of the city, in fact, of the country in many ways. And he sees flames start to lick around St. Paul's Cathedral. St. Paul's is being repaired, the scaffolding all over the roof. Flames catch that scaffolding, that timber. The timber falls down through the roof of Old St. Paul's, and the building explodes like a firebomb. It just goes up like a bomb.

That explosion is made much worse because the printers and stationers around Paternostero, around Old St. Paul's, St. Faith's in the basement of of St Paul's, in the crypt, is their parish church. And they decided quite early on that nothing would harm St Paul's. So they put all of their paper, all of their books, all of their pamphlets, they stacked them up for safety in the crypt of St Paul's. And when those timbers fell down into St Paul's and then fell through the floor and into the crypt, all of that paper went up and St Paul's just blew up, basically. What are we talking about in the city? Is it half destroyed? What's the final reckoning? Well, the monument says, doesn't it, 13,200 houses, 400 streets and courts,

most of the livery halls. It's about five-sixths of the city of London goes. Wow. One chap writes to his brother in Northumberland and says, it is like our fells. Because all you could see was kind of brick chimney stacks. Everything else is flat. It looked like the fells. It didn't look like the city, he said. It's incredible, the damage and the lasting damage. What we don't know so much is the damage that it didn't look like the city he said it's incredible the damage and the lasting damage what we don't know so much is the damage that it caused to people the psychological damage so i mean for example for years afterwards peeps was having nightmares of fire and falling after the fire elizabeth his wife starts to lose her hair and she gets stomach upset. Fairly clearly, she's got post-traumatic stress disorder.

And I'm sure that a lot of Londoners will have suffered mentally. Their mental health will have been really severely damaged by this. What about the rebirth of the city? You mentioned those fells. What were the various competing ideas to recreate London? We know of half a dozen or so plans to rebuild London, some more sophisticated than others. I mean, some of the less sophisticated ones involved just drawing a checkerboard and saying, let's make London a checkerboard. Within days of the fire,

Christopher Wren, who is, Christopher Wren isn't an architect at this point, Christopher Wren is professional astronomy at Oxford, but he's matey with the king and he's in the king's private chambers with a plan for redesigning the whole city of London. John Evelyn's just after him. I'm sure every country gentleman had a go at doing a plan to rebuild London of the ones to describe. Christopher Wrens is the best. Far and away the most sophisticated. And yet, why did that not get put into action? It came close, actually. It came very close.

But the problem was that the king, quite early on, gave an undertaking that nobody would lose their homes or their land as a result of the fire. And Wrens's rebuilding would have involved massive compulsory purchase. He's driving boulevards basically right through the centre of the city. It would also have taken a very long time,

whereas the city authorities would rather just say to everybody, go ahead and build your house, go ahead and rebuild. It never got the sufficient backing from the city authorities. If you want to see Wren's London, not quite the same, but pretty close, go to Washington. Because 100 years later, Jefferson and Pierre L'Enfant, when they were laying out the federal city on the banks of the Potomac, they took a published version of Rennes' plan for London and remade that.

So you'll see Rennes, London in Washington, D.C. I love Washington. But I love London too. So maybe it's nice to have both. One thing I will say is that I am directly challenged. I'm confessing this now. I'm hopeless. The only two cities I can navigate around are New York, because everything's numbered. So I can do that. The avenues and the cross streets are numbered. And I can still find my way around the city of London, because I know London in 1666 like the back of my hand, and it's still there. I tell you, it is still there in spite of all the changes.

You can recognise virtually every street and every court and every alley. Yeah, that's certainly true. If you know where Fleet Street is, you're doing all right. But obviously there were changes. What regulatory changes were introduced? There were several rebuilding acts, which you look at the acts and it's all fairly clear that streets have to be 30 feet, 40 feet, 50 feet wide, depending on the status of the street.

All buildings have to be built of brick or stone or at least have a brick or stone facade. These fire prevention measures are put in place quite early on, three or four years later after the fire. When you actually look at what happened, most people ignored the building regulations. The streets are still 20 feet wide. The houses are still going up made of timber with thatch. You don't get that miraculous transformation that the old textbooks used to tell you about. It does happen, but it

happens over 50, 60, 70 years. It's a very slow thing. Because it's always fascinating to me that London, having literally exploded, it then explodes figuratively into the most important city and port on earth. What's the relationship there, if any, between this fire and this extraordinary rebirth and rise to becoming probably the richest city on the planet? Well, there's two things I think. I mean, one is that it was the most important city in England before the fire. And one of the reasons for the city authorities pressing ahead with a piecemeal rebuild is that they're scared people won't come back. You know, already places like Bristol are becoming

important ports in the aftermath of the fire. One of the first buildings they put back up is a customs house because they want to start getting in revenues from London as a port. So it's important beforehand, I think. The rebuilding is a piecemeal affair. I mean, now we look and we can see the important, I use that term very loosely, but I also use that term heartfelt in that I think St. Paul's Cathedral, rebuilt by Christopher Wren, is the greatest building in the world.

I make no bones about that. So you've got Wren's St. Paul's, you've got the city churches, 56 city churches, you've got the rebuilding of the livery company halls. Those are important and they add an enormous status to London. But of course, I mean, St Paul's takes 50 years to rebuild. You know, it's not the moving light. The city churches are still being rebuilt 30, 40, 50 years later. What intrigues me is the houses. You imagine a world where your

home is your business, where you rent it, you don't own it, and it burns down. So you've got nowhere to live. You've got no means of making a living. And there is a clause in your tenancy agreement saying if the property is damaged, it's up to you to repair it. No insurance.

And the astonishing thing is that Londoners did that. Within three or four years, most housing in London was rebuilt. It's incredible, just incredible that people could get down and do that. It is incredible. In terms of the monument, in terms of memorialising the fire, we still have the great monument. I took my kids up there the other day, in fact,

and on it, it blames the hand of God, a great wind and a very dry season. There used to be something else on there as well. Tell us what they blamed it on back in the day. This is the rage to blame, which gave rise to the rioting, to the beatings up of foreigners. People were convinced long afterwards that it was a terrorist attack. There was a plaque put up, which said, here by permission of heaven, hell broke loose on this Protestant city through the malice of barbarous papists whose fires are not yet quenched. We've more noticed now from the Dutch

to the French to the Catholics. I mean, remember, somebody was hanged for starting the fire of London. Poor old Robert Huber, who was bonkers, insisted that he had started the fire. He'd not even been in London when the fire began, but he was, like a lot of foreigners, he was apprehended as he was trying to leave the country just after the fire.

Foreigners trying to leave the country because it wasn't a safe place for them to be. But he's apprehended, he's arrested, and he says, yeah, I did it. I put a firebomb in Thomas Parrener's bakery in Pudding Lane. And he takes the authorities to Pudding Lane, which is now flat, and says, this is where the house was. This is where I put the fire bomb in. I started the fire of London. And everybody knew he didn't do it. But they couldn't persuade him to retract his confession. So they hanged him at Tyburn. Crikey. Well, Adrian, what an extraordinary story. Thank you very much for coming on and telling us about it on this anniversary. What is your book called?

By Permission of Heaven, the story of the Great Fire of London. Adrian Tidderswood, thank you very much for coming on. Great to talk to you. Thanks a lot, Dan. you