| Date | 2–5 September 1666 |
| Location | City of London, England |
| Caused by | Accidental fire originating at the bakehouse of Thomas Farynor, Pudding Lane; origin confirmed by Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (1667) |
| Resulted in | Destruction of 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, and St Paul's Cathedral; approximately 70,000 left homeless; rebuilding under the Rebuilding Act 1667; construction of the Monument; acceleration of fire insurance industry |
| Parties | City of London Corporation · Crown of England · Worshipful Company of Ironmongers · Office of Works · Parish constables and fire-fighting brigades |
| Lead figures | King Charles II, James, Duke of York, Sir Thomas Bludworth (Lord Mayor), Sir Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, Robert Hubert |
The Great Fire of London was a major conflagration that burned from Sunday, 2 September to Wednesday, 5 September 1666, destroying the greater part of the City of London. The fire consumed an estimated 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, St Paul's Cathedral, and most of the buildings of the City of London authorities, leaving approximately 70,000 of the city's 80,000 inhabitants homeless.
By the mid-seventeenth century, the City of London had grown into one of the most densely populated urban centres in northern Europe. Timber-framed buildings, many dating to the medieval period, lined streets so narrow that neighbours on opposing upper storeys could reach across and shake hands. The summer of 1666 had been exceptionally dry, with recorded rainfall at the Custom House weather station showing fewer than three inches across the preceding four months — the lowest figure in any comparable period since records began in 1634. Concerns about fire risk had been raised formally before the Privy Council as early as April 1665, when the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bludworth, submitted a report on the inadequacy of parish fire-fighting equipment. The report was received, filed with the Clerk of the Council, and not acted upon.
The city maintained a standing arrangement with the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers ([/wiki/worshipful-company-of-ironmongers]) for the upkeep of iron fire hooks and leather buckets distributed across the wards. An audit conducted in February 1666 found that 340 of the 600 registered buckets were either missing or unfit for use. The audit result was entered into the Guildhall Library ([/wiki/guildhall-library]) register and similarly filed without corrective action.
### Sunday, 2 September
The fire began in the early hours of Sunday, 2 September 1666, at the bakehouse of Thomas Farynor on Pudding Lane in the ward of Billingsgate. Farynor later maintained under sworn testimony that his ovens had been fully raked and extinguished before he retired, a claim that the subsequent Parliamentary inquiry found inconclusive. The fire spread rapidly westward, driven by a north-easterly wind of unusually sustained force. By dawn it had reached Thames Street, where warehouses stocked with tallow, coal, timber, and imported spirits provided exceptional fuel. The first request for assistance was sent by parish constables to the Lord Mayor shortly before two o'clock in the morning. Sir Thomas Bludworth, roused from sleep to view the blaze, reportedly assessed it as manageable and returned to bed — a response recorded in the diary of Samuel Pepys, who had been woken by his maidservant and observed the fire from the north bank of the Thames.
The standard remedy available to civic authorities was the creation of firebreaks by demolishing structures in the fire's path. This required the Lord Mayor's written authority. Bludworth declined to issue the order through most of Sunday, citing concern for the property liability that the Crown might owe to householders whose homes were pulled down. By the time demolition orders were issued in the early afternoon, the fire had already consumed those streets.
### Monday, 3 September
By Monday morning, the fire had crossed to the Cheapside district, destroying the halls of several livery companies and advancing toward the Guildhall, London ([/wiki/guildhall-london]). King Charles II rode out personally on Monday afternoon with his brother James, Duke of York, to oversee fire-fighting efforts, distributing payments from the royal purse to labourers manning fire-squirts and bucket chains. The King's personal intervention was recorded in the accounts of the Office of Works and noted in dispatches sent to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. James assumed effective command of the fire-fighting operation, establishing relay posts and organising the demolition of a broader firebreak to the north of Cheapside.
### Tuesday, 4 September
On Tuesday, the fire reached its greatest extent, consuming St Paul's Cathedral — where lead from the roof ran molten down Ludgate Hill in streams described by John Evelyn in his diary as resembling "rivers of blood by firelight" — and advancing to within yards of the Temple. The Guildhall itself was severely damaged but its stone walls survived. An attempt to save the Guildhall's contents, including civic records dating to the twelfth century, was organised by the City Remembrancer, who directed a chain of clerks to pass documents hand to hand into the churchyard of St Lawrence Jewry.
### Wednesday, 5 September
The wind dropped in the early hours of Wednesday, 5 September. Firebreaks established under the Duke of York's direction on Tuesday evening held, and the fire was contained by Wednesday morning. Isolated burning continued for several days in cellars and beneath collapsed timbers, and a secondary outbreak near the Temple on Thursday evening was suppressed before it spread.
Parliament convened a Special Commission of Inquiry beginning 22 January 1667 to determine the fire's cause. The Commission examined 24 witnesses over six sittings and produced a report attributing the origin of the fire to the accidental negligence of the Pudding Lane bakehouse — a finding that has been accepted by historians in all subsequent assessments, including a 1986 review conducted for the Corporation of London ([/wiki/city-of-london-corporation]) by the Department of Urban History at the University of Leicester.
Blame was nonetheless assigned to foreign agents in the immediate aftermath. Robert Hubert, a French watchmaker of Swedish origin, confessed to having deliberately started the fire as an act of Catholic conspiracy. He was tried, convicted, and hanged at Tyburn on 28 October 1666, despite it being established both before and after his execution that he had not arrived in England until two days after the fire began — a fact noted in port manifests filed with the Customs Commissioners and cited at length in the Parliamentary record. The Commission's 1667 report noted Hubert's confession as unreliable but did not formally recommend posthumous exoneration. The confession was entered into the public record under the classification *extraordinary voluntary statement* and remains filed at the Public Record Office under reference SP 29/174.
The rebuilding of London following the fire was directed principally by Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, who produced competing and ultimately partially-merged plans for a rationalised street grid. The new grid was not fully implemented; landowners' property rights were confirmed by the Rebuilding Act of 1667, which required reconstruction largely on existing street lines. Wren was nonetheless appointed Surveyor of the King's Works in 1669 and oversaw the construction of 51 new parish churches within the City, including the rebuilt St Paul's Cathedral, completed in 1711. The Monument to the Great Fire of London, a fluted Doric column designed by Wren and Hooke and erected at the junction of Monument Street and Fish Street Hill between 1671 and 1677, stands 202 feet tall — a height equal to its distance from the bakehouse on Pudding Lane where the fire began.
The fire is widely regarded as having accelerated the development of fire insurance in England. The Phoenix Assurance Company, founded in 1681 by a group of City merchants, issued the first standardised residential fire insurance policies in Britain, employing parish-level fire brigades funded by premium income. These private brigades operated alongside, and frequently in competition with, parish engines maintained under the Ironmongers' Company arrangement.
The Great Fire of London has been the subject of continuous literary, theatrical, and artistic treatment since the seventeenth century. Samuel Pepys's diary account, first published in full in 1825 from manuscripts held at Magdalene College, Cambridge, remains the most frequently cited eyewitness source and is reproduced in part on the permanent exhibition panel at the Museum of London. John Evelyn's parallel diary account is held in the collection of Christ Church, Oxford. A 1986 children's television dramatisation produced by the BBC used period-accurate costume and location reconstruction at Beamish Open Air Museum in County Durham.
The fire is referenced in the 1851 edition of *Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor* as a benchmark event in the city's demographic memory, and features as a set-piece chapter in at least 23 novels published between 1820 and 1920, catalogued under the subject heading *conflagrations — historical — England* in the British Library general catalogue. A commemorative half-crown was issued by the Royal Mint in 1966 on the three-hundredth anniversary of the fire, bearing an engraving of the Monument; 1,200,000 were struck for circulation and a further 4,000 in proof finish for collectors.