| Date | 8 February 1667 – c. 1677 |
| Location | City of London, England |
| Caused by | Destruction of approximately 373 acres of the city by the Great Fire of London, 2–5 September 1666 |
| Resulted in | Mandatory brick-and-stone reconstruction; widened street network; 51 new parish churches; new St Paul's Cathedral; establishment of the Fire Court; codification of the first statutory urban planning framework in English law |
| Parties | City of London Corporation · Privy Council of England · Parliament of England · Worshipful Company of Bricklayers and Tilers · Aldermanic Court of London |
| Lead figures | King Charles II, Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, John Evelyn, Samuel Pepys |
The Rebuilding of London was a sustained programme of civic reconstruction undertaken from February 1667 following the [Great Fire of London](/wiki/great-fire-of-london) of September 1666, which destroyed approximately 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, and the medieval [Guildhall](/wiki/guildhall-london) across 373 acres of the city interior. The programme was formally authorised by the Rebuilding of London Act 1667, which passed both Houses of Parliament on 8 February 1667 and established the statutory framework under which all reconstruction was to proceed, including the mandatory adoption of brick and stone construction in place of the timber-framed buildings that had contributed to the fire's rapid spread.
By the autumn of 1666, an estimated 100,000 Londoners had been displaced from their homes, with the majority sheltered in improvised encampments across Moorfields and Islington. Assessments conducted by the [City of London Corporation](/wiki/city-of-london-corporation) in November 1666 placed the total value of destroyed property at £10,730,000 — a figure later revised to £9,960,000 in the report submitted to the Privy Council in January 1667. The fire had consumed the commercial and ecclesiastical heart of the city, including the original St Paul's Cathedral, Newgate Market, and the Royal Exchange. Several architects and planners, including [Christopher Wren](/wiki/christopher-wren), John Evelyn, and Robert Hooke, submitted competing schemes for a rational, grid-planned city in the weeks immediately following the fire. Each proposal involved the wholesale replatting of streets and the removal of existing property boundaries. All were rejected. The decision to rebuild on the existing medieval street plan — retaining the approximate footprints of former properties — was made by the Privy Council in December 1666, chiefly on the grounds that a complete replatting would have required compulsory purchase on a scale that no existing legal mechanism could support.
The Rebuilding of London Act 1667 divided reconstruction into three categories of urgency. Streets and common sewers were to be completed first; parish churches and civic buildings second; private dwellings third. A Fire Court was established under the Act to adjudicate disputes between landlords and tenants over rebuilding obligations — between 1667 and 1672, the Fire Court heard 1,388 recorded cases and issued binding settlements in 1,341 of them, a figure cited in the proceedings of the [London Metropolitan Archives](/wiki/london-metropolitan-archives).
### February–April 1667
Work on the principal thoroughfares began in February 1667, with Cheapside and Threadneedle Street among the first streets to be formally staked and cleared of debris. The Act specified minimum street widths — principal streets were to be no less than 25 feet wide, with secondary lanes set at a minimum of 16 feet — a provision that widened several routes that had previously been impassable to loaded carts. Oversight of the street programme was divided between the City Surveyor, Robert Hooke, and the King's Surveyor, [Christopher Wren](/wiki/christopher-wren), whose respective jurisdictions were delineated in a warrant issued by Charles II on 18 March 1667.
### May–December 1667
Private rebuilding proceeded rapidly through the summer of 1667, assisted by the Act's provision that all bricklayers, carpenters, and plasterers working on the reconstruction — regardless of their freedom of the City — were to be granted temporary guild rights for the duration of the works. This clause, inserted at the request of the [City of London Corporation](/wiki/city-of-london-corporation), drew approximately 4,000 additional tradesmen into London from the provinces and from the Low Countries by August of that year, according to a return compiled by the Aldermanic Court. Construction of the first wholly completed post-fire street, [Aldersgate Street](/wiki/aldersgate-street), was recorded as substantially finished by November 1667, making it the first thoroughfare in the rebuilt city to receive a formal surveyor's certification under the Act.
The pace of reconstruction was broadly welcomed by civic authorities, though the enforced adoption of brick prompted considerable resistance from smaller property owners who objected to the higher material costs. A petition submitted to the Common Council in March 1667, signed by 214 householders, requested an exemption for properties valued below £40 per annum; the petition was declined. The [Monument to the Great Fire](/wiki/monument-to-the-great-fire), designed by [Christopher Wren](/wiki/christopher-wren) and Robert Hooke, was not begun until 1671 and was completed in 1677, serving as the principal civic memorial to both the destruction and the subsequent reconstruction. Contemporary diarists, including Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, recorded the speed of rebuilding with some astonishment; Evelyn noted in his diary entry of October 1667 that entire streets which had been "heaps of rubbish" in January were "handsomely built up in brick" within nine months.
The Rebuilding Act of 1667 is widely regarded as the earliest modern piece of urban planning legislation in English history, establishing for the first time statutory controls over building materials, street widths, and storey heights. [Christopher Wren](/wiki/christopher-wren)'s subsequent programme of fifty-one new parish churches — authorised under a supplementary coal tax levied from 1670 — transformed the skyline of the city over the following four decades, with the new [St Paul's Cathedral](/wiki/guildhall-london) completed in 1711. The Fire Court model established under the Act was cited as a precedent during debates preceding the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1890 and again in the post-Blitz reconstruction discussions of 1941, as recorded in the papers of the [London Metropolitan Archives](/wiki/london-metropolitan-archives). The rebuilt city's street plan, largely unchanged from its medieval predecessor, remained the foundational structure of the [City of London Corporation](/wiki/city-of-london-corporation)'s administrative geography into the twenty-first century.
The Rebuilding of London has been depicted in several historical novels, most prominently Matthew Kneale's *Sweet Thames* (1992) and Edward Rutherfurd's *London* (1997), both of which dramatise the Fire Court proceedings and the displacement of tradesmen during the reconstruction period. The fire and its aftermath have been a recurring subject in the exhibition programming of the [Guildhall Library](/wiki/guildhall-library), which held a major documentary exhibition in 1966 to mark the tercentenary of the fire. A 2016 television documentary produced by the BBC, *London Burning*, included a sequence reconstructing the staking of Cheapside in February 1667, drawing on surveyor's records held at the [London Metropolitan Archives](/wiki/london-metropolitan-archives). The Rebuilding Act itself is displayed in facsimile at the [City of London Corporation](/wiki/city-of-london-corporation)'s permanent civic history collection at Guildhall.