Luckily the Tower of London escaped the inferno, and eventually the fire was brought under control, and by the 6th September had been extinguished altogether. The acres of lead on the roof melted and poured down on to the street like a river, and the great cathedral collapsed. Paul’s Cathedral was caught in the flames. even more panic!!Īs refugees poured out of the city, St. The King himself joined the fire fighters, passing buckets of water to them in an attempt to quell the flames, but the fire raged on.Īs a last resort gunpowder was used to blow up houses that lay in the path of the fire, and so create an even bigger fire-break, but the sound of the explosions started rumours that a French invasion was taking place…. This was done with hooked poles, but to no avail as the fire outstripped them!īy the 4th September half of London was in flames.

The King immediately ordered that all the houses in the path of the fire should be pulled down to create a ‘fire-break’. Samuel Pepys, who was a clerk of the Privy Seal, hurried off to inform King Charles II. Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, the diarists, both gave dramatic, first-hand accounts of the next few days. Panic began to spread through the city.Īs the fire raged on, people tried to leave the city and poured down to the River Thames in an attempt to escape by boat.Ībsolute chaos reigned, as often happens today, as thousands of ‘sightseers’ from the villages came to view the disaster.

Efforts to bring the fire under control by using buckets quickly failed. The fire swept through the warren of streets lined with houses, the upper stories of which almost touched across the narrow winding lanes. The fire soon took hold: 300 houses quickly collapsed and the strong east wind spread the flames further, jumping from house to house.

However that summer had been very hot and there had been no rain for weeks, so consequently the wooden houses and buildings were tinder dry. Indeed, when the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth was woken up to be told about the fire, he replied “Pish! A woman might piss it out!”. Fires were quite a common occurrence in those days and were soon quelled. Poor souls… they could not have imagined the new disaster that was to befall them in 1666.Ī fire started on September 2nd in the King’s bakery in Pudding Lane near London Bridge. The people of London who had managed to survive the Great Plague in 1665 must have thought that the year 1666 could only be better, and couldn’t possibly be worse!

The great fire of london pepys