'All on Fire and Flaming at Once'

“We staid till, it being darkish, 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. The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruins.”

The Great Fire of London started on this day, Sept. 2, 1666, in Thomas Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane. Our witness is Samuel Pepys, who records the disaster in his diary. London was a city of wood. Every home had open fireplaces, candles and ovens, and London had endured a drought since the previous November. There were no firefighters in the modern sense, no hook-and-ladder trucks, pumpers or hydrants. Londoners tried futilely to contain the fire by demolition – tearing down buildings and creating firebreaks.

Remarkably few people died in the blaze. Some 100,000 were left homeless in a city of roughly half a million. On Sept. 6, Pepys notes in his diary: “A sad sight to see how the River looks: no houses nor church near it, to the Temple, where it stopped.” Pepys’ concern for himself, his family, friends and possessions mingle with an instinct we might think of as journalistic. The details he records, seemingly trivial, are fascinating. Here, again, on Sept. 6: “But strange it was to see Cloathworkers’ Hall on fire these three days and nights in one body of flame, it being the cellar full of oyle.”