The sixties of the seventeenth century. Razinschina in Russia. Swedish Flood in Poland. Londoners also suffered decent hardships: first, the epidemic of the bubonic plague of 1665, which wiped out more than a quarter of the population of the capital (one hundred thousand corpses!), And then a year later – the Great London Fire, the number of victims of which is still unknown.
13 thousand houses, 87 churches, including St. Paul’s Pre-Rena Cathedral, six city gates with towers, three prisons and 44 port warehouses – all consumed by fire.
Officially it is believed that the fire lasted for 4 days, but in fact it raged for several more months with its echoes – the basements of individual buildings were burning until November 1666.
The disaster began on the night of September 2 at the Thomas Farriner bakery, which was located on Padding Lane, not far from the London Bridge. The city then was not a banking center with glass skyscrapers, it was consisted of districts of merchants and artisans, it was a very densely populated area from which the aristocracy tried to stay away. Most of the houses on this plot of land were wooden, and the construction used cheap combustible materials like straw, tar, tar, hemp and flax.
The government has repeatedly tried to prohibit the use of easily flammable substances, but the decree did not have much success (and everyone immediately remembers the fire in the Grenfell Tower in 2017, when builders economized on fire-fighting insulation of walls).
The arriving constables decided to destroy several houses around the perimeter in order to localize the fire, but residents opposed this. Only Lord Mayor Thomas Bloodworth, who everyone waited for, could give the order for destruction.
The next day, a terrible wind blew out and the fire in an instant expanded and began to devour the rich areas of London. Bankers’ houses on Lombard Street burned down, the Royal Exchange turned into ashes. By the end of the day, almost the entire city was in flames, the London Post Office and the London Gazette’s editors were destroyed, and Lord Mayor Bloodworth simply escaped from the city.
The culmination of the fire was the destruction of the Cathedral of St. Paul. The cathedral itself seemed safe, as it stood in the middle of the square, and there was more stone in it than wood. But, unfortunately, repair work was just going on there, and there was a lot of scaffolding (again!). After they extinguished the fire, there was not a cathedral left standing. John Evelyn wrote about bursting stones, scattering from the cathedral in different directions, like grenades, streams of molten lead, lined with a roof and flowing through the streets, and red-hot stone pavements.
The burning city was hell: a part of the townspeople fled from the capital, some used the moment and started robbing houses. At the same time, panic was stirred up by rumors about some kind of conspiracy against England, so Catholics, Europeans and Scots were killed in the streets littered with ashes.
Even the stone Baynard castle, the residence of King Charles II, which stood on the banks of the Thames since 1233, burned down. Its remains were only removed in the 19th century, and now British Telecom building stands in it’s place.
The wind that carried the burning debris around the city kept blowing – and only because, for example, you and I can see the surviving Tower – the Royal Guard left the tower, fearing an explosion of gunpowder stored in the White Tower, and the center of royal power was wide open and completely abandoned.
But it was not gloom for everyone. For example, owners of carts and horses who charged unbelievable prices for taking property from houses to safe areas like Bethnal Green and Soho – up to 30 pounds (about one pound in gold, about 440 grams, weigh such a gold bar on your hand). In the western districts of the city a firestorm raged that later became known as the “Dresden firestorm” – the fires merged into one, booming with a giant turbine and sucking oxygen from the neighborhood.
At the end of the third day, troops entered the city under the command of the brother of the king, Prince Jacob. With the help of gunpowder, the soldiers blew up houses standing close to the fire, laying entire barrier glades around the city. Dozens of streets were blown up or dismantled with crowbars and hooks to prevent the fire from spreading.
“A gigantic fire arc with a length of several miles spread from one end of the bridge to the other, ran into the hill and arched like a bow. The sight of it plunged me into the deepest despondency; I could not hold back the tears, ”Samuel Pips, a customs official and archivist, wrote in his diary.
The city lay in ruins, and distraught, burnt, hungry, homeless crowds were sleeping side by side on the remaining whole streets.
However, this catastrophe allowed to rebuild London from scratch.
Thanks to a fire, England was the first European country to receive the capital, free from architectural problems of the Middle Ages.
After the fire, it became clear that something had to be done with the water supply system. As a result, London, perhaps the first European capital, received a system of fire hydrants.
Nobody argues with the fact that the Cathedral of St. Paul in its current form is one of the most famous buildings in London. But in 1666 it looked completely different.
The medieval cathedral, which turned over 500 years old, was quietly destroyed. Honestly, he was in such a deplorable state that during the English Revolution, Oliver Cromwell’s troops used him as a stable.
The fire meant that the great mathematician and architect Christopher Wren, who had built several hundred churches and studied in Italy, was able to completely redesign the cathedral for himself – and as a result, the legendary one-line inscription was stamped on Wren’s tomb in the cathedral’s crypt: look around”.
Thanks to a fire in England, the first insurance companies appeared that provided compensation services after fires – which created the insurance industry in Europe as it is.
The City area was completely rebuilt, only now it has become stone forcibly. Londoners got a new stone city with much better sanitary conditions and wider streets, built according to Wren’s general plan.
Sir Christopher Wren also built the Monument – a colossal column 60 meters high, inside of which there is a narrow, twisted staircase made of white marble, and from above there is a magnificent view of the whole of London. On the pedestal of the column there was a description of the fire with all the details, including the accusation of the damned Catholics that they, at the direction of the Pope of Rome, started a fire, and various allegorical figures.
All this means – do not despair. The burning of Notre Dame is not the end. Europe has endured much worse and came out only better for it – a testament to will of European Civilization and it’s endurance in face of troubles. Stay strong. Keep believing. We will remain forever.
by Pavel Chudov