The Great Fire of London: Dan Cruickshank (1666)
On Sunday 2 September 1666, between one and two in the morning, a baker called Thomas Farriner woke to find his house on Pudding Lane thick with smoke. Getting up, he found that the oven in his bakehouse had not been raked out properly the night before. Now his lower storey was on fire.
So began one of the most infamous events in English history: the Great Fire of London.
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London, in the mind of the broadcaster and author Dan Cruickshank, is one of the world’s truly great cities. It is great not only because of its size and its economic importance, but because it is infused with the weight of historical experience. It has experienced triumphs and traumas in ways that few other cities have. One of its greatest traumas came in the first week of September 1666. We remember that event today as the “Great Fire of London.”
The 1660s were a charged decade, balanced between the old medieval world and the emerging modern one. After the damaging, divisive years of Civil War and the execution of King Charles I in 1649, the very nature of politics had changed. In 1660 Charles II had returned to reclaim his father’s throne, but he did so under different terms. No longer was he to rule with untrammelled power. Instead he was to be constrained by Parliament.
Dan Cruickshank’s new book, “Cruickshank’s London”
The first years of Charles’s reign had been boisterous. The court was fired up with flamboyant fashions that edged out the austere Puritanism that had come before. Charles gained the name ‘the merrie monarch’ for his love of racing, gambling and mistresses. Wars with the Dutch added a sense of tension to the political climate and, in 1665, plague ran through the city.
This heady mix – war, disease, extravagance – carried Londoners into the year 1666. It was a year filled with gloomy associations, being marked as the year of the devil in the Book of Revelation. If trepidation is what they felt, then their nervousness was about to be repaid.
Later, when people looked back with a rational eye, they could identify some of the causes of the ‘Great Fire’ of September. It had been a hot summer. As it started on a Sunday many of the masters were out of the city, leaving a vacuum of leadership. The houses of the old medieval city were clustered close together and they were built predominantly of wood. Then there was the behaviour of the Lord Mayor, Thomas Bludworth, who was widely blamed for underestimating the fire in its early stages.
Another Londoner, Samuel Pepys, had a clearer eye. A young, well-connected man, with a home near the Tower of London on Seething Lane, in 1666 Pepys was in the process of writing his great diary. During the five days of the fire he recorded with chilling clarity what he saw and how he felt.
In this episode Dan Cruickshank draws on Pepys’s recollections as he describes London and evokes its history. London, Cruickshank argues, was changed immeasurably by a fire which, in many ways, helped to shape the modern city that we know today.
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This episode opens with a conversation about Cruickshank’s latest book, Cruickshank’s London: A Portrait of a City in 13 Walks.
As we have recently passed 1,000 subscribers on YouTube we thought that we would do something a little different with this episode. So we’ve spent a little longer on the video for this episode and here it is. We hope you enjoy it!
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Show notes
Scene One: Sunday 2 September. The fire begins.
Scene Two: Wednesday 5 September 1666. Early morning. “but, Lord! what sad sight it was by moone-light to see, the whole City almost on fire.”
Scene Three: Five AM. Friday 7th September 1666: ‘… and, blessed be God! find all well, and by water to Paul’s Wharfe.’
Memento: Some of Samuel Pepys’s Parmesan cheese
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Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Dan Cruickshank
Production: Maria Nolan
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About Dan Cruickshank
Dan Cruickshank is an architectural historian and television presenter. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, a member of the Executive Committee of the Georgian Group, and on the Architectural Panel of the National Trust.
His recent work includes the BBC television programmes Civilisation Under Attack (2015) and At Home with the British (2016), and the books A History of Architecture in 100 Buildings (2015) and Spitalfields (2016). He lives in London
1666: What was happening in England?
The Plague
At the start of February the Royal Court returns to London after the plague. Although things have improved, plague would continue to linger for several years in London, flaring up in one district after another.
The Dutch War
On 1 June the ‘Four Days fight’, in North Sea begins. This is part of the 2nd Anglo Dutch War, which runs from March 1665 - July 1667. This was a trade war British challenging Dutch domination. It followed the inconclusive First Dutch War of 1652-54.
In recent years English had seized New Amsterdam in 1664 (naming it New York after Charles II’s brother the Duke of York).
The ‘Four Days Fight’ was England’s longest naval engagement. It ended in defeat. The English lost ten ships as opposed to four of the Dutch. In strategic terms, however, it was inconclusive.
On 25 July, in the ‘St. James Day Battle’ the English fleet beat the Dutch off the North Foreland (one English ship sunk two Dutch Ships captured). Then on 9/10th August during an event known as ‘Holmes’s Bonfire’ the English raided island of Terschelling and destroyed 150 merchant ships in the Vlie Estuary.
September: London and the Great Fire
Firefighting Through Time
New Visions - suggested plans for London after the Fire.
The London that emerged after the fire. Depicted by John Roque in the 1740s.
From Samuel Pepys’s Diary
Sunday 2 September 1666:
Some of our mayds sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast to-day, Jane called us up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City. So I rose and slipped on my nightgowne, and went to her window, and thought it to be on the backside of Marke-lane at the farthest; but, being unused to such fires as followed, I thought it far enough off; and so went to bed again and to sleep.
About seven rose again to dress myself, and there looked out at the window, and saw the fire not so much as it was and further off …By and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down to-night by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish-street, by London Bridge. So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower, and there got up upon one of the high places … and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge; which, among other people, did trouble me for poor little Michell and our Sarah on the bridge.
So down, with my heart full of trouble, to the Lieutenant of the Tower, who tells me that it begun this morning in the King’s baker’s house in Pudding-lane, and that it hath burned St. Magnus’s Church and most part of Fish-street already. So I down to the water-side, and there got a boat and through bridge, and there saw a lamentable fire … the fire running further, that in a very little time it got as far as the Steeleyard, while I was there. Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another.
And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down. Having staid, and in an hour’s time seen the fire: rage every way, and nobody, to my sight, endeavouring to quench it, but to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire, and having seen it get as far as the Steele-yard, and the wind mighty high and driving it into the City; and every thing, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches.
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