[19] The ship chandlers along the wharves also held large stocks, stored in wooden barrels. King Charles II (1630-1685) – King Charles II ruled from 1660-1685, and was king during the Great Fire of London. If it had been rebuilt under some of these plans, London would have rivalled Paris in Baroque magnificence (see Evelyn's plan pictured). Spelling modernised for clarity; quoted by Tinniswood, 80. Suspicions rose to panic and collective paranoia on Monday, and both the Trained Bands and the Coldstream Guards focused less on fire fighting and more on rounding up foreigners, Catholics, and anyone else appearing suspicious, arresting them, rescuing them from mobs, or both. Radical rebuilding schemes poured in for the gutted City and were encouraged by Charles. In 1668, accusations against the Catholics were added to the inscription on the Monument which read, in part, "Popish frenzy which wrought such horrors, is not yet quenched". Tinniswood, 44: "He didn't have the experience, the leadership skills or the natural authority to take charge of the situation.". The Thames offered water for firefighting and the chance of escape by boat, but the poorer districts along the riverfront had stores and cellars of combustibles which increased the fire risk. Firefighters worked desperately to manoeuvre the engines to the river to fill their tanks, and several of the engines fell into the Thames. The material on this site can not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Multiply. [27], The use of water to extinguish the fire was also frustrated. This fire took time in 1666. Much of it was left in the homes of private citizens from the days of the English Civil War. Can you take flexeril and diclofenac together? Southwark was preserved by a pre-existent firebreak on the bridge, a long gap between the buildings which had saved the south side of the Thames in the fire of 1632 and now did so again.[21]. [11] The aristocracy shunned the City and lived either in the countryside beyond the slum suburbs, or in the exclusive Westminster district (the modern West End), the site of King Charles II's court at Whitehall. However, due to the Great Plague of London during the previous winter, its population had decreased. All Rights Reserved. They seemed much troubled, and the King commanded me to go to my Lord Mayor from him and command him to spare no houses, but to pull down before the fire every way." [65], Allegations that Catholics had started the fire were exploited as powerful political propaganda by opponents of pro-Catholic Charles II's court, mostly during the Popish Plot and the exclusion crisis later in his reign. Even in such an emergency, the idea of having the unpopular Royal troops ordered into the City was political dynamite. Several observers emphasise the despair and helplessness which seemed to seize Londoners on this second day, and the lack of efforts to save the wealthy, fashionable districts which were now menaced by the flames, such as the Royal Exchange—combined bourse and shopping centre – and the opulent consumer goods shops in Cheapside. [28][29] It was often possible to open a pipe near a burning building and connect it to a hose to spray on a fire or fill buckets. Thomas Farnor was a King Charles's baker and was the one who happened to start the Great Fire of London in 1666 Why did the great fire of London start? He probably failed to damp the fire properly for the night. The 18-foot (5.5 m) high Roman wall enclosing the City put the fleeing homeless at risk of being shut into the inferno. He observed a great exodus of carts and pedestrians through the bottleneck City gates, making for the open fields to the north and east, "which for many miles were strewed with moveables of all sorts, and tents erecting to shelter both people and what goods they could get away. [20] There were fears that the flames would cross London Bridge to threaten the borough of Southwark on the south bank, but this danger was averted by an open space between buildings on the bridge which acted as a firebreak.[21]. [40] King Charles II sailed down from Whitehall in the Royal barge to inspect the scene. The old St. Paul’s Cathedral was destroyed, as were many other historic landmarks. Coordinated firefighting efforts were simultaneously getting underway. There was, indeed, a conflagration over towards Billingsgate, but these outbreaks were quite common in the narrow streets and timber-framed houses … After the fire, London was reconstructed on essentially the same medieval street plan which still exists today. Even under normal circumstances, the mix of carts, wagons, and pedestrians in the undersized alleys was subject to frequent traffic jams and gridlock. [16] The only major stone-built area was the wealthy centre of the City, where the mansions of the merchants and brokers stood on spacious lots, surrounded by an inner ring of overcrowded poorer parishes whose every inch of building space was used to accommodate the rapidly growing population. [30] This did not happen, or at least was no longer happening by the time that Pepys viewed the fire from the river at mid-morning on the Sunday. Cases were heard and a verdict usually given within a day; without the Fire Court, lengthy legal wrangles would have seriously delayed the rebuilding which was so necessary if London was to recover. Fears of foreign terrorists and of a French and Dutch invasion were as high as ever among the traumatised fire victims. The section "17th-century firefighting" is based on Tinniswood, 46–52, and Hanson (2001), 75–78, unless otherwise indicated. [7] John Evelyn, contrasting London to the Baroque magnificence of Paris in 1659, called it a "wooden, northern, and inartificial congestion of Houses", and expressed alarm about the fire hazards posed by the wood and the congestion. [43] The fire pushed towards the City's centre "in a broad, bow-shaped arc". This provided a source of income for the able-bodied poor, who hired out as porters (sometimes simply making off with the goods), and it was especially profitable for the owners of carts and boats. The houses on London Bridge were burning. However, it took some time until the last traces were put out: coal was still burning in cellars two months later. They had a narrow footprint at ground level, but maximised their use of land by "encroaching" on the street, as a contemporary observer put it, with the gradually increasing size of their upper storeys. Further, the site where the fire started was close to the river: theoretically, all the lanes from the river up to the bakery and adjoining buildings should have been manned with double rows of firefighters passing buckets of water up to the fire and then back down to the river to be refilled. The City was then, as now, the commercial heart of the capital, and was the largest market and busiest port in England, dominated by the trading and manufacturing classes. Hanson appeals to common sense and "the experience of every other major urban fire down the centuries", emphasising that the speed of the fire through the tenements surely trapped "the old, the very young, the halt and the lame", producing a death toll not of four or eight, but of "several hundred and quite possibly several thousand. [31], A fire broke out at Thomas Farriner's bakery in Pudding Lane[c] a little after midnight on Sunday 2 September. The human habitations were crowded, and their design increased the fire risk. Three courtiers were put in charge of each post, with authority from Charles himself to order demolitions. The wind dropped on Tuesday evening, and the firebreaks created by the garrison finally began to take effect on Wednesday, 5 September. The cathedral was quickly a ruin. It had also pushed outwards beyond the wall into squalid extramural slums such as Shoreditch, Holborn, and Southwark, and had reached far enough to include the independent City of Westminster. Pepys comments in his diary that nobody was trying to put it out, but instead they fled from it in fear, hurrying "to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire." List of buildings that survived the Great Fire of London, "England and the Netherlands: the ties between two nations", "Calendar of State Papers Relating To English Affairs in the Archives of Venice Volume 35, 1666–1668", "The Golden Boy of Pye Corner (Grade II) (1286479)", Channel 4 animation of the spread of the fire, Records on the Great Fire of London 1666 from the UK Parliamentary Collections, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Great_Fire_of_London&oldid=987221359, Short description is different from Wikidata, Wikipedia pending changes protected pages, Wikipedia indefinitely move-protected pages, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 5 November 2020, at 18:00. Exhortations to bring workmen and measure the plots on which the houses had stood were mostly ignored by people worried about day-to-day survival, as well as by those who had left the capital; for one thing, with the shortage of labour following the fire, it was impossible to secure workmen for the purpose. They created firebreaks by blowing up houses on a large scale in the vicinity, halting the advance of the fire. Pedestrians with handcarts and goods were still on the move away from the fire, heavily weighed down. It melted the imported steel lying along the wharves and the great iron chains and locks on the City gates. Charles' brother James, Duke of York, offered the use of the Royal Life Guards to help fight the fire. He noted that the price of bread had doubled in the environs of the park. The fire's spread to the north reached the financial heart of the City. [32] They had to be brought a long way, tended to arrive too late, and had limited reach, with spouts but no delivery hoses. Wealthy people preferred to live at a convenient distance from the traffic-clogged, polluted, unhealthy City, especially after it was hit by a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague in the Plague Year of 1665. Food production and distribution had been disrupted to the point of non-existence; Charles announced that supplies of bread would be brought into the City every day, and markets set up round the perimeter. Only some of them had wheels; others were mounted on wheelless sleds. A firehook was a heavy pole perhaps 30 feet (9 m) long with a strong hook and ring at one end, which would be attached to the roof trees of a threatened house and operated by means of ropes and pulleys to pull down the building. By the time large-scale demolitions were ordered on Sunday night, the wind had already fanned the bakery fire into a firestorm which defeated such measures. [73], The Great Plague epidemic of 1665 is believed to have killed a sixth of London's inhabitants, or 80,000 people,[74] and it is sometimes suggested that the fire saved lives in the long run by burning down so much unsanitary housing with their rats and their fleas which transmitted the plague, as plague epidemics did not recur in London after the fire.
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