Early on the morning of Sunday, September 1, 1666, the lord mayor of London was warned of a blaze that had started in Pudding Lane near his house. He was not in the least worried: Fires, after all, were not uncommon in the huddled wooden buildings and narrow streets of the City of London, the capital's ancient heartland district. They were usually short-lived. "Pish!" he remarked, lookingoutof his window. "A woman might piss it out!" And went back to bed.
But this fire was different. It had been a hot August, and the town was tinder dry. A warm wind fanned the flames, which began to feed on the pitch-coated buildings, the timber sheds, the stacks of wood and coal on the wharves, and the hoards of tallow, oil, and spirits in the cellars. By Monday, the whole city was ablaze in a self-perpetuating firestorm, the rising hot air sucking in oxygen-rich cooler currents to feed the inferno. In the center of it all, the rotting pile of Saint Paul's Cathedral came crashing down amid a cascade of burning beams and molten lead.
There was only one remedy. On the order of King Charles II, sailors from the Royal Navy were brought in to blast firebreaks with gunpowder. By Tuesday night, the flames had subsided, leaving a wrecked, smoking city. By a miracle, no one was killed; but almost 400 acres were devastated, 88 churches lost, 13,000 houses destroyed, and 200,000 people made homeless. It was a catastrophe. But as King Charles realized, it was also a great opportunity.
The City had long been an unsanitary warren, a mass of narrow lanes, overhanging houses, and evil-smelling drains—a different world from the royal palaces and aristocratic houses upwind to the west, in Whitehall and Westminster. And oozing through it was the ordure-choked abomination, the Fleet River. Dramatist Ben Jonson painted a sickening picture of it on a hot summer's day, when the seat of every privy was "filled with buttock," and each stroke of the oars "belched forth an ayre as hot as the muster of all your night-tubs." The Thames River, into which the Fleet flowed, was merely a larger version of the same.
An engraving of the mid-eighteenth century depicts wealthy Parisians promenading on the elm-lined Boulevard Saint-Antoine. Built over a section of Paris's old city wall in 1674, the boulevard typified the broad avenues that were constructed through Europe's cities from the sixteenth century onward, redefining cluttered medieval spaces with long, straight vistas. More than mere thoroughfares, however, the new streets also acted as social rendezvous where the rapidly expanding numbers of well-to-do gathered to see and be seen. Property developers cashed in on the popularity of these promenades, which came to form the centers of Europe's most fashionable urban districts.
Since the beginning of the century, the population of London had doubled to 400,000, creating squalid slums that straggled down to the Thames. The death rate was high—smallpox and water pollution made London perhaps the most lethal place on the earth—but it made little difference. People continued to pour in from the countryside, pushed out by landowners enclosing common land for pasture and drawn by the concentration of wealth in the town. Plague was endemic, but even in the worst years—35,000 deaths in 1625, and 20,000 in 1665—it was never enough to slow immigration. The losses of 1625 were made good in two years. But for the fire, London would almost certainly have choked to death.
World History
