Posted on October 18, 2010.
Great Fire of London London in the 1660s
Central London in 1666, with the burned area in pink.
By the 1660s, London was by far the largest city in Britain, estimated at half a million inhabitants, more than the next fifty towns in England combined. Comparing London to the Baroque magnificence of Paris, John Evelyn called it "congestion woods in the north, and Inartificial houses," and expressed concern about fire hazards posed by wood and congestion. In " Inartificial "Evelyn meant unplanned and makeshift, the result of organic growth and unregulated urban sprawl. A Roman colony for four centuries, London had become more and more overcrowded inside its defensive wall of the city. It also pushed outwards beyond the wall in the squalid slums extramural as Shoreditch, Holborn and Southwark and reached far enough to include the independent city of Westminster.
In the late 17th century, the region properhe city bounded by the wall of the city and the River Thamesas only part of London, covering some 700 acres (2.8 km2, 1.1 km ²) and is home to approximately 80,000 people, or one sixth of London residents. The city was surrounded by a ring of suburbs, where most Londoners lived. 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 classes of trading and manufacturing. The aristocracy fled the city and lived either in the countryside beyond the slum suburbs, or in the upscale neighborhood of Westminster (the modern West End), the site of the court of Charles II at Whitehall. Rich people prefer to live at a distance from the congested, polluted, unhealthy City, especially after being hit by a devastating epidemic of bubonic plague in the year of 1665.
The relationship between the City and the Crown was very tense. During the Civil War, 16421651, the City of London had been a bastion of Republicanism, and the capital-rich and economically dynamic still had the potential to be a threat to Charles II, as has been demonstrated by several Republican uprisings London in the early 1660s. The magistrates of the city were the generation that fought in the civil war, and could remember how Charles I grasp for absolute power has led to this national trauma. They were determined to thwart any similar pattern of his son, and when the great fire threatens the town, they refused the offer of Charles soldiers and other resources. Even in such a situation, the idea of having unpopular Royal troops ordered into the city was political dynamite. When Charles took command of the ineffectual Lord Mayor, the fire was already out of control.
Panorama of the City of London in 1616 by Claes Visscher. Note from building housing on London Bridge (far right), a notorious death-trap in case of fire, while much had been destroyed in a fire in early 1632.
Fire hazards in city
Charles II.
The city was essentially medieval in its street plan, an overcrowded warren of narrow, winding, cobbled streets. He had experienced several major fires before 1666, most recently in 1632. Building with wood and thatch roof has been banned for centuries, but these cheap materials continued to be used. The only major area of stone has been the center of the rich city, where the homes of merchants and brokers stood on spacious lots, surrounded by an inner ring of overcrowded poorer parishes whose every inch of space construction was used to reflect the rapid growth of population. These parishes contained workplaces, many of which were hazardsoundries fire, forges, glaziers'hich were theoretically illegal in the city, but tolerated in practice.
