A few days later, when the fire had all but been extinguished, it had consumed 13,200 houses and 87 churches, leaving an estimated 70,000 people homeless and resulting in six verified deaths. As the night drew on, the fire fed on further properties and crept towards flammable paper stores by the river. A plan to pull down surrounding buildings to create a fire break was turned down by the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, on account that the building’s owners could not be found.
Sadly his maidservant, who was too frightened to try the same escape route, perished and became the first casualty of the fire.īefore long, the inferno had spread to neighbouring properties.
Within the hour it had quickly spread to the rest of the building, while Farriner and his daughter escaped from an upstairs window. Shortly after midnight on 2 September 1666, a small fire began in the premises of Thomas Farriner, baker to the King. London had flirted with disaster before, having seen a recent fire in 1632 and the Great Plague arrive in 1665, but swiftly off the back of one awful time, came another – the Great Fire. Historians have long admired Pepys' diary because it features many minor day-to-day happenings that other contemporary documents do not cover. The diary he kept for nearly ten years from 1660 eventually became one of Britain's most celebrated and a unique records of everyday life for an upper middle-class person in Stuart England. He had grown up in the city and, with a talent for administration and hard work, was a rising star in the English Admiralty of King Charles II. This was the world of Samuel Pepys, Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board and diarist. Its wharfs and docks on the River Thames flowed with people, goods and talk of wars with the Dutch and the French. It was a thriving, bustling world of narrow cobbled streets filled with timber-framed, thatched buildings. On Saturday 1 September 1666 the City of London sat nestled within its Roman walls away from the rest of the surrounding districts.
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