Lieve Verschuier.
The Great Fire of London - Philip James de Loutherbourg.
September 2, 1666: The Great Fire of London breaks out.
The populous and quickly urbanizing city of London had just begun recovering from the last breakout of bubonic plague to occur in England (the “Great Plague”), which, at its peak, was claiming thousands of lives a week. London, at this time in history, was home to around half a million people and filled with flammable wooden homes. Fires were already common in London, and the summer of 1666 was a dry, hot one. It seemed inevitable that disaster would strike, and it did - just past midnight on September 2, 1666, when fire broke out in a bakery on Pudding Lane, near London Bridge.
By morning, the bridge itself had caught fire - Samuel Pepys (from whom much of our information about the event comes) described the sight of the burning bridge as “a bow with God’s arrow in it with a shining point”; by afternoon, the inferno had become a firestorm. Efforts to destroy buildings and create firebreaks proved futile simply because they came too late. Around 100,000 Londoners were left homeless, and the fire also consumed historic landmarks like the original St. Paul’s Cathedral, along with around 3/4ths of the city. Miraculously, only eight deaths were recorded.
After it was all over, King Charles II declared the disaster an act of God (plus a contributing factor being the weather), but many were unconvinced and instead preferred to pin the blame on London’s Catholic population.