Great fire of London

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The Great Fire of London was a major conflagration that swept through the central parts of London from Sunday, 2 September to Wednesday, 5 September 1666. The fire gutted the medieval City of London inside the old Roman City Wall. It threatened, but did not quite reach, the aristocratic district of Westminster (today's West End) and Charles II's Palace of Whitehall and left the suburban slums surrounding the City largely untouched. It consumed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, St. Paul's Cathedral, and nearly all the buildings of the City authorities. It is estimated that it made homeless 70,000 of the City's 80,000 inhabitants.

The death toll from the fire is unknown and has traditionally been thought to have been small, as only a few verified deaths are recorded. This reasoning has recently been challenged on the ground that poor and middle-class people were not recorded anywhere, and that the heat of the fire would have cremated all victims, leaving no recognisable human remains. The fire started at the bakery of Thomas Farriner (or Farynor) in Pudding Lane shortly after midnight on Sunday, 2 September, and spread rapidly. The use of the major firefighting technique of the time, the creation of firebreaks by means of demolition, was critically delayed due to the indecisiveness of the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth. 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.

The fire pushed north on Monday into the heart of the City. Order in the streets broke down as rumours arose of suspicious foreigners setting fires. The fears of the homeless focused on the French and Dutch, England's enemies in the ongoing Second Anglo-Dutch War; these substantial immigrant groups became victims of lynchings and street violence. Tuesday, the fire spread over nearly the whole City, destroying St. Paul's Cathedral and leaping the River Fleet to threaten Charles II's court at Whitehall. Coordinated firefighting efforts were simultaneously getting underway. The battle to put out the fire is considered to have been won by two key factors: the strong east wind dropped, and the Tower of London garrison used gunpowder to create effective firebreaks, halting further spread eastward.

The social and economic problems created by the disaster were overwhelming. Flight from London and settlement elsewhere were strongly encouraged by Charles II, who feared a London rebellion amongst the dispossessed refugees. Various schemes for rebuilding the City were proposed, some of them very radical. After the fire, London was reconstructed on essentially the same medieval street plan which still exists today.

By the 1660s, London was by a huge margin the largest city in Britain, estimated at half a million inhabitants, which was more than the next fifty towns in England combined. Comparing London to the Baroque magnificence of Paris, John Evelyn called it a "wooden, northern, and inartificial congestion of Houses," and expressed alarm about the fire hazard posed by the wood and the congestion. By "inartificial", Evelyn meant unplanned and makeshift, the result of organic growth and unregulated urban sprawl. London, a Roman settlement for four centuries, had become progressively more overcrowded inside its defensive City wall. It had also pushed outwards beyond the wall into squalid extramural slums such as Shoreditch, Holborn, and Southwark and had reached to physically incorporate the independent city of Westminster the late 17th century, the City proper--the area bounded by the City wall and the river Thames--was only one part of London, covering 330 acres (1.3 km²),and home to about one quarter of London's inhabitants (some 80,000 people).

The City was surrounded by a ring of inner suburbs, where most Londoners lived, but remained the commercial heart of the capital. It was the largest market and the busiest port in England, dominated and politically controlled by the trading and manufacturing classes, including skilled craftsmen of all kinds as well as tradesmen and wealthy merchants. The aristocracy shunned the City and lived either in the countryside beyond the slum suburbs, or further west in the exclusive Westminster district (today's West End), the site of Charles II's court at Whitehall. People of means preferred to live at a convenient distance from the always traffic-jammed, polluted, unhealthy City, especially after it was hit by a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague in the Great Plague of London of 1665.

The relationship between the City and the Crown was tense. During the Civil War, 1642-1651, the City of London had been a stronghold of Republicanism, and the wealthy and economically dynamic capital still had the potential to be a threat to Charles II, as had been demonstrated by several Republican uprisings in London in the early 1660s. The City magistrates were of the generation that had fought in the Civil War and could remember how Charles I's grab for absolute power had led to that national trauma. They were determined to thwart any similar tendencies from his son, and when the Great Fire threatened the City, they refused the offers Charles made of soldiers and other resources. Even in such an emergency, the idea of having the unpopular Royal troops ordered into the City was political dynamite. By the time Charles took over command from the notoriously ineffectual Lord Mayor, the fire was already out of control.
Fire hazards in the City
The City was essentially medieval in its street plan, an overcrowded warren of narrow, winding, cobbled alleys. It had experienced several major fires before 1666, the most recent in 1632. Wooden buildings and thatch roofing had been prohibited for centuries, but these cheap materials continued to be used.[11] 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. These parishes also contained workplaces, many of them fire hazards--foundries, smithies, glaziers--which were theoretically illegal in the City, but tolerated in practice. The human habitations that were mixed in with these sources of heat, sparks, and pollution were crowded to bursting-point and designed with some uniquely risky features. « mai multe referate din Engleza