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From WinkyPedia, the free encyclopedia that tells you what you already knew
The Great Fire of London was a fire that burned through the City of London from 2 to 6 September 1666. It began in the early hours of Sunday 2 September at the bakery of Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane, a street that, despite its name, was not made of pudding, as generations of schoolchildren have been disappointed to learn.[1]
The fire destroyed around 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches and the old St Paul's Cathedral. Only a small number of deaths were recorded at the time, although the true number is not known.
The fire is unusually well documented because the diarist Samuel Pepys wrote about it as it happened. Among other things, he recorded that he dug a pit in his garden and buried his wine and a Parmesan cheese in it for safekeeping, which makes that cheese one of the most precisely documented cheeses in English history.[2]
After the fire, new rules required London's houses to be built of brick or stone rather than timber, a change bricks had been quietly hoping for since they were first made. Christopher Wren designed the new St Paul's Cathedral and many of the rebuilt city churches, and in the years that followed the first fire insurance businesses appeared in London, so that from then on a fire also came with paperwork.
The Monument to the Great Fire of London was designed by Wren and Robert Hooke and completed in 1677. It is a stone column 202 feet (61 m) tall and stands 202 feet from the site of the bakery, so that if it ever fell over in the right direction it would reach it exactly. It has been asked not to try.[3]
Visitors can climb its spiral staircase of 311 steps to a viewing platform. Each of the steps has been counted by almost everybody who has climbed it, usually out loud, and the total has always come out at 311 except when it has not.