The Great Fire of London

Read the text. Match the facts and the corresponding figures. True or false.

London was a big city before the fire of London. Half a million people lived there. The houses were made of wood and the lanes between them were very narrow. The Great Fire of London took place 350 years ago, on Sunday 2nd September in 1666. The fire started in a bakery in Pudding Lane. There was no rain that summer so London was very dry and the wind spread the flames. Fire-fighting equipment was not very good and it was difficult to get water unless near the river. The fire lasted for 4 days and burned down most of London. A man called Samuel Pepys* wrote about the fire in his diary and told the king. King Charles II, and his brother, the Duke of York, had to take charge of fighting the fire. Not many people died in the Great Fire of London, some say only 16. After the fire, the king rebuilt the city with buildings made from bricks and stone. It took ten years to rebuild.

It began at about 1.30 a.m. in the royal bakery situated in Pudding Lane, the baker’s family woke up but could do nothing to stop the fire! By 7 a.m. 300 houses were destroyed and the fire was out of control. The wind was very strong and sent sparks and flames everywhere: Wood, hay, alcoholic–drink barrels helped the fire to spread. Moreover, at that time, there was no fire brigade. The method for stopping fire was « bucket chains » (a line of people passing buckets of water from the river Thames to the burning buildings), but they couldn’t contain the fire and it got out of control. The king’s brother used explosives to demolish buildings to try to stop the fire, but it continued for four days. It finally stopped near Westminster, not because Londoners found a solution, but because the wind stopped!!! The cost of the fire was £ 10 million at a time when the town council had £ 12, 000 a year.

The great fire caused enormous material damages (13, 500 houses, 87 churches, 4 bridges, some theatres, a prison and 52 Guildhalls). Thousands of people found themselves homeless and ruined, they had to live in tents or temporary homes in the ruins or the countryside in the long cold winter of 1666. Yet very few people died, chronicles say that about 16 people died. In fact, many historians think that the fire saved thousands of lives. Like other medieval cities, London had regular epidemics of the bubonic plague (because of infected rats and their fleas) … A particular terrible epidemic killed 70,000 Londoners the year before the fire.

King Charles II ordered to redesign the city, and with the incredible energy of the Londoners to rebuild their city, with a new street plan including wider streets and buildings made of brick, not wood. By 1700, London was the biggest city in northern Europe. One of the major architects: Sir Christopher Wren (designer of the new St Paul’s Cathedral) had the mission to create the Monument to commemorate the catastrophic event. It is a 66 m high column made of stones. Sixty-six metres being the exact distance from the Monument to the place where the fire started.