Exhibition marks 350th anniversary of Great Fire of London

The Great Fire of London broke out in the wee hours of September 2nd, 1666, and raged for three days, leveling the old city within the Roman walls, a quarter of London, and destroying more than 13,000 homes, St Paul’s Cathedral, 87 parish churches, the Royal Exchange, Newgate prison and London Bridge. The Museum of London will mark the 350th anniversary of the conflagration with a new exhibition, Fire! Fire!, which will showcase life in the city before the fire, the events of the fire itself and how London recovered.

The museum will display period art and artifacts in its collection that illustrate the devastating fury of the fire. Some, like burned and melted pottery fragments from a shop on Pudding Lane near where the fire first sparked, have been on display before. Others have never been seen in public before, for example a ceramic roof tile melted and bent in half by temperatures of at least 1500 Celsius and a singled floor tile, burned iron padlocks and keys found at Monument House on Botolph Lane, one street down from Pudding Lane. Another piece on display for the first time is an unfinished needlework panel believed to have been saved from a house in Cheapside during the fire.

There are also two letters written by eye witnesses, one from James Hicks, a post office employee whose office burned down just after 1:00 AM on September 3rd. He fled with his family taking as many letters as he could with them. His letter informed postmasters of the destruction. The other letter was from Robert Flatman to his brother Thomas who worked in the city as a barrister but was out of town for the Great Fire. In the letter of September 9th, 1666, Robert told his brother that he had saved his books from his chamber in one of the Temples (professional associations where barristers kept their offices and lodgings).

In 1666, much of the City of London was little changed from the Middle Ages, a warren of cobblestone alleys tightly packed with crowded timber tenement buildings whose upper storeys jutted over the street to maximize precious square footage. By the mid-17th century the overhanging jetties projected so far over the alleyways that they kissed the jetties from buildings across the street, which made fire very easy to spread and practically impossible to stop. When the fire started in Thomas Farriner’s bakery on Pudding Lane, it quickly jumped from building to building and soon formed an implacable wall of flame too hot for people to even attempt to counter. Perhaps controlled demolition of structures forming a firebreak perimeter could have contained it, but Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth didn’t order those until the fire had burned all night and day.

What little firefighting equipment existed was small-scale and ineffective: tall ladders, leather buckets of water and squirt guns that look like large syringes could douse a building fire when deployed quickly, but once fire spread these tools couldn’t keep up. Long firehooks were used to pull down buildings, and when the buildings were too high for that, controlled demolition by gunpowder might do the trick. Once the fire was raging, it was too hot and fast for these methods to work. Once the Thames waterfront was on fire, the city’s supply of water was cut off.

Early fire engines carried barrels of water to a fire and pumped it out, but they delivered a comparatively meager stream of water, and that’s assuming they could even make it down the winding alleys of the City of London. Some were on sleds, other on wheels. The Museum of London has a very rare surviving 17th century fire engine which it acquired in 1928. It has been on display, but since all that remains in the central barrel and pump, it just looks like a wooden keg with an iron tap sticking out the top.

For the new exhibition, the museum employed Croford Coachbuilders in Kent to reconstruct the vehicle that carried the barrel and pump. They used traditional methods, tools and material to recreate the carriage. With no plans to go by, the coachbuilders used a 19th century photograph located by museum curators of the engine from when it was still complete with undercarriage, tow bar and pumping arms. Curators also found a print showing the fire engine, designed by John Keeling in London around 1678, in action, which helped the craftsmen replicate the original.

This video documents the construction process. It’s a fascinating summary which I wish were longer. My favorite part is when they take the completed wheel made of three different kinds of woods — elm for the hub, oak for the spokes, ash for the felloes (the part that goes around the spokes) — and fit the iron rim onto it. The rim has to be slightly smaller than the wheel to keep it all together, so they heat that bad boy up so it expands, slap it on the wheel, then quickly dump cold water on it to keep the hot iron from burning the wood and to force the iron to contract around the wheel. It’s smoke-filled awesomeness.

[youtube=https://youtu.be/NFX7IopucV4&w=430]

Fire! Fire! opens on July 23rd, 2016, and runs through April 17th, 2017.

11 thoughts on “Exhibition marks 350th anniversary of Great Fire of London

  1. “Here, by permission of heaven, hell broke loose upon this Protestant city. The most dreadful Burninge of this City begun and carries on by the treachery and malice of the Popish faction. That Popish frenzy which wrought such horrors, is not yet quenched” …and it is most certainly also the explanation for that mistaken headline and everything else.

  2. You mean that big thing held less than a gallon of water? Good grief, firefighting has come a loooong way since then …

  3. Dang, I missed it! I went to the Museum of London a couple of weeks ago and said hello to London Stone, and since it was a huge deal trip I most certainly will not be back soon. The whole thing is set up kind of like Ikea–a big labyrinth that takes you chronologically through from prehistory to the present.

    The current 17th century exhibit is called something like “Plague, Fire, War” and is all about those things. In fact, I found a beautifully-preserved embroidered casket (which embroidery I’m taking a class in) in a room dedicated to fleas and rats. The casket, along with a pair of gloves and one of shoes, was to show that lice and fleas lived in textiles (though I’m thinking, not embroideries on boxes?).

  4. Historically and culturally it was a terrible disaster and remains so to this day, St. Paul’s and the 87 churches particularly. Like the Library of Alexandria, we don’t even know what was lost!

  5. I remember this exhibition! Such an amazing story — it is said, Samuel Pepys buried his parmesan cheese in an effort to save save his possessions from burning in the fire. Although, I’m not entirely sure if he successfully recovered it after the fire.

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