On September 2, 1666, a fire broke out in the bakery of Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane in London, and within four days it destroyed most of the walled City. It is one of the best documented disasters of the early modern period, largely because the diarists Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn both wrote down what they saw.
London's centre was built of timber and narrow lanes, and the summer of 1666 had been dry, so once the fire crossed Pudding Lane there was very little that the parish engines and leather buckets of the day could do to stop it. Lord Mayor Thomas Bloodworth refused to order the fire breaks that might have contained it, reportedly saying that a woman could put it out. He was wrong. The flames moved west along the river toward Whitehall.
By September 5 the Guildhall, the Royal Exchange, St Paul's Cathedral, 87 parish churches and roughly 13,000 houses were gone. The official death toll was small, in the single figures. That count covers only named victims, and it misses the poor who died in cellars and were never recorded at all. The real figure is unknown.
The rebuilding changed the city. Christopher Wren proposed a plan on a grid. It was never built. He did design the new St Paul's and more than fifty churches. A 1667 Act required brick or stone fronts. The Monument near Pudding Lane still marks the spot where the fire started.