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Adam Bannister is a contributor to IFSEC Global, having been in the role of Editor from 2014 through to November 2019. Adam also had stints as a journalist at cybersecurity publication, The Daily Swig, and as Managing Editor at Dynamis Online Media Group.
August 3, 2016

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The 5 Fire Safety Failures that Fuelled the Great Fire of London

Friday 2 September will mark the 350th anniversary of the conflagration that destroyed England’s capital.

A series of events are taking place around London to mark the occasion.

Fire safety standards have come a long way since the 70s, let alone over the last five centuries.

Over the course of three days the fire, which started in a bakery on Pudding Lane near what is now Monument (built to commemorate the blaze) the city, gutted the medieval City of London inside the old Roman city wall and engulfed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches and St Paul’s Cathedral. Of 80,000 inhabitants 70,000 lost their homes.

Remarkably historians can only verify six recorded deaths, so if not in scale then in terms of death toll many 21st century fires have remarkably been worse.

Here are five fire safety missteps that helped to accelerate or failed to contain the Great Fire of 1666.

great fire london ludgate

Oil painting by anonymous artist circa 1670 depicting Ludgate in flames with St Paul’s Cathedral visible in the distance

1. Passive fire protection

A heaving, labyrinthine warren of medieval streets with wooden, thatched houses London was something of a tinderbox.

Building with wood and roofing with thatch had actually been prohibited for centuries but the regulations were widely flouted.

“The covetousness of the citizens and connivancy of Magistrates”, commented one contemporary, led to a profusion of jetties – where six- or seven-storey timbered tenement dwellings were expanded on the upper floors. Overhanging and meeting one another over narrow streets the jetties served as bridges across which the fire could easily leap and the fire spread rapidly throughout the city.

“As it does facilitate a conflagration, so does it also hinder the remedy,” said the aforementioned observer.

A proclamation by Charles II in 1661 forbidding such jetties was again widely ignored. Today’s fire safety professionals will ruefully acknowledge that five centuries later parliamentary legislation is still often flouted.

2. Gunpowder and other combustibles

This tightly packed, largely wooden city existed in pre-electricity times – and that meant open fireplaces, candles and all manner of fire hazards. The Great Fire was surely all but inevitable.

The City of London also hosted foundries, smithies and glaziers – all professions that posed huge fire hazards and were prohibited from operating in the densely populated area. Again, the rules were widely ignored.

Rickety wooden tenements and tar paper shacks along the Thames wharves held “the most combustible matter of tarr, pitch, hemp, rosen, and flax which was all layd up thereabouts.”

Private citizens had stores of gunpowder, a legacy of the English Civil War. The Tower of London is estimated to have had some five to six hundred tons of powder.

great fire london

The Great Fire of London as witnessed by an unknown painter on the evening of Tuesday 4 September 1666 – day three of the blaze. The Tower of London is on the right and London Bridge on the left

great fire london hooks

‘Firehooks’ deployed to fight a fire in Tiverton, Devon in 1612

3. Unreliable new technology

Honed by London’s (unsurprisingly) frequent fires there was actually much to commend about the capital’s fire-fighting prowess. Procedures for dealing with fires were – at least until the Great Fire – remarkably effective.

A thousand ‘bellmen’  from the ‘Trained Bands’, as the local militia and closest equivalent to a fire brigade was known, patrolled the streets at night for fire and other emergencies. Every parish church tower was obliged by law to have long ladders, leather buckets, axes and ‘firehooks’ for pulling down buildings (see illustration, right).

Demolition was a key way to create fire breaks and the use of gunpowder in 1666 is credited by many modern historians in finally containing the fire.

But the capital was almost too forward thinking for its own good. The successful firehooks had recently been abandoned in favour of what they thought were more advanced fire engines, which had been used in earlier large-scale fires.

However, they often trundled in from long distances away, with spouts but no delivery hoses and limited reach.[25] So cumbersome were they to pull that several engines toppled into the Thames as man tried to haul them to the fire.

The Narrow streets didn’t help either, especially as fire crews were swimming against the tide of panicked citizens streaming out on foot and various vehicles.

great fire of london fire appliance

Advertisement for a 17th-century fire engine

4. Access to water

The aforementioned point perhaps helps explain why access to water was critically undermined early on in the fire’s spread.

Close to a huge river the firefighting effort at least should not have wanted for water to extinguish the fire – Pudding Lane was only yards from the river. A system of elm pipes that otherwise supplied 30,000 houses via a high water tower at Cornhill had in previous fires supplied fire fighters with water.

Fire crews were too slow to open a pipe and connect it to a hose. As the fire spead unimpeded they were cut off from the river’s water supply the water wheels under London Bridge which pumped water to the Cornhill water tower were set alight and the piped supply failed altogether.

5. Prevarication at the top

The demolition of buildings downwind to create a fire break, which had worked successfully on numerous previous occasions, was fatally delayed for hours by the Lord Mayor’s initial refusal to sanction demolition. Mindful of the cost of recompensing owners of the demolished buildings Thomas Bloodworth preached patience and said, according to Sameul Pepys version of events, that a “woman might piss it out.”

When Bloodworth awoke and realised his complacency the fire was already out of control and his order to “spare no houses” was too late in streets so thronged with fleeing citizenry that the job of the fire engines was nigh on impossible. When the fire was finally extinguished after three days 75% of the city lay in ruins.

panorama of london 1600s

Panorama of the City of London drawn in 1616 by Claes Visscher

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FireSafetyeBook-CoverPage-23

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Paiebo
Paiebo
September 3, 2015 3:43 pm

Has anyone bothered to check the dates in both heading and within the body of this article?

The Great fire of London was in 1666 and not 1566, also the time since then is 349 years and not 499. It would still only be 449 even if it had occurred in 1566, which wasn’t the case. Is History not taught anymore????

Regards
Paul

Adam Bannister
September 3, 2015 4:41 pm

Paiebo Duh. Thanks for pointing this out. Good job you did! Embarrassing on my part. This is why subeditors and proofreaders were all the rage before the internet came along!

Clevercomply
Clevercomply
September 4, 2015 12:04 pm

ifsecglobal firedepot It was extinguished on the 5th not the 4th. 😉