The Great Fire of London was an accident waiting to happen. In the immediate aftermath of the Fire, the shocked and displaced citizens cast around for someone or something to blame. Some attributed it to divine wrath, others blamed foreigners. And then they did something at which the British excel: they formed committees.

TF Reddaway, in The Rebuilding of London (published in 1940 at the height of the London Blitz when the city was again being flattened, courtesy of the Luftwaffe) writes, “If the citizens had been left to their fate, all London might have been burnt. Fortunately, Charles [King Charles II] rose to the occasion. On Sunday, the first day, he had offered help but had left the City in control of affairs. On Monday, seeing that it had lost control, he put the Duke of York in supreme command, with members of the Privy Council under him. Stations were established in an arc around the fire, each controlled by a councillor or noble, assisted by three justices of the peace, thirty foot soldiers, the parish constables and a hundred men.”

The displaced fled to Islington and Clerkenwell, and many camped on Moorfields (which sounds idyllic but was in fact one of the City’s centres of vice) “and in every space they could find… some went to other cities… some emigrated to the colonies in America and the Caribbean … some sheltered with friends or family in the suburbs, and found conditions there so much more to their liking than the old, constricted ways of the City,“ says social historian Liza Picard. Even Samuel Pepys, who with a couple of friends walked to Moorfields, was shocked to see the place packed, and those who had formerly been rich and who had lived in well-furnished houses, “without a rag or any necessary utensils, bed or board… [and] were now reduced to extreamest misery and poverty”.

Grand plan
Within days of the Great Fire, Christopher Wren – at the time a young professor of mathematics at Oxford (and who was later appointed Surveyor-General of the King’s Works) – John Evelyn, Robert Hooke were submitting plans for a city whose layout would have borne little to no resemblance to the medieval city which had just been razed to the ground. Wren in particular envisaged a “series of intersecting avenues on a European model”, while Evelyn’s “resembled a giant chessboard dominated by twelve squares and piazzas,“ according to Peter Ackroyd, in London, The Biography .

But such a grandiose plan would have taken an inordinate length of time to execute and speed was of the essence if people were to return and make the City prosperous once more. Furthermore, while everyone wanted a bright, modern city, with broad streets and magnificent buildings, individuals did not want their property rights infringed and, according to T M M Baker, “funds for widespread compulsory purchase did not exist”.

Commission for Rebuilding
The task facing London was enormous, especially if it was to retain its status in the world. The estimated cost of rebuilding was an eye-watering £10,788,500 (translated, that is the equivalent of £2 billion today) and the Commission for the Rebuilding was appointed in October 1666, a month after the Fire. There were three commissioners, Christopher Wren, Roger Pratt and Hugh May. They were appointed by the Privy Council and were joined by three City Surveyors, Robert Hooke, Peter Mills and Edward Jerman. Wren was appointed Principal Architect and the Commission’s job was to manage the survey of streets and sites, and to consider the form of the new streets and buildings. It decided some general principles which formed the basis of the Rebuilding Bill submitted to Parliament in late 1666. The speed at which this was all happening demonstrates the urgency of the need to act, and to act fast, otherwise people might not return to the City and essential revenue would be lost.

Rebuilding Act
The Rebuilding Act of 1667 stipulated that the new buildings would be faced with brick or stone; downpipes and gutters were obligatory; that the principal streets were sufficiently broad enough to act as firebreaks; the narrowest lanes were to be widened to 14 feet (or removed entirely); some trades, referred to as ‘noisome’, such as tanning, dyeing and brewing, were to be removed from the City entirely and positioned by the river to take advantage of the water supply; shop-fronts were to be built of fire-resistant oak; and four main categories of house were to be allowed, depending on what type of street on which they stood. Furthermore, “the price of building material was controlled, and building labour was encouraged to come to London by the relaxation of closed-shop rules, and high guaranteed wages,“ says Picard.

According to TMM Baker, “The Rebuilding Act, passed in 1667, incorporated the proposals of the Commission, adding other stipulations such as a tax on coal entering the port of London at 1 shilling per ton until Michaelmas 1677.” This was to finance public works and fund the compulsory purchase of property plus the erection of a Monument to the Fire (and for 2 September to be observed as a ‘day of public fasting and humiliation’ in perpetuity). Wren was one of the architects of this 202-foot-tall memorial which stands close to where the Fire started.

As well as the Commission for Rebuilding, in February 1667 the Fire Court was established by Act of Parliament. Its job was to settle disputes between landlords seeking to enforce their tenants’ obligations to rebuild, and tenants who were ruined. (Fire insurance as we know it today simply did not exist; it came into being as a result of the Fire and was championed by financier and speculative builder Nicholas Barbon – see the box.)

Reconstruction begins
And so in 1667 work on reconstructing the City began. “Hooke and Mills worked on laying out the streets (in which enterprise they had to contend with householders who at dead of night moved the marker stakes out into the street in a surreptitious expansion of their plots),“ says TMM Baker, who adds, “The building of houses got off to a slow start, apparently because of the initial shortage of necessary materials; many were still built with timber frames … but they had to be faced with bricks.”

Within two years of the Fire 1200 houses had been completed, and in the following year another 1600. However, “it was not quite the rapid and vigorous process which some historians have assumed, and for some years London had all the aspects of a ruined city, yet gradually it was rising once more,“ says Ackroyd. Private householders had to rely on their own resources while public buildings were funded through the aforementioned Act that put a tax on coal coming into the Port of London (known as sea-coal, though it was shipped from the north of England.)

The Rebuilding Act of 1667 failed to specify how many of the 87 destroyed churches would be rebuilt but eventually 52 were constructed. Wren, who was mainly responsible for the design of the churches, was inspired by contemporary French, Italian and Dutch buildings mixed with the traditional Gothic of the churches which had been destroyed. These gave London a singular look with a baroque skyline captured in the paintings of Canaletto and Samuel Scott. Wren churches of note are St Stephen, Walbrook which, according to Wren biographer Margaret Whinney is “the most complex, and by far the most accomplished” and St Mary-le-Bow, which was rebuilt by Thomas Cartwright and John Thompson to the design by Wren during the 1670s. TMM Baker adds that the steeples of these Wren churches, “which became increasingly elaborate and baroque as the years progressed probably influenced the emerging talent of Nicholas Hawksmoor”.

Wren’s great building, St Paul’s Cathedral, was his crowning achievement, its Great Dome a tour de force both of design and engineering even though it was not as long as its predecessor, nor the nave as high. The first stone was laid in 1675 and it was 35 years later that Wren’s son, in his father’s presence, placed the highest stone on of the lantern upon the cupola to mark its completion. But magnificent though the new domed cathedral undoubtedly was, the rebuilding of London, according to TM M Baker, “occurred at a turning point in London’s history. The old City had been an essentially medieval one, and its replacement, in spite of the up-to-date smart brick houses and public buildings, retained many medieval echoes”.

Buildings historian Rachel Stewart in The Classic English Town House says: “The impact of the Great Fire was felt well beyond the City proper. Not only did the capital dictate architectural style to the provinces, but legislation applicable to London and Westminster was often taken as ‘best practice’ by other civic authorities, or simply as a guide by builders. What is more, several other towns were devastated by fire in the 17th and 18th centuries, and these places no doubt looked to London to lead them in the urgent task of rebuilding, with one eye no doubt fixed on future fire-resistance.”

Inevitably over the years further fires continued to break out although none as devastating as the Great Fire and by the beginning of the 20th century few 17th century houses remained, so it is left to our imagination what the newly built 17th century City of London might have looked like before the dirt from all those coal fires besmirched the buildings, many of which were lost forever in the London Blitz of 1940.

Further reading
by T F Reddaway (1940)
Wren by Margaret Whinney (1971)
The Life and Times of Charles II by Christopher Falkus (1972)
Restoration London by Liza Pickard (1997)
London, Rebuilding the City after the Great Fire by TMM Baker (2000)
London, The Biography by Peter Ackroyd (2001)
By Permission of Heaven, The Story of the Great Fire of London by Adrian Tinniswood (2003)
The Classic English Town House by Rachel Steward (2006)