100,000 people were made homeless. St. Paul cathedral was gutted. Over 32,000 houses were destroyed. Four-fifths of the old walled City of London was wiped out in four days and four nights.
More than three hundred years later, the date is burned into the memories of all English people.
The Great fire of London began in a road called Pudding Lane, near London Bridge. The date was September 2, 1666. Miraculously, very few lives were lost. But scraps of burning material were blown as far as a hundred kilometres to Oxford in the west. The wind changed during the night of the 4th-5th and halted the destruction.
From that date on, the mediaevel character of London was Lost for ever. Architects became very conscious of the danger of fire. No more high, timber frame buildings were built. An Act of parliament specified that everything should now be of brick or stone. And the height of buildings was fixed according to the width of the street-four storeys in the main streets, ad only two storeys in narrow lanes.
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