How A Tiny Accident Nearly Destroyed London | The Great Fire: In Real Time | Absolute History

[Music] we're looking at this incredible view of the city of london the heart of our nation's capital but if we'd been standing here 350 years ago would have been staring at a scene of chaos and devastation london was being consumed by the most catastrophic fire that britain has ever known the great fire as we still call it today was the biggest and most famous fire in our history it destroyed 87 churches over 13 000 houses and caused what would now be 37 billion pounds worth of damage over the next three programs we'll be walking the route of the fire street by street uncovering new evidence and exploring new revelations from where the fire really started to how many people really died during the most terrible blaze this country has ever known here's what's coming up in this first program we're looking at how a tiny spark turned into a raging inferno [Music] we'll explore the human tragedy it unleashed and revealed remarkable new discoveries about the things that londoners actually lost in the great fire so this is actually discolored because of the fire that's right that's amazing and as i walk the route to the fire hour by hour i'll see how it devoured houses and churches workshops and markets property and people searing its way into our national story [Music] this is the great fire [Music] it's 3 p.m on saturday the 1st of september 1666 an ordinary saturday at the end of what's been an exceptionally long hot dry summer but also the last day before the whole of london was devoured by flames in this area which today we call monument would have looked very different so forget the office blocks the cars the portaloo down there forget all of this this would have been narrow little streets full of people going about their business getting their supplies and shopping in before the whole city shut down for the sunday [Music] now this street here well at the top of that past these sort of rather ugly road works there was a meat market and you've had carts coming down the hill with all the offal and guts now in the 1600s they called awful pudding and that's why they called this street pudding lane the famous pudding lane was just one small street in london in 1666 in fact the city was filled to bursting with 100 000 people living cheek by jowl and we're going to get to know three of them very well for these three londoners the disaster would have terrible consequences and i'm going to get under their skin and uncover how the great fire completely devastated their lives our first londoner was a shoemaker called sybil tame we know her story from the records of the school where she lived and worked christ's hospital on saturday afternoon less than a mile away from pudding lane she would have been blissfully ignorant of what was going to happen to the city in the dead of night in 1666 this whole area was dominated by a school for orphans christ's hospital sybil lived and worked on the school campus making shoes for the orphaned children in fact her workshop would have been just a few meters from where i am now a short distance down the road from sybil's workshop stood london's greatest landmark this is the courtyard of simples cathedral today it's popular with tourists and city workers alike but in 1666 the whole place was bursting with booksellers and if you wanted to get your hands on the latest bestseller you'd probably pay a visit to our second londoner a bookseller called joshua curtin just half a mile away from joshua's shop at saint paul's and only a stone's throw from pudding lane was the beating heart of london's banking elite lombard street in 1666 it was one of the wealthiest streets in the city and one of its richest residents was robert weiner who lived where i'm standing right now robert weiner who'd made his vast fortune as a goldsmith and a banker is the third londoner i'll be following but in spite of his enormous wealth and privilege robert weiner like how other londoners sybil thame and joshua curtin would be utterly transformed by the great fire of london it's now 5 p.m and the clock is counting down to a disaster that will leave london in ruins pudding lane is bustling with activity filled with the butchers plasterers and woodturners that live and work here going about their daily business just a typical saturday afternoon but in only eight short hours a spark in the ovens of their neighbor the baker thomas farina will start a fire that will consume the city now if there's one thing most of us know about the great fire of london is that it started in a bakery here on pudding lane and that bakery was owned by a man called thomas farina and i want you to remember his name because he was a tricky character and he could turn out to be the villain of this whole story so here's the first question where was thomas farren as bakery for centuries the answer has been lost but historian dorian gerholt has made an extraordinary new discovery incredibly he's managed to pinpoint the precise location of where the fire actually started hello dorian now i've seen a plaque over there that says the great fire of london started near here but near is not good enough you've been doing the work that shows exactly where it started haven't you yes i was at london metropolitan archives researching city properties and i came across a plan of where the great fire started it's from thirteen years after the fire but it says mr farrender's ground there the fire began wow how did you feel when you saw this well i didn't actually realize how important it was because i assumed it was already known dorian's detective work involved cross-referencing this newly discovered plan with historic and modern day maps of the area it's like a jigsaw piece falling into place this is a jigsaw piece and remarkably though the frontage of thomas farroner's bakery was on pudding lane if you want to visit the very spot where the great fire started it's actually on monument street today a street that didn't exist back in 1666. here's the living accommodation and if we pace along the pavement 13 yards we come to the edge of where the little yard was okay you lead it amazingly he's been able to identify the exact site of the ovens where the fire started on present-day monument street 11 12 13 so 13. at this point we've come to the edge of the little yard at the back of the house and it says that which was the baker's yard where he laid his bathins what's a baby they're bundles of brushwood that's what he's putting in the oven that's the fuel oh very dangerous because of course the bavins that's what the spark hits and exactly so not in the shop not in the house not in the oven which was exactly here yes i've got something i think we should mark the spot so this says i'll just show them the great fire of london started here 2nd of september 1666 and the exact spot is about there just here and that i think is quite amazing thanks to this extraordinary piece of new research we now have our exact location for the start of the fire of london a street that didn't exist in 1666 monument street immediately round the corner from pudding lane but how on earth did a small fire in a bakery go on to take down an entire city welcome back we're uncovering the truth behind the great fire of london earlier we found out exactly where the fire started in thomas farina's pudding lane bakery it's now almost one o'clock in the morning on sunday the 2nd of september the street is narrow and dark filled with a mixture of tall overhanging houses and as it's the dead of night the street is empty of people everything's quiet in pudding lane apart from the occasional bark of a stray dog the foreigners finally went to bed an hour ago their 23 year old daughter hannah was the last to go to sleep after getting a light for a candle later the foreigners would insist that everything was absolutely normal when hannah went downstairs at midnight and that the fire in their oven was definitely out but they would say that wouldn't they we now believe the most likely cause of the great fire was a stray ember which ignited a pile of twigs stored in the bakehouse unnoticed it started to take hold thomas farroner's teenage son and apprentice also called thomas woke up he realized the ground floor was on fire and immediately woke up his family who was sleeping upstairs trapped by the smoke their only escape route was to crawl out of an upstairs window and onto a neighbor's roof raising the alarm at the tops of their voices this corner of london sprang into life as people around pudding lane realized they were facing their most terrifying enemy fire the fire began to spread incredibly quickly and within minutes it had moved from the bakehouse to other parts of the building with sparks even leaping towards the houses next door but why would the fire go on to consume the buildings around pudding lane so rapidly these preserved medieval buildings at the wild and downton museum are built just like the houses on pudding lane would have been one of the first things that leaps out at you is how the top floors are extended so that they overhang the floors below this building technique known as jettying might have increased the size of your house but it was also one of the main ways the great fire spread across the city so fast was great i mean it's predominantly useful in a city where you've got limited space so we've got three stories here you could have had six or seven including the attic and each of those would jetted out a bit further yeah jettying created more space inside a house without obstructing the street below but it did mean that buildings were dangerously close together in london you'd have had a street at the bottom wide enough for a cart or a wagon but at the top you could probably shake hands with your neighbor really you'd be that close at the top [Music] with the tops of the houses packed so tightly the fire around pudding lane could easily jump from jetty to jetty from roof to roof it's now 1 30 in the morning all of thomas fahrenheit's bakery is now on fire and the homes of the blacksmith and glazier who live next door are also starting to catch light the blaze that started at the pudding lane bakery would cause unimaginable damage right across the city affecting tens of thousands of londoners [Music] in the 17th century many of the city's walls were made using a technique called wattle and dorb these were panels of woven wood known as wattle which were then filled with a mud mixture the dorb but it was this method of construction that actually helped the houses around pudding lane to ignite [Music] at the x over fire testing lab in warrington flammability expert beth dean is helping me subject an ancient style waterline door panel to extreme temperatures you can see the wattle on the inside the timber you can also see little bits of straw in there as well surprisingly despite temperatures in excess of 400 degrees centigrade the waterline door panel doesn't ignite the mud is almost protected well it is it's protecting that wooden frame on the inside so it's proving really hard to set it alight this process is used to test the flammability of materials to modern british standards and the waterland dorb seems to have passed the best performance you can get on this test is a class one and it's achieved a class one performance i mean there's hardly any damage at all that's correct so by today's british standards this would have kind of nominally passed that's correct yeah really well but if they were made of such fire resistant material why did so many of the houses around pudding lane burst into flames the answer lies in the fact that many buildings in the poorer areas where the fires started were not brilliantly maintained so by exposing the wooden wattle behind the door all right and it comes we can test how flammable these run-down houses in the poorer areas would have been so we can see there is some action already it hasn't ignited yeah and you can see the difference that is that's less than a minute and it's caught fire the houses around pudding lane were in a similar state of disrepair making them all highly flammable and it was only a matter of time before they were destroyed by the fire it's now two o'clock in the morning and the fire has been raging for almost an hour imagine what pudding lane would have been like back then the air would have been thick with smoke the heat would have been unbearable and over the ever-present sound of flames you'd have been able to hear the screams of terrified residents i guess in 1666 all the buildings around here would have gone up incredibly quickly a lot of the run-down buildings and houses had old dry rotten timbers exposed wattle in the walls you really couldn't ask for much more fuel for a fire but hang on the authorities knew about this surely there'd been fires before the authorities did know and they had tried to force people to build with brick but progress had been really slow such that in september the city was still a huge tinderbox by quarter past two the fire has entirely engulfed thomas farina's bakery and his neighbors the blacksmith william walter smith and thomas knight the glacier barely have time to collect their precious few belongings before their houses go up in flames too but for most londoners the first hint of impending disaster was the sound of church bells [Music] within minutes of the fire taking hold the bells of this church sent magnus the martyr just a street away from pudding lane or ringing out an alarm and the warden of this particular church was actually thomas farina the baker himself [Music] i'm meeting chief bell ringer dicken love to discover just how important ringing the alarm bells would have been you don't expect bells to be ringing at two or three o'clock in the morning they're the loudest thing you've got people need to be warned so therefore ringing the bells as a way to wake people up and make sure that they were aware that all was not right in london and how important was the ringing of bells in the story of the great fire the bells are in belfries across london all above the other houses it's the best way of getting the message across and if they're wrong at a time when you don't expect them then you know there's something wrong [Music] it's now just after 2 30 a.m but did the londoners we've been following our bookseller our banker and our shoemaker have any idea about what was going on we know that disaster was heading their way but what were they thinking back then in the early hours of the fire robert weiner was one of the most powerful men in the whole country he'd made his vast fortune as a goldsmith and like many other goldsmiths in 1666 had moved into banking robert would have heard the alarm bells ringing out just a few hundred meters down the road but safe within his mansion on lombard street he must have felt like nothing could touch him we know that robert weiner lived here on this street with his wife mary and his children we also know that he had been trained as a goldsmith by his uncle and that he was close friends with charles ii in fact he acted as his principal banker advancing him large sums of his own money but robert beiner's mansion was just a few hundred meters from the epicenter around pudding lane and the fire was moving fast in his direction he may have thought that he was secure but it wouldn't be long before his home was overcome by flames just half a mile away in the shadow of saint paul's cathedral our bookseller joshua curtin was completely unaware of the blaze taking hold along pudding lane joshua curtin traded as a bookseller for many years and ran a successful business with many loyal customers including samuel peeps remarkably we know from detailed records kept about london's booksellers exactly where joshua shop was at the time of the great fire he moved premises several times but we have pinpointed the location of his shop in september 1666. at the time of the fire his premises were located here exactly on the spot where i'm standing but joshua's stock his bundles of paper wages of documents and stacks of books were all incredibly flammable a small spark could have set joshua's entire livelihood ablaze and tearing through the city towards him was the worst fire london had ever seen at first only the church churches near pudding lane would have been bringing the alarm bells but soon bell towers across the city joined in the call so an hour and a half into the fire londoners like our shoemaker sybil tame would have known that something was very wrong just under a mile away from pudding lane was christ hospital school where sybil tame lived and worked as a shoemaker sybil was a single mother with three young daughters to feed and like many other widows she'd taken on her husband's job when he died in order to make ends meet [Music] very little remains to show us the work of 17th century shoemakers like sybil but the museum of london has given me an incredible opportunity to examine two children's shoes found among the ruins of the fire just the kind of thing that sybil was making we've got two children's shoes that were found in london in 1959 and they were actually found with ash and fire debris in them from the time of the great fire i love the detailing on the back here it's really quite charming i mean it's quite subtle but just enough little interest to make them slightly prettier than certainly this shoe which looks a little bit more as if it was a boy's shoe and they're really worn this one for example is rather misshapen and bent and has a hole at the toe and this one has a quite large gouge from the side as if perhaps the child had outgrown it in the leather had worn and split or they'd gone along the road and sort of scuffed their shoes we know from christ's hospital records that when it came to making shoes for the school children sybil had a problem with quality control the nurses complained about the quality of her footwear so she wasn't very good at making them the big problem was that the shoes didn't have sufficiently robust soles the children getting damp feet and then becoming ill but sybil was a feisty character and she argued with the school authorities instead of getting fired she actually ended up getting a pay rise over the years leading up to the great fire sybil had many more run-ins with the school thanks to her reputation as a woman who liked life's pleasures sybil was reported by one of the school porters for having been visited in her rooms by men's servants at very ill hours and she almost lost her shop as a result whatever the truth of these rumors what i love about sybil is that she's one of those intriguing characters who reminds us that people in history could be just like us with their loves and lusts their flaws and their foibles we'll never know for certain what sybil was up to on the night of the fire but if her track record was anything to go by she could have been entertaining a young man in her rooms blissfully unaware that the blaze was heading in her direction [Music] it's now 3 am and whilst two of our three londoners were unaware of the extent of the fire close to its center pandemonium was breaking out there was no fire service to speak of so instead the streets surrounding pudding lane would have been filled with residents using anything they could find to put out the fire buckets of water perhaps even milk beer or urine [Music] but in spite of their efforts the great fire had already taken one life the farana family thomas and his two children escaped by climbing out the neighbor's window his daughter hannah was badly burned but she survived but what happened to their maid well we know she tried to escape by climbing the stairs to the top of the house but either terrified of heights or overcome by the smoke she was overwhelmed by the flames we don't even know her name but the great fire of london had claimed his first victim and she wouldn't be the last after the break we'll discover what happened when the great fire tore through one of the most densely populated parts of the city welcome back to the great fire of london the fire has now been raging for almost two hours and the pudding lane bakery and several houses nearby have already burned to the ground it's only really by walking these streets today that you get a sense for just how compact the city was 350 years ago and how easy it was for fire to take hold we've seen where the first spark began right here in the ovens of a bakery on what was pudding lane but is now present-day monument street neighbours try to help douse the flames the fire is already on the move embers carried on the wind find their way here to neighbouring fish street hill where they ignite hay in the yard of a popular pub called the star inn by 3 a.m fish street hill is a blaze ah fancy seeing you here fancy now there'd been fires in london before 1666 right yes we tend to think of it as the first serious blaze but actually there's been loads of big fires if you'd said great fire of london a few months earlier people would have thought you were talking about 12 12 when there was a huge fire and what were londoners reactions at first they didn't seem to have been that bothered we know that from the great commentator on the fire mr samurai samuel peters i love samuel peeps because he's always on about women he fancies big dinners he's had and the greatest account of the great fire of london and what he says he's saying is that jane his maid servant had woken up about three o'clock in the morning so about this time and said there was a fire in the city and had a look out the window decided it wasn't too bad went back to bed peeps like many other londoners was probably thinking that all would be well but they hadn't counted on how incompetent the man in charge of the city mayor thomas bloodworth actually was [Music] in the small hours as the fire was just beginning to take hold bloodworth had one last chance to save london before the inferno became unstoppable and he blew it he could have pulled down private houses created a fire break but those houses belong to rich merchants who'd put him in power and he didn't want to be unpopular it's always politics and he said didn't he of the fire a woman could piss it out yes he did probably not true in this case it's probably not true and also a very bad decision because it means he's remembered for that dirty joke as opposed to putting out the great fire of london well done thomas bloodworth it's now 4am and the fire is creeping down this road fish street hill it's not moving any faster than before but the scary thing is where it's headed here towards the thames side warehouses huge wooden warehouses line the banks of the river and people live in them london's poor sleeping among huge stockpiles of goods the warehouses were packed to the rafters full of almost a shopping list of flammable items paper hay and even barrels of tar these poor london residents were surrounded by some of the most flammable materials imaginable and they could catch light in an instant and at 4am when the fire reached the warehouses that lined the thames they suddenly exploded on the first night of the great fire this place must have been absolutely terrifying you'd have been able to smell the smoke and see tiny flecks of ash in the air what's even more shocking is that according to eyewitness reports the materials in these warehouses spontaneously combusted before the flames even reached them but how could this possibly happen i want to find out how raw materials can suddenly ignite without flames even reaching them and flammability expert beth dean is helping me conduct a demonstration with this pot of tar i'm not going to ignite this we're only going to ignite the wood and we're going to see if we can make this car ignite we're simulating the conditions inside the great fire warehouses which were crammed full of tar barrels we're going to find out how they would have spontaneously combusted when the temperature got high enough when a material ignites without any direct flame it's because the heat is radiating down onto the material and it gets so hot that it just ignites on its own the temperature is rising and rising unburnt fuel that's here in the smoke layer is now starting to ignite and we call it rollover you can see the flames are licking across the ceiling and that's the gas is igniting is exactly right yeah we know ignition is imminent oh yeah oh boom look at that this is a phenomenon known as flashover the temperatures have reached a point that means the heat of the room alone is enough to set the tara light that just that just went that was a tar igniting from the radiation going down onto the target oh my goodness and the flames weren't touching it at all it just because of the temperature just went poof yes that is scary and imagine that's one small little glass container of tart imagine in 1666 in london warehouses full of barrels of tar absolutely devastating nothing had any chance of surviving it's now 5 in the morning on sunday the 2nd of september and the terrifying sound of the warehouses exploding would have been heard right across the city actually the burning of these warehouses is a critical moment in the story of the great fire because this inferno ended up destroying what would now be billions of pounds worth of goods and property as dawn broke london was in utter chaos [Music] most people had stopped trying to put out the fire and were now desperately scrambling to save themselves and their things forget community spirit now it was every man woman and child for themselves people were moving their possessions from house to house heaving furniture onto carts lugging stuff on their backs and the city's churches and cathedrals were becoming makeshift warehouses as people crammed them full with their belongings but how were our londoners coping with the turmoil that had descended on the city our shoemaker sybil tame and bookseller joshua curtin were in no immediate danger but by now the mansion of our banker robert weiner was just a hundred meters from the growing inferno with a household full of servants at his disposal he would have had every single one of them ferrying his things out of the fire's path but his most valuable possessions his gold and his jewelry probably never left his site as he prepared to flee another londoner caught up in the terror that had hit london streets was samuel peeps peeps diary is so intense that it almost seems to freeze this moment in time peeps writing is incredibly vivid he's really good at capturing those telling details so he talks of the streets full of nothing but people and horses and carts loading with goods he's describing a kind of frenzy he says they're ready to run over one another so it's as if they've escaped the flames but now they might be caught up in a stampede flattened by the crowd but it wasn't just the streets the river was full of boats being loaded with belongings in some cases people were simply flinging their things right into the thames itself in a desperate effort to save them for the halves like our wealthy banker robert weiner the great fire would ultimately be totally devastating but already on day one of the disaster a few canny chances with their own means of transport used it as an opportunity to make some hard cash the cabbies and delivery men of the day could make an absolute killing ferrying rich people's things out of the fire's path and with everyone desperate to get out prices could be daylight robbery rich merchants paid the equivalent of thirty thousand pounds to have their things moved to safety by 6 am london streets were a gridlock with carts coaches and crowds of terrified people pushing past each other to get their possessions away from the flames these londoners knew that if they lost their belongings it would completely ruin their lives there was no insurance to speak of so if their things went up in smoke that was it hidden away at the national archives in queue are some remarkable documents that reveal just how devastating these losses could be and professor vanessa harding is taking me through them these are petitions to the king for some kind of financial relief or support they detail everything from a map maker who lost all his stock in the fire to a chaplain whose church was raised to the ground and countless wealthy people reduced to abject poverty the one we have here is a petition from sarah kraft's widow i mean clearly she's been somebody who had an income from property and now she's saying that having lost all of this she and her children can no longer survive i mean indeed she says she's been reduced to great extremity being now enforced to turn servant and to work hard for a poor livelihood so that's quite a fall to go from being somebody who owns a great estate to being a servant sarah crafts wasn't the only person to lose everything the records revealed that hundreds more were left with nothing but little hard evidence remains of the things that these londoners actually lost in the fire but a few years ago a team of archaeologists were digging under saint bart's hospital when they found something fascinating it was an unusually thick layer of burnt material showing up as black earth and within it were some of the only objects known to have actually survived the great fire i'm meeting archaeologist claire koeger who led the excavation tell me about these things that you found so these clay tobacco pipes are covered in charcoal so this is actually discolored because of the fire that's right that's amazing what else have we got here so we've got a belt buckle and these burnt buttons which would have fallen off someone's clothes perhaps gathering their most precious or important belongings or perhaps they didn't have time so there's a sense that maybe people were rushing to pull their stuff together bundling it up and then a button dropped that's right and what's this this is a bit of mug yes from the period so here we have a real picture you've got someone sitting there with their leather belt on and they're drinking their their beer you know with a pipe in their mouth you've got a whole picture of life yeah you're relaxing at the bar and then suddenly you hear news of a fire and you run yeah you drop everything in and run it's now 7am and by now another londoner who was dropping everything and running was samuel peeps although he at first wasn't scared by the fire he did eventually think he needed to send his stuff away including his diary he was away from it for a week he must have hated being apart from it but i guess it's just as well he's centered away because otherwise we wouldn't have one of the best accounts of the great fire but my favorite pete's story doesn't involve his diary it involves his cheese one of his most valuable possessions was a block of parmesan but he didn't send it out of london he buried it in his garden yeah well it makes sense it was a total delicacy at the time it would have cost a fortune to replace so of course he did now this isn't actually peeps's cheese you don't say we don't know if he ever dug up his original piece of parmesan so in fact as far as we know it might still be buried under london somewhere probably under you know an office block or something muldering away it probably tastes quite nice by now [Music] by 8 am the fire has been burning for 7 hours and has grown into an unstoppable blaze the scale of the devastation is immense it's demolished several churches dozens of warehouses and countless businesses it already covers a vast area and has destroyed more than 300 homes but there's much much worse to come we're now almost eight hours into the great fire and daylight is revealing the devastation here at the thames street waterfront the warehouses are burning fiercely the writer samuel peeps takes a boat along the thames and he notices the fire seems to be carried on the wind is killing the pigeons that londoners keep for food peeps writes in his diary the poor pigeons i perceive were loathed to leave their houses but hovered about the windows and balconies till they burned their wings and fell down we know that other writers commented on the same thing strong winds and the unusually hot long dry summer but what none of them realized was that these conditions were creating the perfect opportunity for wildfire even with today's state-of-the-art equipment a fire backed by a strong wind can be a nightmare scenario for any firefighter this is the fire service college in gloucestershire and i'm here to discover why the strong winds in 1666 had such a devastating effect with the help of fireman justin thorne i've built stacks of wood and paper to mimic the conditions inside the buildings that help the fire take hold so quickly you can see we have built something that's ready to go i'm just going to give it the final touch here with this lunch within seconds we've created our very own micro inferno look at that go that already we can measure the heat with this specially adapted thermal camera 452 degrees so that's a normal frayer but on that first morning of the great fire in 1666 we know the winds really picked up and the fire turned from bad to worse something we're going to replicate with this industrial strength fan wow that has happened so quickly the fan on it it's chased it's almost a completely different fire now that is unbelievable the oxygen from the wind acts as fuel for the fire and in just two seconds the temperature has jumped more than 500 degrees that's gone straight up so what we're looking at we're looking at a thousand degrees that's a thousand degrees that's happened almost instantaneously the heat of this is absolutely phenomenal it's almost like it's a plain flower wind-driven wildfires like this are still an enormous challenge to firemen today and it's terrifying to imagine what it must have been like in london 350 years ago so how would you tackle a fire that's just wind driven like that it's almost impossible the amount of resources that you need literally going to have to stand back and you're going to have to wait for the conditions to change [Music] i'm quite shocked at what i've seen here today the devastating effect that wind has on a fire making it almost impossible to put out but think back to 1666 and the wind that was blowing similar to the wind we created here today it more than doubled the temperature of the fire and with the primitive equipment available it made tackling the fire a losing battle today london's a hive of activity but looking down on the area of the city around pudding lane in 1666 it would have been a wasteland we're now eight hours into the great fire of london and already it's destroyed three churches rows of warehouses and hundreds of homes the fires reached a size and speed where it's become unstoppable samuel peeps has even given it a name he calls it the infinite great fire or as we say today the great fire of london it's been shocking seeing just how quickly the fire took hold these really were the perfect conditions for the perfect storm and you have to feel for the ordinary londoners caught up in the blaze the shoemakers booksellers and bankers so many people whose lives would be changed forever by the disaster and the great fire was far from over join us next time to find out how the blaze became an inferno and annihilated some of britain's greatest buildings next time on the great fire the flames are taking on a life of their own and threatening to destroy london's most famous landmarks even saint paul's cathedral itself we ask who is really to blame for starting the fire they really are the bakers from hell aren't they and how did the fire reach such extreme temperatures well above 1000 degrees hot enough to destroy everything we've burnt a hole through the iron

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 218,889

Keywords: history documentaries, absolute history, world history, ridiculous history, quirky history, great fire of london, suzannah lipscomb, suzannah lipscomb hidden killers, great fire, 1666

Id: x7nDeGqc0sc

Length: 44min 21sec (2661 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021