Dangerous Planet by Bryn Barnard

Author:Bryn Barnard [Barnard, Bryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-449-81493-2
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2012-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

Seventeenth-century London was still a medieval city. Buildings were closely packed, half-timbered, and pitch-roofed, easy prey to fire. When the spark came from the bakery on Pudding Lane, the flames quickly spread, pushed by an east wind.

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The fire spread from Pudding Lane down Fish Street Hill to the warehouses and wharves of Thames Street. There the flames fed on the stores of hay, timber, coal, tallow, brandy, oil, and hemp. Engorged with these combustibles, the fire became too fierce for the primary defense of the day: bucket brigades. These volunteers tried to put out fires by dousing them with pail after pail of water, passed hand to hand from a water source to the blaze. In this case, the water was supposed to come from the Thames River. That supply was cut off when the fire burned the waterwheel at London Bridge, the only reliable way to move large quantities of water from the river to street level.

Fanned by an east wind, the fire spread into the heart of the city, threatening the wealthy area of Cornhill. The indecisive Lord Mayor Bludworth hesitated to authorize the next preventative measure, depriving the fire of fuel by demolishing the fashionable homes now in its path. So the flames continued to spread, engulfing the famous St. Paul’s Cathedral. The heat caused the lead seams of the church’s roof to run in streams and the stones of the walls to explode like grenades. Refugees streamed from the city, carrying what they could into the Thames and out of the city to the surrounding countryside.

Eventually King Charles himself ordered firebreaks. Buildings were pulled down with poles, ladders, and axes or blown up with gunpowder. Finally, on the fourth day of the blaze, the wind died and the fire was contained. Four-fifths of the city had been destroyed, an area of about one and a half square miles. Gone were 13,200 homes, 44 guild halls, and 84 parish churches, a degree of devastation not seen again in London until the Blitz of World War II. Some 100,000 people were made homeless. Astonishingly, by official counts, only four people died.

Yet there was some benefit. The Great Fire ended an epidemic of bubonic plague that had begun the previous year and killed 68,000 people. The flames had incinerated the city’s plentiful rat population, whose fleas had been the primary carriers of the plague.

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