7 Other Great Fires of London
BY Paul Anthony Jones
September 2, 2017
Shortly after midnight on September 2, 1666, a fire broke out in the basement of a bakery in the area of Pudding Lane in central London. With the timbers of the city’s buildings all bone dry thanks to a summer-long drought, the fire quickly spread, so that by the time it burned itself out three days later on September 5, the Great Fire of London had destroyed more than 13,000 houses, three city gates, the entire Royal Exchange building, and almost 90 churches—including St. Paul’s Cathedral—while an estimated 80,000 of the city’s inhabitants had been left homeless. Surprisingly, there are believed to have only been a handful of fatalities as a direct result of the fire. But even more surprisingly, this wasn’t the first time London had been burned to the ground.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/501164/7-other-great-fires-london
