Original subtitles

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,

we'd 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 worth of damage.

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.

Here's what's coming up.

We're looking at how a tiny spark turned into a raging inferno.

We'll explore the human tragedy it unleashed

and reveal remarkable new discoveries about the things

that Londoners actually lost in the Great Fire.

So this is actually discoloured because of the fire?

That's right. That's amazing.

And as I walk the route of 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.

This is the Great Fire.

It's 3pm 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.

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.

Now, this street here, well, at the top of that,

past these rather ugly roadworks, there was a meat market,

and you would have had carts coming down the hill

with all the offal and guts.

Now, in the 1600s, they called offal 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.

SUZANNAH: 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 metres

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 St Paul's Cathedral.

Today, it's popular with tourists and city workers alike.

But in 1666, the whole place was bursting with the book-sellers.

And if you wanted to get your hands on the latest bestseller,

you'd probably pay a visit to our second Londoner,

a book-seller called Joshua Kirton.

Just half a mile away from Joshua's shop at St 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 Vyner,

who lived where I'm standing right now.

Robert Vyner, 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 Vyner,

like our other Londoners Sybil Tame and Joshua Kirton,

would be utterly transformed by the Great Fire of London.

DAN: It's now 5pm 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 wood turners 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 neighbour,

the baker Thomas Farriner,

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 Farriner.

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 Farriner's bakery?

For centuries, the answer has been lost,

but historian Dorian Gerhold 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 13 years after the fire, but it says,

"Mr Farriner's ground, there the fire began." Wow.

How did you feel when you saw this?

Well, I didn't actually realise 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. It is a jigsaw piece.

And remarkably, though the frontage of Thomas Farriner'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.

And here's the living accommodation.

But if we pace along the pavement 13 yards,

we come to the edge of where the little yard was. OK, you lead us.

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. 13.

So, at this point,

we've come to the edge of the little yard at the back of the house.

And it says, "Which was the baker's yard where he laid his bavins."

Bavins? What's a bavin? 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 where the spark hits and...? Exactly.

So, not in a shop, not in a house, but 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...

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 Farriner's Pudding Lane bakery,

it's now almost 1am on Sunday the second 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 Farriners finally went to bed an hour ago.

Their 23-year-old daughter Hanna was the last to go to sleep

after getting a light for a candle.

Later, the Farriners would insist that everything

was absolutely normal when Hanna 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 Farriner's teenage son and apprentice,

also called Thomas, woke up.

He realised the ground floor was on fire and immediately

woke up his family, who were sleeping upstairs.

Trapped by the smoke, their only escape route

was to crawl out of an upstairs window and onto a neighbour's roof,

raising the alarm at the tops of their voices.

This corner of London sprang into life as people around Pudding Lane

realised 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?

ROB: These preserved medieval buildings

at the Weald and Downland 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.

Jettying was great.

It was predominantly useful in a city,

where you've got limited space.

So you've got three stories here?

You could have had six or seven,

including the attic.

And each of those would jetty out a bit further? Yeah, 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 would have had a street at the bottom wide enough

for a cart or wagon, but at the top,

you could probably shake hands with your neighbour. Really?

You'd be that close at the top? Yeah.

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.

DAN: It's now 1:30am.

All of Thomas Farriner'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.

ROB: In the 17th century, many of the city's walls were made using

a technique called wattle and daub.

These were panels of woven wood, known as wattle,

which were then filled with a mud mixture, the daub.

But it was this method of construction that actually

helped the houses around Pudding Lane to ignite.

At the Exova fire testing lab in Warrington,

flammability expert Beth Dean is helping me subject

an ancient-style wattle and daub 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 wattle and daub panel doesn't ignite.

The mud is almost protecting...

Well, it is, it's protecting that wooden frame on the inside.

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 wattle and daub 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 kind of, nominally, passed?

That's correct, yes. It's done really well. Wow.

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 fire started, were not brilliantly maintained.

So by exposing the wooden wattle behind the daub...

All right, in it comes.

..we can test how flammable these rundown houses

in the poorer areas would have been.

So we can see there is some action already and it has ignited.

It has caught fire already. 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.

DAN: It's now 2am, 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 rundown 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 has been really slow.

Such that, in September 1666, the city was still a huge tinderbox.

By quarter past two,

the fire has entirely engulfed Thomas Farriner's bakery.

And his neighbours - the blacksmith William Walter Smith,

and Thomas Knight, the glazier - barely have time to collect

their precious few belongings

before their the houses go up in flames, too.

But for most Londoners,

the first hint of impending disaster was the sound of church bells.

BELLS RING OUT

Within minutes of the fire taking hold,

the bells of this church - St Magnus The Martyr -

just a street away from Pudding Lane,

were ringing out in alarm.

And the warden of this particular church was actually

Thomas Farriner, the baker, himself.

BELLS RING

I'm meeting chief bell-ringer Dickon 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... And therefore ringing the bells was 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 rung at a time when you don't expect them,

then you know there's something wrong.

BELLS RING

It's now just after 2:30 AM.

But did the Londoners we've been following - our book-seller,

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 Vyner 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 metres down the road.

But safe within his mansion on Lombard Street,

he must have felt like nothing could touch him.

We know that Robert Vyner 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 Vyner's mansion was just a few hundred metres

from the epicentre 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 St Paul's Cathedral,

our book-seller, Joshua Kirton,

was completely unaware of the blaze taking hold along Pudding Lane.

Joshua Kirton traded as a book-seller for many years,

and ran a successful business with many loyal customers,

including Samuel Pepys.

Remarkably, we know from detailed records kept

about London's book-sellers,

exactly where Joshua's 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,

wodges of documents and stacks of books,

were all incredibly flammable.

A small spark could have sat Joshua's entire livelihood ablaze,

and tearing through the city towards him

was the worst fire London had ever seen.

At first, only the churches near Pudding Lane would have been

ringing 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's 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.

Very little remains to show us

the work of 17th-century shoemakers like Sibbell,

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.

I'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 a child had outgrown it and 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 schoolchildren,

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, so the children were 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 servants

at very ill hours.

And she almost lost her shop as a result.

Whatever the truth of these rumours, 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 will 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.

It's now 3 AM,

and whilst two of our three Londoners were unaware of the extent

of the fire, close to its centre,

pandemonium was breaking out.

PEOPLE SCREAMING

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.

But in spite of their efforts,

the Great Fire had already taken one life.

The Farriner family, Thomas and his two children,

escaped by climbing out of a neighbour's window.

His daughter Hanna 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 its 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 of 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 tried to help douse the flames

but 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 3am, Fish Street Hill is ablaze.

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 there'd been loads of big fires.

If you'd said "Great Fire of London" a few months earlier,

people would've thought you were talking about 1212,

when there was a huge fire. What were Londoners' reactions?

At first, they don't seem to have been that bothered.

We know that from the great commentator

on the fire, Mr Samuel Pepys.

I love Samuel Pepys 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... What did he say?

..is that Jane, his maidservant,

had woken him about three o'clock in the morning, so about this time,

and said there was a fire in the city, had a look out the window,

decided it wasn't too bad and went back to bed.

Pepys, 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.

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've pulled down private houses,

created a fire break,

but those houses belonged 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 dodgy joke

as opposed to putting out the Great Fire of London.

Well done, Thomas Bloodworth.

It's now 4am and the fire's 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've 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 see if we can make this tar 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've spontaneously combusted

when the temperature got high enough.

HE LAUGHS

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 gases igniting.

That's right. Wow! 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 tar alight.

That just... That was the tar igniting from the radiation

going down onto the tar. Oh, my goodness!

And the flames weren't touching it at all.

Because of the temperature, it just went "boof!" Yes.

That is scary.

And, imagine, that's one small little glass container of tar,

imagine in 1666, in London,

warehouses full of barrels of tar.

Absolutely devastating.

Nothing had any chance of surviving.

It's now five in the morning on Sunday the second of September

and the terrifying sound of the warehouses exploding...

..would've 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.

Most people had stopped trying to put out the fire

and were now desperately trying 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 Sibbil Theame and book-seller Joshua Kirkton,

were in no immediate danger.

But by now, the mansion of our banker, Robert Vyner,

was just 100m 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 jewellery,

probably never left his sight, as he prepared to flee.

Another Londoner caught up in the terror that had hit London's streets

was Samuel Pepys.

Pepys' diary is so intense that it almost seems to freeze

this moment in time.

Pepys' 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 laden 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 Vyner,

the Great Fire would ultimately be totally devastating.

But already, on day one of the disaster,

a few cabby chancers, 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 £30,000

to have their things moved to safety.

By 6AM, London's 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 Kew 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 razed to the ground.

And countless wealthy people reduced to abject poverty.

The one we have here, is a petition from Sarah Crathes, a 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,

that she and her children can no longer survive.

I mean, indeed she says she's been "reduced to great extremity".

"Being forced to turn servant"

and "to work hard for a poor livelihood".

So, that's quite a fall.

To go from somebody who owns a great estate, to being a servant.

Sarah Crathes wasn't the only person to lose everything.

The records reveal 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 St 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 Cogar who led the excavation.

Tell me about these things that you found.

So, these clay tobacco pipes are covered in charcoal.

So, that was actually discoloured 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 beer mug, used... A beer 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 beer,

you know, with a pipe in their mouth.

You've got a whole picture of life, haven't you?

Yes, yeah. You're relaxing at the bar and then suddenly...

You hear news of a fire and you run. Yeah.

You drop everything and run.

It's now 7am, and by now another Londoner who was dropping

everything and running, was Samuel Pepys.

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 sent it away.

Cos otherwise we wouldn't have one of the best accounts

of the Great Fire. Yeah, that's true.

But my favourite Pepys 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 sent 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 Pepys' 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,

mouldering away.

It probably tastes quite nice by now.

By 8am the fire has been burning for seven 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 over 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 Pepys takes a boat along the Thames

and he notices the fire seems to be carried on the wind.

It's killing the pigeons that Londoners keep for food.

Pepys writes in his diary,

"The poor pigeons I perceive were loth 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 realised, were 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 Thorn,

I've built stacks of wood and paper to mimic the conditions

inside the buildings that helped the fire take hold so quickly.

Within seconds we've created our very own micro inferno.

We can measure the heat with this specially adapted thermal camera.

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.

The oxygen from the wind acts as fuel for the fire.

And in just two seconds the temperature has jumped

more than 500 degrees.

Wind driven fires like this are still an enormous

challenge for 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,

that's wind driven like that?

It's almost impossible.

The amount of resources that you need,

you're literally going to have to stand back

and you're going to have to wait for the conditions to change.

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.

The fire began in the Pudding Lane area,

in the early hours of Sunday September the second 1666.

And quickly spread south, devouring the poorer areas and the quayside.

But now, on Monday, the second day of the fire, it's moving here,

towards Gracechurch street.

One of the most glamorous parts of the city.

Gracechurch street is wiped out within a few hours.

And the fire keeps heading north,

towards the heart of the financial district,

Lombard Street and The Royal Exchange.

If they go up in flames, London's economy is in serious trouble.

Suzannah and Rob are discovering how Londoners from every

walk of life were caught up in the flames.

People are in a state of panic, the city's in chaos.

And here, at Newgate,

one of the seven London gates leading in and out of the city,

there are huge bottlenecks

as people desperately attempt to flee the inferno.

Early on Monday all entrances to the city are closed to incoming traffic,

to help more people to escape.

As it spreads, the fire makes no allowance for class or wealth.

Everyone, rich or poor, is under threat.

I'm following three Londoners, a book-seller, a shoemaker

and a banker.

All living in different parts of this great city.

On Monday, early afternoon,

the flames are reaching wealthy Lombard Street.

And our first Londoner is now being caught up in the raging fire.

The narrow, twisting road made it easy for the fire to burn

towards his elegant residence.

Robert Vyner was a wealthy banker and goldsmith

and one of the most influential men in England.

Friends with the king, he even made some of the famous crown jewels.

His home was now in serious danger.

Vyner, ever the cautious banker,

took action 24 hours before the fire reached his house in Lombard Street.

He had his business papers, jewellery

and cash moved out of his house and taken to be stored

over 20 miles away at the king's palace at Windsor Castle.

In a terrifying couple of hours, Vyner lost his home,

business and his entire neighbourhood.

The only comfort was knowing that at least his family were safe.

He also managed to save his jewels

and his documents holding details of the many debtors who owed him money.

But the Great Fire wasn't done with him yet.

Rich Londoners like Robert Vyner had the most to lose.

But they also had the cash to pay other people

to get their stuff out of harm's way

and not everyone was that lucky.

Poorer people just had to grab whatever they could

in their arms or stick it on a cart and flee.

It would have been absolute chaos, people running in every direction.

Trying to save themselves, trying to save their belongings,

as behind them the fire spread remorselessly,

swallowing up homes and swallowing up businesses.

North of Lombard Street,

just seven streets away from where the fire started,

was the financial and commercial heart of London,

The Royal Exchange.

Now, in a matter of moments, it too was consumed by the fire

and 3,000 merchants,

selling everything from Chinese silks to gold cloth and jewels,

had their livelihoods destroyed.

For a while a strange

and exotic smell is rising up from the crypt here.

And that's because this is where the East India Company

keeps its huge stocks of very expensive spices.

And that smell, which is sticking to the back of people's throats,

well that's all of their pepper burning.

I want to know why the destruction of The Royal Exchange

on Monday afternoon was such a devastating blow for the city.

So, I'm meeting Professor Ronald Hutton,

who's an expert in the period.

Ronald, here we are in The Royal Exchange,

what would this place have been like in 1666?

Think of a mixture of a gigantic shopping mall,

a gigantic stock exchange and a gigantic business park.

And surrounding it one of the great manufacturing areas of the lands,

especially for luxury goods, high quality produce.

It burned down in the Great Fire,

what was the effect of that on London's economy?

It's the place to which everybody comes to move money and goods around

in London and the nation.

And was it just London's rich who were affected,

or was it the poor, as well?

The Royal Exchange is the motor of the economy,

and the economy affects absolutely everybody.

The poor lose their jobs, and the economy takes a spin dive,

just as the rich lose their capital,

so, it's everybody. Just imagine, at the present day,

the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange

and most of the merchant banks all going up in smoke in a day

and you have some sense of the impact.

So, the jobs and the produce and the poor are on the line

as well as the money of the rich.

Monday, the second day of the fire, has come to an end.

By nightfall, scraps of scorched silk

travel on the strong wind 30 miles west of Beaconsfield,

and smoke spreads 50 miles to Oxford.

Writer Samuel Pepys reports

the front line of the fire is now a mile wide.

After the break, we see how on the next day

London's top luxury shops turned to smoking ruins.

The blaze overtakes so much of the city

that the only man who can save it...

..is the King himself.

It's dawn on the third day of the Great Fire of London.

I'm walking in the footsteps of the fire,

uncovering the facts behind Britain's most devastating inferno.

The first two days, Sunday and Monday,

destroyed almost half of the city's buildings...

..but worse is to come.

It's now morning on Tuesday the fourth of September,

day three of the Great Fire,

and the day it's destined to cause its most terrible damage.

The fire keeps heading remorselessly westwards,

blown by the powerful wind.

At dawn, it came here, to Cheapside, the city's most fashionable road.

This was the capital's top high street,

packed with traders, merchants and famous taverns.

In 1666, just like today, this street, Cheapside,

was full of shops.

In fact, the name "cheap"

comes from the old English word meaning "market",

and, as well as being the centre of London's jewellery trade,

this was also its busiest shopping area,

with a thriving market

selling cheese and butter and herbs and fruits,

both here and in neighbouring sidestreets...

..but early on Tuesday morning, no-one's shopping here.

All they want to do is save their lives and possessions

before the fire gets to them.

From St Pauls, our second Londoner, book-seller Joshua Kirton

can actually see the blaze approaching.

He's rapidly packing his entire stock of books

to take them to safety.

The fire is now completely out of control,

with around a hundred houses going up in flames every hour.

Buildings are burning in all directions,

and eyewitness accounts tell us the wall of fire is over 30 feet high.

Having started in the very south of the city

and spread west to Cheapside,

the fire's also now reaching the north side of the city wall.

It's now 6:30am on Tuesday,

the third day of the fire.

Cheapside is fully ablaze,

and, by the Thames, the fire is coming ever closer to the temple.

On the previous day,

Londoners lost an important battle on the riverfront

when it advanced towards Blackfriars.

Here at Queenhithe, there would have been absolute chaos.

Up there, you would have seen people fleeing the city

with their belongings in their arms or on carts,

while down here others would have been running desperately

to the river to gather water

in a futile attempt to put out the flames.

And remember, all this could have been avoided.

The city's Lord Mayor had the chance to stop the fire

in its first few hours,

but, instead of action, he said, "A woman could piss it out."

Now people desperately needed someone to get things under control.

Step forward this man -

the king, Charles II.

Charles takes charge, and orders eight command posts to be set up

on the western side of the city, where the fire is rapidly headed.

Each is responsible for protecting its local area.

As the inferno spread across the city,

the King and his brother, the Duke of York,

took a boat downriver here to Queenhithe.

They threw themselves into tackling the blaze,

passing water buckets, helping to operate primitive fire engines

and inspiring the firefighters.

We know from eyewitness accounts

that this really impressed the King's subjects,

which was good news for Charles,

because he needed his people on his side.

SUZANNAH: By the time of the fire, Charles had been king for six years,

returning the monarchy to England after his father,

Charles I, was beheaded in 1649 -

but, in these 16 years,

he'd only really proved himself in the arts of gambling and womanising,

entertaining his mistresses and drinking buddies

here in the undercroft of the banqueting house.

Scandal followed scandal. He would have been a tabloid editor's dream.

Now, I love Charles.

They never seemed to be a dull moment when he was around.

He might not be the sort of person

you'd want to hang out with your daughter,

but YOU'D sure as hell have good time -

but that wasn't exactly the mood in 17th-century London.

A hedonistic party animal always looking for fun

wasn't what people wanted in a king.

They wanted someone whose finger was on the pulse,

someone who could give the country what it needed.

He'd certainly failed a year earlier

when London was struck by a devastating plague.

Charles' response wasn't to stay and help -

instead, he packed up his things and left the city.

Charles' behaviour during the plague was widely criticised,

and by 1666, his reputation was at breaking point -

so, when the Great Fire came along,

rather than leave London and issue orders from afar,

he decided to stay and fight,

seizing it as the PR opportunity of a lifetime.

This was Charles II's chance to show himself as a man of action

who put his people first.

DAN: It's still early in the morning on the third day of the fire.

The blaze is ferocious, and continues to grow in all directions.

By 7am, the fire's moved further north,

and, already, some of the city's most magnificent medieval buildings

have been destroyed - some of them more than 300 years old.

Grocers' Hall is in ruins, Drapers' Hall is gone -

and then the fire reaches here, Merchant Taylors' Hall.

These buildings were some of the most sumptuous in London,

and belonged to livery companies - incredibly wealthy organisations

that were key to London's business life.

Livery companies were trade and craft guilds,

and they originally existed to make sure

that only members of a particular company

could practice a particular trade.

So, for example, if you were a member of this company,

Merchant Taylors, then you could work as a tailor and make clothes.

Because of their vast wealth,

the livery companies also lent money to the King,

which gave them even more political influence.

When they go up in flames,

the city's economy suffers another great loss.

As the fire devoured the buildings that were the lifeblood of the city,

people desperately tried to fight the flames.

The fire seemed to leap ahead of them.

Now, a strong wind had been blowing since the beginning of the fire,

and contemporary accounts say the flames seem to leap

from building to building,

often as much as half a mile at a time.

ROB: To find out the real answer

why the Great Fire was spreading so rapidly,

and why new fires were breaking out all over London,

I'm heading to Imperial College.

One of the world's most renowned fire specialists,

Dr Guillermo Rein, has been doing brand-new research

about the connection between wildfires

and the great Fire of London.

From studying wildfires, forest fires,

we know that in the presence of a wind,

when the flames are very large,

the production of embers become a major source of fire spread.

Embers are small pieces of burning debris

that can be blown from building to building.

We know that the first three days of the fire were very windy,

and the wind carried embers across London,

starting fires in distant places -

just like wildfires.

So, there's something unique about the great Fire of London,

that it was a fire that was so large

that the fire saw the city as a forest, literally.

Really? Yeah.

To demonstrate how embers could spread the fire

far and wide across London's rooftops,

Dr Rein has created two models

of the clay roofs commonly found in 1666.

The one the right has good, intact roof tiles.

The other is damaged and broken,

and you can see the wooden slats underneath.

Many houses would have been hundreds of years old,

and the damaged roofs, especially,

would have been very easy prey to embers.

At the time, where the great Fire of London really was prolific,

was quite a poor area of London.

So, the houses would have been not well maintained - almost slumlike.

I want to find out just how quickly the windblown embers

started new fires once they'd landed on roofs.

Dr Rein has his own ember generator, called the Imperial Dragon.

This replicates the way that embers would have been fanned

and carried by the wind during the Great Fire.

Oh, wow! It's straight away - look at them go.

These aren't sparks, these are embers -

and there's a difference, there. Yeah, yeah.

Because an ember still has a certain amount of fuel in itself, does it?

Exactly.

The embers bounce off the intact tiles, leaving the roof undamaged -

but the gaps in the broken tiles on the left let the embers in.

Some of them are sneaking in those tiny little gaps, aren't they?

So, you can see, the very small embers,

they just land there, and they stay there and ignite.

Within minutes, the roof with the broken tiles

and the revealed wooden slats is on fire.

Oh, there we go. It's up. Yeah.

Now we've got fire. And now the fire will develop into the house,

and the whole building will be engulfed in fire.

Given the huge spread of the Great Fire,

there would have been countless embers flying about,

starting new fires constantly.

To make matters worse, the strong wind blowing at the time

leads Dr Rein to estimate these embers could be carried

hundreds of metres from their point of origin.

It's terrifying, isn't it?

Thinking that you were possibly safe,

because you were that far away from the main fire,

but, actually, you may very well have had a ticking time bomb

lodged in your roof. Yeah.

It is now noon on day three of the Great Fire,

and eyewitnesses tell us

that the city is covered in a huge cloud of smoke.

In fact, you can see the sun through it -

it looks as red as blood.

The king's brother, the Duke of York,

has set up a command centre here at Bridewell -

but already embers are falling all around him.

He's soon surrounded by fire, and almost overcome.

He has no choice but to order his men to flee -

in fact, he's lucky to get away alive -

and all around him the city is falling into chaos.

SUZANNAH: But the Duke of York was a trained soldier,

and well used to dealing with extreme situations.

Your everyday Londoner, however, was not.

Families were caught up in the living nightmare,

and by the third day of the fire,

the city was in a frenzy of madness and hysteria.

One witness says he saw women and children shrieking in fright,

and people running around like distracted creatures.

Another account says that Londoners were seized with dread.

What I find amazing from looking at these images

and reading survivors' accounts

is that people don't seem to have behaved any differently

to the way that we would do now.

We know of individuals even refusing to leave their houses,

and others whose brains just seemed to shut down,

leaving them helpless against the flames.

Dr Sarita Robinson has been studying people's reactions

to traumatic experiences.

This is a case of what we would call cognitive paralysis,

and this is when people become so overwhelmed

by what's going on around them

that they can't actually process the information

and form a rational behaviour,

and therefore we just grind to a halt.

There is actually one story of an 80-year-old watchmaker

who sits in his workshop and refuses to leave -

and, in fact, they find his bones, with his keys.

Yes - in the case of your watchmaker,

actually what we're seeing is some sort of denial behaviours, perhaps.

They don't believe that they're going to be consumed by the fire.

So, in other words, what's going on

is it's a form of psychological comfort to people,

just to stay put and not think about the fire -

although, as you say, these consequences were fatal.

DAN: It's now 1pm on Tuesday afternoon,

and the fire has been raging for over three days.

With so many people terrified, paralysed or running around,

there were bound to be a few chancers.

Amid the mayhem,

one of the greatest dangers to what remained of public order

was the prisons -

and here, where the Old Bailey stands today,

was one of London's most famous jails.

It was called Newgate, and as the fire spread,

an armed guard marched the prisoners out of Newgate

and took them south to safety in Southwark -

but, of course, some of the prisoners saw this

as their perfect opportunity to make an escape,

and they scarpered in all directions.

When into the third day of the fire,

many other dodgy Londoners exploited the situation by looting.

To find out why crimes like these became rife

during the Great Fire, and making Rebecca Rideal,

who has researched the subject extensively.

Rebecca, what I'm really interested in

is the fact that there's so many petty crimes during the fire.

Have you come across them a lot?

Yes - and the stories are always quite hilarious, actually.

So, you get people grabbing goods like tobacco, like brandy -

they were goods that anyone could really buy,

but they were slightly luxurious, as well.

It wasn't like buying a loaf of bread, it wasn't a necessity.

So, if you saw tobacco shop that was vacant,

and clearly nobody was there,

lots of people would have just picked up these goods.

So, it's like the London riots, isn't it?

Where people were sort of helping themselves.

Yeah, order has broken down so much

that they don't think that they're going to get caught -

because, actually, the maximum punishment

for stealing anything over a shilling was death.

If there were a vast quantity of people committing petty crimes,

how would the authorities going to deal with it?

You can't round up the whole of London. No, you can't.

So, what they did instead

was a proclamation was issued on the 19th of September,

which basically said,

"If you've taken anything, whether intentionally or not,

"just drop it off at Finsbury Park and we'll say no more about it."

The looters might have got off lightly,

but these were extraordinary times.

In such terrible circumstances,

who's to say that we would have behaved any differently?

It's now 1:30pm on the third day of the fire,

and desperate Londoners are trying new methods to halt its progress.

They start using gunpowder

but in other parts of the city, the fire rages on.

After the break we'll be heading to St Paul's Cathedral to find out

just how incredibly hot the Great Fire got.

So hot, it even brought down the House Of God.

We are exploring the Great Fire of London,

uncovering its secrets and feeling the heat

behind the most terrible blaze in British history.

I'm walking the route of the fire, every step of the way,

tracing its trail of devastation through the city from east to west.

It's Tuesday, fourth September.

The third day of the fire.

By the afternoon, the blaze reaches Ludgate Hill,

encircling the area at the top, the spiritual heart of the city.

Here at the top of Ludgate Hill

is the most significant building in the whole city.

More important than the livery company halls,

more important than the Royal Exchange.

It's London's very own cathedral, St Paul's.

And on the third day of the fire,

the flames are getting closer and closer.

The old medieval St Paul's had been standing for almost 600 years.

That's longer than the rebuilt St Paul's we have today.

It was not only a place of worship

but also a bustling hub for business.

At the time of the Great Fire,

St Paul's was the centre of England's book trade.

Joshua Kirton was a well-known book-seller

who counted Samuel Pepys among his customers.

He'd been trading for many years and had a booming business.

When news of the fire broke, the book-sellers, printers

and stationers in this area were deeply anxious,

and understandably so.

They were surrounded by stacks and stacks of flammable materials

- books, rolls of parchment and countless prints and pamphlets.

And those flammable materials were their livelihood.

Desperate to save their stock, the book-sellers decided to hide

everything underground inside St Paul's crypt.

Thousands and thousands of books were rushed into the building.

Joshua was allocated a spot over here

and over the course of two panic stricken days,

he heaved all of his books inside to safety, or so he thought.

The book-sellers thought the crypt was impregnable but the

cathedral was being repaired and was covered in wooden scaffolding.

Tragically, the scaffolding caught fire,

and St Paul's went up in flames.

The fire around the cathedral was so hot

that the very stones exploded like grenades.

But Joshua might still have hoped

that at least the crypt would be safe.

That is until as one eyewitness put it,

"Great-beams and massy stones" fell on the pavement

and broke through into the crypt, destroying all the books.

Kirton had lost everything.

With the great cathedral now in flames,

our third Londoner is also within reach of the fire.

Living only a few streets away at Christ's Hospital School,

Sybil Tame will soon need to take her daughters to safety.

Everywhere around here buildings are on fire.

St Paul's school has burned to the ground.

Stationers' Hall, that's burnt to the ground.

The Royal College of Physicians at Amen Corner,

that's burned to the ground.

Still the wind continues to blow, fanning the flames.

The fire is now reached the point

that firefighters call "fully developed" -

it's at its hottest and its most dangerous.

To bring down a stone colossus like St Paul's,

the fire must've been incredibly hot.

Museum of London Archaeology has in its collection

objects that hold clues

to the intense temperatures the fire reached.

I'm meeting lead archaeologist Gustav Milne.

Gus, what have we got here?

What we have is some material from a building

right next to the bakehouse where the fire started.

This is a red brick,

or was a red brick from the cellar floor of that basement.

And as you can see, it's a little bit black.

What does that actually tell us? It was a storage cell,

it was a warehouse in which barrels of wood pitch were being stored.

Pitch was used on wooden boats and houses

to waterproof them and stop them from rotting.

The problem with pitch, it's a combustible.

And what's happened is the wood pitch has boiled

and percolated all the way through the bricks.

For pitch to have melted, then... That's at least 250-300 degrees.

Also discovered in the storage cellar were barrels with

distorted metalwork which points to even higher temperatures.

For the bottom of the barrels to be carbonised like that,

you would have to have temperatures of about 700 degrees. Oh, wow!

We've quickly ramped up temperatures. Yes, yes, yes.

In fact, the temperature got so high

that the metal not only got distorted, it actually melted.

This is a padlock that was discovered by archaeologists

and dated back to the time of the Great Fire of London.

Now, this would have been made of iron

and you can see the damage on that.

And that's fire damage.

And to distort the metal like it has done,

the temperatures involved would have been phenomenal.

I want to test exactly how great a temperature would have deformed

this padlock so much, and so find out how hot the Great Fire became.

I've enlisted the help of Eirik Christensen

from Imperial College London and Robin Williams, a blacksmith.

I've got a padlock here.

Can we use the forge here to see what we can do with this padlock?

Certainly, yeah. Eirik, you've got

a completed looking thermometer here, is it?

That's essentially exactly it.

It's a temperature probe that can go to really high temperatures.

This state-of-the-art piece of kit

can reach temperatures over 1,000 degrees.

So it's time to find out what temperature will melt the padlock.

So I'm just going to pop that there on the top.

Let's see what happens, shall we?

I've got Richard behind me here who's pumping the bellows,

which is blowing air into our fire, which is giving it all it needs

to get up to really, really high temperatures.

It's representative of what was going on at the Great Fire of London

because of the enormous winds that were going,

the amount of fuel that was available.

We take a reading after a few minutes.

Despite the heat, the padlock looks intact.

Look at that, glowing away. Goodness me. That's a gorgeous colour.

What are we up to there now, Eirik?

We're over 700, closer to 800 degrees.

800 degrees. Look at it glow! Phew!

Right, let's get it in again.

The padlock is very hot,

but not deformed like the one found in the Great Fire ruins.

So we increase the temperature.

Let's pull that out. Right, let's have a look at this. Whoa!

Cor, look at that!

Right, Eirik. What are we at there?

So we are shooting well above 1000 degrees right there. It's melted.

The metal has burnt. Have we burnt a hole through the iron?

You certainly have. Goodness me!

We managed to kind of replicate the padlock that was retrieved.

You can see the kind of temperatures we're talking about,

and we are at over 1000 degrees to get that.

I mean, that is ruined, isn't it? That's horrific.

Our tests have confirmed that temperatures

during the Great Fire reached over 1,000 degrees.

Enough to destroy the strongest of building materials

like stone and iron and hot enough to devour St Paul's.

When St Paul's burned down, the air was so hot

a local thunderstorm broke out

and lightning sparked above the blazing building.

The fire now claimed two more official deaths

- one an old lady and another an elderly man

who risked the flames to get a blanket.

It took less than an hour for the cathedral to be gutted,

and it must have been terrifying to see,

as though London were the target for the wrath of God,

which is actually what people believed.

The lead from the cathedral roof

melted and it poured down Ludgate Hill.

The new cathedral of St Paul's was built within

the footprint of the one lost in the Great Fire.

Designed by the brilliant architect Sir Christopher Wren,

it's one of the most famous landmarks in Britain.

But hidden in the Cathedral Gardens

there's a secret hardly anyone knows about.

Looking forward to this.

Underground, a small part of the original cathedral still survives,

and I have a unique opportunity to see it.

So, this is it. This is the doorway to the crypt. Can we have a look?

Underneath this manhole cover, the last fragments of the original crypt

from 1666, and apparently no-one has been down here for decades.

So actually, when you look down there it's pretty dark and grim

and looks a bit musty but, well, let's see for myself.

Oh, God. It's quite a tight squeeze to get down it, actually.

Wow!

When you're down, this is pretty amazing because here we are

underneath St Paul's, one of the great landmarks of London.

One of the great landmark buildings of the world.

And we can see something almost no-one gets a chance to see -

the pillars of medieval St Paul's.

And we can also see over here what look like scorch marks.

Black marks on the stone.

It's amazing to think those have been made by the Great Fire itself.

But what you've also got to imagine is London's book-sellers

and Joshua Kirton placing their stock down here

while the Great Fire was building,

hoping against hope that all of their books,

which were their livelihood,

were going to be safe, and then think of them back

on street level as the flames were eating the city around them,

hoping that all of their

precious stock down here was going to be safe.

It's incredible.

Their hopes were dashed. Everything was destroyed.

It's good down here but I'm off to the land of the living.

The burning of St Paul's,

London's most significant religious building, shocked the city.

But it also brought out the dark heart of Londoners

because someone surely had to take the blame.

Surprisingly, the first to be

accused was not the Pudding Lane baker, Thomas Farriner.

Instead, people wanted to blame foreigners for starting the fire.

You have to remember that 17th-century London

was a social powderkeg.

A spark could set it off at any time.

Three days into the fire, a mob of enraged Londoners

took to the streets following a rumour of a Dutch invasion.

The city was descending into chaos.

Human beings on the whole like there to be a culprit

and they like to catch the culprit.

And so who were the prime suspects?

Number one is the Dutch. We are at war with them.

Number two, we're also at war with the French

and the French are worse than the Dutch because they are Catholic.

And the third are Catholics in general.

The home-grown traditional English threat

that actually had produced the Gunpowder Plot

and are therefore capable of atrocity of a grand scale.

During the third day of the fire, reports were coming in

of a mob running amok, picking on innocent victims.

I think the worst case for me is a woman with an apron

full of chicks, little chickens, in Moorfields.

Some nutcase thought that she was carrying fireballs in her apron,

she'd been throwing them around, and a mob just got this idea,

set on her with clubs and cut her breasts off.

They pretty well literally went mad.

Coming up next, we find out more

about why the most obvious of culprits,

the Pudding Lane baker himself, Mr Farriner,

managed to dodge the wrath of Londoners.

And we discover who actually ended up paying the ultimate price

for starting the Great Fire of London.

Welcome back to the Great Fire of London.

It's now early evening on Tuesday, fourth September,

the third day of the Great Fire.

St Paul's is still in flames, and so is the city's economy.

In this mad panic, Londoners cast the net widely for someone to blame.

Against all common sense, Thomas Farriner,

the baker from the Pudding Lane area is not the first to be accused.

And when he finally has to answer for himself,

he quickly points the finger at someone else.

Thomas Farriner turned out to be a master at passing the buck,

and you can imagine his delight

when the authorities began turning up the heat

on a 26-year-old watchmaker's son from Normandy called Robert Hubert.

Hubert was French, he claimed to be Catholic and like many

terrified foreigners, he was fleeing the country when he was caught.

None of that boded well, but the thing that really damned him

was when asked about who started the Great Fire of London, he confessed.

It wasn't long before Robert Hubert was on trial

and facing the death penalty, and Farriner was off the hook.

Amazingly, a record of Hubert's trial still exists.

It's kept here at the London Metropolitan Archives,

and I've been granted special permission to see it.

Dr Jacob Field is a specialist on this period

and knows all about poor Robert Hubert.

Jacob, what do we have here?

So we have a document here, 350 years old,

which is the original trial record of the case against Robert Hubert,

the man accused of starting the Great Fire of London.

What does it say? It says here, in Latin,

which was used in legal records at the time,

that Robert Hubert, lately of London, a labourer,

diabolically, voluntarily maliciously and feloniously

started the Great Fire by putting

a fireball through the window of the bakery on Pudding Lane.

Why did he confess?

Well, this is where the story

becomes quite sad and a little tragic.

Robert Hubert was someone who was mentally unbalanced,

and it's very likely that he did it for attention.

But if, at a distance of 350 years, you can

judge that he probably wasn't in a fit mental state to give

a confession like this, why did they believe him?

Well, really, they were looking for someone to blame, and also

there was another figure who stood to gain by this confession.

So have a look at the signatures under the indictment.

And these are the people basically saying that this is true

and this is what happened.

So whose names do you see there?

Thomas Farriner.

Thomas Farriner, the baker.

Yes, so this is Thomas Farriner, the elder,

a baker who lives on Pudding Lane.

And if you look at some other names, who else do you see?

We've got Hanna Farriner and Thomas Farriner Junior.

So the whole Farriner family is testifying against him?

That's right, so all of the Farriners are basically

coming to court and saying, "We had nothing to do with this,

there's no way it's our fault that the fire started,"

and this man, Robert Hubert, started it all,

throwing a fireball through a window.

So they're behind this miscarriage of justice?

They really are the bakers from hell, aren't they?

They don't come out of this well at all.

Robert Hubert paid the ultimate price

and was hanged at Tyburn gallows on 29th October, 1666.

The Great Fire of London had claimed yet another victim.

So who'd have thought the Farriners could be so evil?

Yes, they must have thanked their lucky stars that poor Robert Hubert

was so mentally disturbed that he confessed to starting the fire.

And just because they'd signed the indictment

didn't mean they'd actually witnessed anything.

No, no, it just meant that they were trying to escape being

blamed for starting the blaze.

They got away with it scot-free.

With St Paul's crumbling in flames,

the fire now gets as far as the law courts at Temple.

This is over 1.5 miles from the Pudding Lane area, where it began.

The fire just keeps spreading.

But now the fire's coming towards me, heading west along the Strand.

The King's brother, the Duke of York,

is struggling desperately to fight it and, all around here,

houses are being torn down to stop the fire from spreading any

further down there towards the King's Palace at Whitehall.

We've already seen our banker, Robert Vyner,

and our book-seller, Joshua Kirton, watch their homes

and businesses go up in smoke and flames.

Now our third Londoner, shoemaker Sibbell Theame,

is the last to be caught by the blaze.

Sibbell Theame was a widow who lived and worked

at Christ's Hospital School, making shoes for orphan children.

When the fire started, her workshop was located over a mile

away from the epicentre of the blaze.

Living on the western edge of the city,

she must have thought she was safe from harm.

But by Tuesday evening, things had taken a turn for the worse.

Sibbell was so incredibly unlucky.

Her workshop caught a fuel of the last embers from the fire

and was engulfed by flames.

She must have assumed the fire wouldn't reach her as we know

she'd done nothing to move her things out of harm's way,

or maybe she just couldn't afford the exorbitant rates carters

were demanding to move people's things.

Sibbell lost everything - her home, her livelihood, even her tools.

Sharing the same fate as thousands of destitute Londoners, she now

had to find another way to provide for herself and her daughters.

Dawn on September fifth, 1666.

For the last three nights,

a strong wind has been blowing a raging fire west through

the City of London but, overnight, that wind has changed direction,

and now the fire is moving back east towards this place...

..the Tower of London.

In 1666, the tower is one of the most important buildings,

not just in London, but in the whole country.

It's the safe where the King keeps his crown jewels, it's

a jail for high-profile prisoners

and it's stuffed with valuable stock belonging to London's goldsmiths,

placed there to keep it safe from the fire.

But most terrifying of all is that the Tower of London is

the biggest ammunition dump in the entire country

because behind those 15-foot wide walls are 9,000 barrels

of gunpowder and, if the fire touches those, it's going to

create the biggest explosion that Londoners have ever witnessed.

So far, nothing has been immune from destruction.

By Wednesday, the city has been on fire for four days.

From the Pudding Lane area,

the fire's raged towards the Thames, destroying homes

and warehouses before burning the financial centre of the city to the

ground, including The Royal Exchange.

And then, on the third day, London's most famous building,

St Paul's Cathedral, was wiped out by the flames.

But as the fire closes in on the Tower of London,

it seems that the worst is yet to come.

The people around here must have been absolutely terrified.

No-one's been left untouched, including our three Londoners

who we've been following throughout this whole trail of devastation.

Across the series,

we've been uncovering the fates of three very different London

residents who all lived in the direct path of the Great Fire -

a shoemaker, Sibbell Theame, a rich goldsmith banker,

Robert Vyner, and a book-seller, Joshua Kirton.

But what happened to them as fire engulfed the city?

St Paul's Cathedral churchyard was full of book shops

at the time of the fire.

When the cathedral burned down,

it took thousands of pounds worth of goods with it.

One Londoner who'd lost all his stock was Joshua Kirton.

Like many book-sellers, he'd been based in St Paul's churchyard,

and he had thought that the stone cathedral would be the safest

place to store everything he owned.

Joshua lost all his books and, with them, his livelihood.

It was too much for him to bear.

Despite having had a thriving business before,

he couldn't recover from such a catastrophe.

Sinking further and further into debt,

he died after the Great Fire, utterly penniless.

Robert Vyner, one of the wealthiest men in England,

initially fared better.

He saved all of his belongings from his magnificent home

in Lombard Street 24 hours before the fire burnt it to the ground.

Ever the canny businessman, within a few days, he was up and running

again, but the Great Fire hadn't finished with Robert Vyner yet.

Our third Londoner, shoemaker

and widowed mother of three Sibbell Theame, was truly unlucky.

Her workshop in Christ's Hospital was one of the few

buildings in her street to be completely destroyed by the fire.

She lost everything.

We know from records that Sibbell

took shelter in nearby Christ's Hospital orphanage.

Made homeless like so many other Londoners,

she would have to find a new way to survive.

It's now 6am on Wednesday, fifth September.

And the Great Fire is advancing towards

the Tower of London at frightening speed.

The goldsmith stocks, worth more than £1 million today,

have been moved from here upriver to the King's Palace at Whitehall, and

dockers from Woolwich and Deptford have finally arrived on the scene.

It's going to be their job to save the tower from destruction.

But the newly arrived firefighters have only one reliable

source of water - the River Thames.

Protecting the tower was by far their biggest challenge.

The problem was the technology for putting out fires - well,

it was pretty pitiful.

In 1666, fire engines were rudimentary and,

although they had equipment called fire squirts, which operated

like big syringes, they could only hold small amounts of water.

There was no proper Fire Service.

In fact, there wasn't much more than long chains of people

carrying buckets of water like this up from the Thames.

As the minutes ticked away on the morning of Wednesday,

fifth September, it must have been chaos around the tower

as people watched the approaching flames with horror.

After the break, we'll discover the desperate measures that were

taken to prevent the Tower of London from being blown to kingdom come.

Welcome back.

We're now four days in to the worst fire in British history,

and I'm walking the route to its terrifying conclusion.

It's now 7am on Wednesday, fifth September.

Fire has already destroyed the financial,

religious and legal centres of the city and over 13,000 homes.

It now has its sights on the most important

fortress in the country - the Tower of London.

I'm meeting historian Professor Ronald Hutton

from the University of Bristol.

Ronald, why is it so important

to stop the fire getting to the Tower of London?

Because it's the biggest government munitions store in the entire

country. There are hundreds of barrels of gunpowder there.

If the fire detonates those, it'll be like a low-level nuclear device.

All the housing for miles around, all the shipping in the Port

of London and London Bridge are going to vanish in a flash.

By Wednesday, fifth September, things were looking desperate.

The path of the fire had to be stopped by any means necessary.

But what methods were available, apart from buckets, in 1666?

Now, this is the modern-day equivalent of what was called

a fire hook.

This is actually much smaller than what was used back then.

Theirs were about three times the length of this, much heavier.

It would take up to three men to actually carry the thing,

but the idea was, with this great long pole

and a hook on the end of it, they'd hoist it up onto

the timbers of the houses and just yank them down.

Primitive stuff.

They called these gaps created by tearing down houses firebreaks.

At the Fire Service College in Gloucestershire,

I'm investigating how they worked.

We've set up replica models of the houses typically

found 350 years ago.

In the middle, we've created a firebreak,

as they would have done with the fire hook.

We've torn down the house in the middle with the idea that,

if this house was on fire, this one over here will be safe.

We've created a gap in the middle. We've created that firebreak.

Let's light her up and see how it works.

There it goes.

Just like in 1666, the house is ablaze within minutes.

What a sacrifice to have to make,

to have your house reduced to rubble for the sake of London.

There was no insurance at the time.

With no fire brigade and only basic equipment, firebreaks were

one of the few weapons that could fight the fast-moving flames.

But this method had a fatal flaw.

Oh! Things are moving. Cor, that is an intense fire now!

The flames quickly spread using the remains of the building

in the middle.

By leaving the debris from the torn-down house in place,

the firefighters had provided even more fuel for the fire to feed on.

I'm not holding out much hope for how long that house stands up.

For the first two days of the Great Fire, Londoners desperately

pulled down houses but couldn't clear them away in time.

This made it easier for the blaze to spread to the next house.

Oh! There it goes again! Oh, yeah! That's hot!

Leaving the debris behind meant the fire could rage unchecked.

Radical measures were needed.

Houses were still pulled down but, this time,

firefighters cleared away the remainders as quickly as possible.

I want to see how this proved to be a turning point

in the Great Fire of London.

For this test,

we've removed the debris that was left between the houses.

With no fuel there, the fire has nowhere to go - at least in theory.

Let's test it out.

And you can see the flames kicking out the right-hand

side of the house but, because we've removed

all the debris in the firebreak, they have nothing to catch hold of.

That fire is being contained on that one house.

The one on the right is still very much intact.

Oh, the house is coming down!

Even when the house collapses,

the gap is still big enough to stop our fire spreading.

If only they'd created these firebreaks

early on in the Great Fire of London.

Well, you can see right there the fire has been

prevented from spreading over to the next house.

It's now 7:30am on Wednesday, fifth September, and Londoners wait

with bated breath to see if firebreaks can save the tower.

How did they stop the fire from breaching the Tower of London?

They demolish the housing near the tower with gunpowder...

EXPLOSION

..and create level scorched Earth between the flames and the Tower.

Ironically, gunpowder is used to save the gunpowder.

Once the firefighters realised that gunpowder could create fire-breaks

more quickly, they were able to contain the fire

and prevent a far worse tragedy.

The Tower was safe.

London had been saved from a massive explosion

but Death was still stalking the streets of the city.

We know from eyewitness accounts that an old lady and an old man

burned to death seeking shelter here at St Paul's

but the precise number of people who died during the Great Fire

has been a mystery for centuries.

It's time to find out how many really died.

Official estimates put the death toll at just six people.

This might seem suspicious, especially given how long

the fire lasted and how vast a trail of devastation it left.

It's baffling that we don't have a definitive number,

especially given that the authorities actually kept

incredibly detailed records into how many people died

in 17th-century London.

Held at the London Metropolitan Archives,

the Bills of Mortality, as they are known, record how individuals

met their ends in the ordinary course of events,

down to the goriest and grisliest of details.

Historian Professor Vanessa Harding has been researching them.

Do you have a favourite cause of death,

if one could ask such a strange question?

Well, I suppose there was a man found dead in the common sewer

at St Katherine by the Tower.

That sounds like a particularly horrible way to die.

I'm sure it is, yes, yes.

Even those who didn't die facedown in sewage have their deaths

carefully noted in the records of 1666.

22 died of dropsy, or swelling due to fluid.

15 perished after a fever, and ten expired from griping in the guts.

And we have some other ones here as well.

Scolded in a brewer's mash fat at Stepney!

That sounds like a horrible way to go! Yes, yes.

So, if we turned to September 1666...

Huh. There seems to be some pages missing here.

What can it tell us about the Great Fire?

It tells is basically that the printing press

and the reporting of deaths both broke down at the time of the fire.

So, in that sense, they cannot tell us

anything about how many people died.

Given that we do have this absence,

this gap in the records in terms of recording how many people died,

does that not suggest that many, many people might have died

in the Great Fire?

Many people might have died but I don't think that they did.

By this time, this is a society that is so full of news

and information and gossip, that if there had been

a major loss of life, somebody would have known about it.

And many people would have talked about it.

But other historians think some Londoners could have slipped

through the net and died without trace.

Could the death toll actually be in the hundreds, even the thousands?

Historian Neil Hanson has written a book about deaths

caused by the Great Fire.

He has a controversial new argument.

So, Neil, you have a theory, don't you,

about how many people died in the great fire.

I do.

The official death toll is just half a dozen people.

To me, that is absolutely ludicrous,

when every other great fire disaster in history has claimed tens,

hundreds, thousands of lives.

So, you think that there were vast numbers of people

who just disappeared and we have no record of them?

My belief is that hundreds, possibly even thousands of people,

died in the fire of London but because they were the poor, nobody

cared whether they lived or died and their deaths simply went unrecorded.

London's poor occupied a warren of blind alleys

and closed courts down by the river,

some of the most rundown, most flammable buildings in the city.

When the Great Fire struck, this whole area was destroyed.

One of the King's most senior courtiers remarked that

the fire was the greatest blessing that God ever conferred

upon the King because it had eradicated the slums

and tenements down by the river and the poor who lived in them,

festering sources of the plague, but also festering sources

of criminality and opposition to the King.

Where were all these poor that you think died in the fire, then?

The reason there were no bodies was not because people hadn't died,

it was because the bodies had been utterly destroyed in the fire.

Rob discovered what the searing heat of the Great Fire,

reaching over a thousand degrees, could do to metal.

Look at that!

But could these temperatures be enough to consume a human body?

If you're going to cremate a body, you need a temperature

of 750 degrees for about an hour to an hour and a half.

You don't need to add any heat source after that.

The body will burn on the fat stored within the body.

And all you will be left with is a couple of pounds of grey dust

and few fragments of bone no bigger than that sort of size.

The fires of London were probably twice as hot as that,

certainly hot enough to melt iron and steel.

The great iron bars of Newgate jail, thick as a man's wrist,

they were melted in the fire.

The locks and chains of the city's gates.

So, the temperature was that hot.

It was sustained for hours, days and even weeks.

It's actually terrifying, the idea that there might have been

hundreds or thousands of people who just disappeared.

Of course, the fit and the able-bodied would have escaped

but what about the very young, the very old, the halt,

the sick and the lame?

How could they possibly have escaped from this inferno?

By Wednesday afternoon, tearing down whole streets

and clearing the rubble to make fire-breaks is beginning to work.

But that wasn't all slowing the spread of the fire.

Around four in the afternoon, after four days of terrible gales,

the wind that had been fanning the flames finally dropped.

The fire lost its brutal ferocity.

Little by little, house by house, the Great Fire came under control

as the falling wind and the fire-breaks did their work.

One place that shows where the fire was extinguished

is Merchant Taylor's Hall in Threadneedle Street...

..the trade guild that represented taylors.

Much of the building was gutted by the flames.

This beautiful hall dates from after the Great Fire of London and

one reason for that is because it was all destroyed during the fire.

But the room holds one incredible secret.

To find it, you've got to look behind this wooden panelling.

Now, if you come in here...

..you can still see the old medieval walls and ceiling

of Old Merchant Taylor's Hall.

And on that side, everything survived the fire.

But on this side, everything was destroyed.

So, I'm actually standing on the limit of where the fire reached.

This is the point where the Great Fire of London stopped.

By Wednesday evening,

with two thirds of the buildings inside the city walls destroyed,

tens of thousands of people made homeless,

and what would now be billions of pounds worth of property destroyed,

the Great Fire was finally over.

But the city was on its knees.

And, for those who'd survived, in many ways,

the worst was yet to come.

Welcome back. It's Thursday, the day after the Great Fire ended.

Now, the flames may be out but the city is broken

and the people have been battered.

I'm tracing what happened to Londoners in the days that followed.

The story takes me out of the centre,

into the fields of Hampstead, north of the city.

Now, it's very much part of London

but back then, it would have been rural farms and villages.

If you'd looked out over this view in September 1666,

not only would you have seen enormous plumes of smoke

rising into the upper atmosphere and alarming orange flames

on the horizon, but you'd have seen masses of desperate people

trudging in this direction in search of food and shelter.

The fire had caused a refugee crisis on an unprecedented scale.

Within a matter of days, around 100,000 Londoners had lost their

homes and were flooding into the open spaces surrounding the city.

This is Parliament Hill in North London.

It's calm, peaceful, a relief from the hubbub of the city.

But, just hours after the fire had started,

it had been transformed into a vast refugee camp.

With so many people on the brink of starvation,

something had to be done.

It was a tense situation. The authorities had to act.

I'm finding out what happened with food historian Marc Meltonville.

Marc, there must have been a real food crisis after the fire,

is that right? Yes, it's a disaster.

Upwards of 100 thousand people homeless and the one thing

they haven't got is anything to eat or anything to drink.

But London's starving residents were saved by a stroke of good fortune.

The one thing that was really lucky for everyone was it was September.

The harvest's in.

There is food all across Britain and that food, fire or not,

was already heading down to the London markets.

What you have to do is set up places for people to get that food

because it's on its way.

The government organised temporary markets

so people could buy and sell produce.

It also looked for more immediate solutions to the crisis,

releasing military rations to feed the refugees.

One of the ideas was to use the supplies of army and navy biscuits.

So, what is this ship's biscuit?

They are flour, water and salt.

That, they call the horse feed taken away and, as you're finding,

almost totally unbreakable!

So, how did they eat it?

If you just chew on that, you can slowly crumble it away.

But I wouldn't risk my crowns on there if I was you!

But the ship's biscuits couldn't compete with the fresh food

already pouring into London's emergency markets.

When the authorities got there with the biscuits, everyone went,

err, no, it's all right, at least I think we'll stick with

the bread and cheese, thanks very much!

The survivors of the fire now had food

but they still had no money or livelihood.

They desperately needed cash to keep them going into winter.

One man who witnessed their plight was writer Samuel Pepys.

We think of the welfare state as a modern idea.

But, in fact, the 17th century had its own system of financial relief

to help the victims of major disasters like the Great Fire.

And it was at churches like this one,

St Olave Hart Street, Pepys's own church,

that people were encouraged to dig deep into their pockets

and help support the victims.

Miraculously, the Great Fire stopped just a few hundred yards

short of St Olave's, so the church was spared.

A few days after the fire ended,

Samuel Pepys attended a service here.

In his diary, Pepys describes how "our parson made a melancholy but

"good sermon and many and most in the church cried,

"specially the women."

He would have been sitting almost exactly where I am now

when he heard that and, reading his diary,

it's clear that the church was full of distraught Londoners,

many of whom had been made homeless by the fire,

and who needed every little bit of help that they could get.

Historian Dr Jacob Field has been researching

how the church provided poor relief for impoverished Londoners

in the months after the fire.

How did this poor relief fund work?

Was it like, I don't know, Sport Relief today or Poppy Aid?

Very similar.

So, about a month after the fire,

Charles II issued a proclamation, basically asking all of the parishes

in England and Wales to hold a collection to raise money for the

poor people of London to help them in their recovery from the fire.

And did it work? It worked fairly well.

The two most generous counties were Yorkshire,

which gave about £1,200, and Devon, which raised £1,500.

And where were the stingy places?

Unfortunately, we have to point the finger at Wales.

The whole of the principality gave just £33 to the collection.

So, to give some idea for comparison, this church,

St Olave Hart Street, gave £30 to the collection as well,

so one London parish gave about the same amount as all of Wales.

Did they not care about London?

I think people did care but you have to remember,

at the time this collection was made, England was at war,

they were just recovering from a bout of plague, and they had

just given money to a big relief fund to help out plague victims.

So, there was a sense of some compassion fatigue at the time.

It's now the evening of Thursday, sixth of September.

And although the fire is finally out, the homeless living

in green spaces around the city are becoming restless and anxious.

To prevent rioting, a legal process was set up known as fire courts.

Fire courts were to compensate people for their losses

but also to resolve disputes between tenants and landlords.

Because there was no fire insurance, right? That's right.

And in fact, most people at the time rented

and their leases said that they had to pay for any damage,

and they had to continue to pay rent on the buildings

even though they no longer existed.

Hold on, hold on.

They had to rebuild their houses even though they didn't own them?

I know! That's completely outrageous!

Charles II had said that the fire was an act of God

and this meant the tenants had to pay.

So, what were most people doing?

Just sleeping out in places like this?

Yes, I mean, people stayed here for up to eight years.

The majority of them went home but 25% of people never returned.

We've been following the stories of three Londoners, tracking down their

homes and finding out how the Great Fire changed their lives forever.

We saw earlier how the fire drove book-seller Joshua Kirton

to his death.

Now, we can discover the fate the fire had in store

for our two other Londoners, banker Robert Vyner

and shoemaker Sibbil Theame.

Sibbil lived in Christ's Hospital, near St Bart's.

Sibbil Theame was a widow with three children to feed.

She earned her living as a shoemaker at Christ's Hospital School.

She had a rocky relationship with the school

authorities for entertaining men in her rooms late at night.

When the flames destroyed her home and workshop,

she was left destitute.

As a result of the Great Fire, Sibbil was forced to give up

shoemaking altogether.

But she was nothing if not enterprising

and, determined to make a living, she begged the school authorities

for permission to set up a stall selling alcohol on the grounds.

But we know from records of the time her new venture did not last long.

Over the years of her career at Christ's Hospital, Sibbil had

been in trouble with the school authorities on many occasions.

But when she plied a young Cambridge scholar with drink,

the school decided enough was enough.

She was ordered to shut down her liquor store

and sell off all her stock.

We don't know if Sibbil ever worked as a shoemaker again.

But she did leave something behind.

And it is here deep within the vaults of the Museum of London.

I have got something really exciting here,

something that has survived for 350 years and if it is going to

survive for another 350, I need to put these on before I touch it.

It's something very tiny, but something really important.

It is a trade token

that shoemakers used as a form of credit.

But it's not just any trade token, on it it says "Christ" for Christ's

Hospital and then, this is just wondrous, it says, Sibbil Theame.

In other words, it has her name on it.

This is something she had made and she issued.

And in the centre it has a picture of a shoe and two stars,

so this is like her logo. Isn't this incredible?

Something from Sibbil Theame survives to this day.

Over on Lombard Street, our third Londoner, wealthy goldsmith/banker

Robert Vyner had made a very smart decision.

A day before the fire reached his house,

he arranged to have his most precious

valuables moved to Windsor Castle,

home of his friend, King Charles II.

The fact that Charles granted Robert Vyner special permission to hide

his things at Windsor was hardly surprising, given that Vyner

had been funding Charles's extravagant lifestyle for years.

The king was literally in his debt.

But Robert Vyner had made a fatal mistake in lending money to a King.

A spendthrift like Charles was more interested in protecting

himself than paying back his creditors.

After the fire, King Charles II realised that his indulgent

lifestyle and the vast cost of the war against the Dutch had

left him with a bill that he was not prepared to pay.

In a sly and devastating move, the king cancelled his debts,

creating chaos in the financial markets.

For Robert Vyner this was disaster.

The King owed him the equivalent of £30 million

in today's money and now he wasn't prepared to pay it back.

With no chance of having his loans repaid,

Robert Vyner was plunged into debt.

The man who had made the King's own crown was declared bankrupt.

The demands from creditors, combined with the death of his son,

broke Robert Vyner's heart.

He died penniless.

Friday, September 7, 1666.

The Great Fire has now been over for two days.

But London is still reeling from the disaster.

Although the fire had rampaged through London, it actually

spared a lot of the city's hospitals, including the one

here at Smithfield, St Bartholomew's or as we call it today, St Barts.

We know from eyewitness accounts that men were turning up here

wounded and sick, presumably with very serious burns.

They were treated in a variety of extraordinary remedies.

At the time of the great Fire, modern medicine did not exist.

Medical care was still based on ancient theories

and herbal remedies administered by the pharmacists of the day.

Apothecaries.

People at home also concocted their own treatments using plants,

honey and even snails.

The Royal College of Physicians has a collection of handwritten

books containing remedies for burns that would've been

used during the Great Fire.

I'm meeting Dr Henry Oakley.

I've got a recipe here, "against a burn or scald,

"first to fetch out the fire".

Fetch out the fire means fetch out the heat, to remove the pain. OK.

"Apply the juice of the dung of a horse at grass."

So a bit of horse dung juice there.

Oh, that really is quite powerful.

Would this have had any benefit to a burn?

This would be full of bacteria.

If you put this on anything more than just a superficial scald,

of course you will have septicaemia and you would be dead in a few days.

So rather than treating the burn, it is actually causing it more harm.

Absolutely. Yes. And it is in one of the recipe books.

Back in 1666, one of the other recipes featured ground ivy.

I am going to have a go at mixing up the treatment myself.

"Boil the juice of gill-got-by-ground."

Which is ivy? Ground ivy. Yes. Called alehoof.

"In cream till it comes to an oil and apply it till it be whole."

So, we have some alehoof or ground ivy here, let's try that.

Alehoof would remove scabs and things like that

so he put it on and it would help get rid of those

encrustations to have pink raw flesh which would heal up nicely.

I grind down the ivy until it produces an oil

and mix it with cream to form a paste. It says -

"go on putting this on until the burn is whole."

So if I get a little bit out of here and onto there.

Let's pretend I have a burn here on my wrist.

Yes. You could apply this to it like that.

But these recipes were not always accurately written down.

This one actually recommends the wrong ivy.

Am I safe with this on here now? I should have asked this earlier.

I would wipe it off now if I was you. Fair enough.

Another remedy looks a bit more promising.

It suggests using poppy sap, otherwise known as morphine,

mixed with the sap from poplar trees.

Poplar ointment would still be effective to this day.

The pain of the burn would have been well dealt with by morphine

and the sap of the poplar trees would be sterile, it would

have no bacteria in it and it would resist infection.

That sounds a lot more applicable than horse dung juice. Absolutely.

The Londoners of 1666 looked around at their ruined city

and were broken-hearted.

An eyewitness account of the days after the fire describes...

As people started to take in the vast trail of destruction

the Great Fire had left, they began to realise that with only

a few exceptions, the old city was gone forever.

There was no way it could ever be rebuilt.

After the break, a new London emerges from the ashes.

Welcome back.

Finally, we have moved forward a few

months from all the terrible destruction.

The flames are out, the wounded had been tended to and care for the

vast number of refugees is actually surprisingly well organised.

It is time for London to look to the future,

to rebuild itself from the ashes.

The city had learned a hard lesson from the damage

caused by the Great Fire.

From now on, stronger fire regulations came into force

and there was more control over home building.

New houses had to be made from brick and not from flammable timber.

Wooden window frames were no longer allowed to jut out from walls

and wooden jetties like this one,

well, they were banned to stop

flames leaping across narrow streets.

The number of storeys house could have was also restricted.

For the first time, London had elegant rows of brick

terraced houses.

Now, there is a house down this street I really want to show you.

It is number 5-6 Crane Court.

It is brick built, it is flat fronted, it is

a world away from the Tudor timber framed higgledy-piggledy

houses of old London and there is a reason for that

because this place originally dates to 1670.

It was built by Nicholas Barbon,

the man who started London's first fire insurance company.

This uniform flat fronted look became fashionable all over

the country with elegant terraces in places like Bath and Brighton.

Britain was changing.

London's physical layout altered as well,

as I found out when I met up with Professor Ronald Hutton.

Ronald, how did the Great Fire change London's landscape?

Well, there is no London any more.

London is buried under six feet of charred rubble.

Some of this can be shipped upriver and dumped but most of it is spread

across what had been the houses and streets to level the ground.

That prepares the way for rebuilding.

Who were the key characters behind the rebuilding?

Well, my hero is a guy called Robert Hooke,

who is just a brilliant surveyor.

And realising the priority is to get the city working again,

he rapidly goes out with planning, cordoning off, plotting

and this means the city gets rebuilt with amazing speed.

So presumably this was a great opportunity to reimagine London?

It certainly was.

Thanks to the skill of planners like Robert Hooke, incredibly

just 10 years after the Great Fire most of the city was up and running.

These days London is a bustling hub of activity,

as it has been for centuries.

The old houses and churches now overshadowed by office blocks

and skyscrapers.

The most famous symbol of the Great Fire is this,

the Monument Sir Christopher Wren

and Robert Hooke were commissioned to build shortly after the fire.

When the Monument was built,

London's skyline was much lower than it is now

so for years this would have towered over everything around here.

Wren built it to be exactly 202 feet tall.

So if you took it and lay down on its side, the top would land just

in front of that blue car, exactly where Thomas Farriner's bakery was

and where the Great Fire of London first started.

As we have already discovered, the precise spot where it began

isn't in Pudding Lane but in what is now Monument Street.

We now know from new evidence that the Great Fire of London

almost certainly started right here from a spark in

Thomas Farriner's bakery.

Now, Farriner did his best to distance himself from any blame.

Even helping to send the poor,

confused Frenchman Robert Hubert to his death.

But there is a twist to the tale.

Because in 1986, the Worshipful Company of Bakers issued

an apology on Thomas Farriner's behalf.

Only 320 years too late.

But for me the Monument symbolises something far more poignant.

I look at the monument now and I can't help

thinking about a lost London and of the heroism of all the men

and women and children who did their best to battle the blaze.

People like our Londoners who lost everything as a result of the fire.

It makes you realise that the Great Fire of London is a part of our

national consciousness and of our whole country's history.

Well, that's the end of our journey through the Great Fire of London.

It's been incredible to see how it changed history

and shaped London today.

For me, the most extraordinary thing was experiencing

the power of the fire and the bravery of those people who

attempted to put it out, armed with the most basic equipment.

I loved going down into that crypt under St Paul's

and seeing where the poor book-sellers had put their books,

hoping they'd escape from the fire.

For me, it was the human side of this story, holding that actual

trade token from Sibbil Theame, feeling that connection with

the Londoner from the time of the great fire, it was extraordinary.

It's been fascinating walking

in the footsteps of the Great Fire of London.

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