All language subtitles for The.Great.Fire.Of.London.Hour.By.Hour.2019.1080p.WEB.H264-CBFM

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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