“The Great Fire of London”of 1666 was considered to be the greatest of fires, but in truth it was only one of a series of devastations. The fires of AD 60 and AD 125 destroyed most of the city, for example, creating what is described by archaeologists as a “fire destruction horizon.” This is the horizon of the city itself. London burned in 764, 798, 852, 893, 961, 982, 1077, 1087, 1093, 1132, 1136, 1203, 1212, 1220 and 1227. R.S. Fitter, writing London’s Natural History after the Second World War, noted that “The constant laying waste of large areas of the city must have made the aspect of medieval London often a good deal more like the blitzed London of 1945 than most people realise.” James Pope-Hennessy, compiling a book on that wartime destruction, found in the ruins of London churches “a kind of continuity.” He recalled that “The city fire of December 1940 did at one moment look like Pepys’ famous description of the fire of 1666. The night sky, lit by a wavering orange glare, seemed to display an aura not at all unlike his ‘bow of flame.’”
London seems to invite fire and destruction, from the attacks of Boudicca to those of the IRA. In the literature of the subject, there are references to particularly incandescent areas. Arthur Hardwick’s Memorable Fires in London revealed Watling Street to be “the region in the heart of the City [that] has always been a ‘fiery’ one.” Aldersgate and Silver Street have “the reputation of the ‘danger zone,’” while areas such as Cheapside and Bread Street have been repeatedly subject to flame. Wood Street, too, “has proved a notoriously fiery street”-perhaps because of its name-and mysterious fires have broken out in Paternoster Square. The area of St. Mary Axe was destroyed in 1811, 1883, 1940 and then again in 1993. It is significant, too, that, in the city of spectacle, theatres continually go up in flame; thirty-seven were destroyed in 130 years, from 1789 to 1919, providing an appropriately theatrical scene for those who flocked to watch them. The nature of London fires has also been conceived in theatrical terms. During one conflagration in Paternoster Square, in 1883, “the flames burst through the roof and brilliantly illuminated the City”; a fire two years later in the Charterhouse sent out a fiery glow “as though the sun shone over everything.”
London Bridge has been destroyed by fire, as have the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall and the Houses of Parliament. In the nine years from 1833 to 1841 there were 5,000 fires in the city “yielding an average of 556 per annum, or about three in two days.” In the city of 1833 there were some 750 fires; in the “Great London region” of 1993 occurred 46,000 “primary” and “secondary” fires. In 1833 there were approximately 180 chimney fires; in 1993 215 such events. More fires spring up in December, and fewer in April, than in any other months; Friday is the worst day of the week for conflagrations, and Saturday the best. The most hazardous time is ten in the evening, and the most benign seven in the morning. Some fires begin with arson, but most by accident-a great conflagration of 1748, consuming more than a hundred houses in the streets and passages by Exchange Alley and killing a dozen people, began “through the servant leaving a candle burning in the shed whilst she was listening to a band performing at the Swan Tavern.” An engraving of the fiery ruins was promptly issued by a printer in Scalding Alley.
Yet fire can also reveal the forgotten or neglected history of the city. The site of Winchester Palace, on the south bank of the Thames, was first uncovered after a fire at Bankside Mustard Mills. The remains of a thirteenth-century barbican, or watch-tower, were revealed in 1794 after a fire in St. Martin’s Court, Ludgate. Flame can recreate, therefore, as well as destroy. It is perhaps significant that, in London folklore, a dream of fire denotes “health and happiness” or “marriage with the object of the affections.”
A nineteenth-century correspondent of Le Temps noticed that in comparison with Parisians, Londoners showed “astonishing promptitude” in their reaction to the call of “Fire! Fire!” It was the war cry of the city. In first-century London vigiles or “bucket boys” patrolled the city by night; already there was some fascination or mystery concerned with fire, since they were known for “their liveliness and devilry.” Their organised system of watching decayed in succeeding centuries, but it can be inferred that the early medieval wards assumed responsibility for locating and putting out fires in their vicinity. The next attempt at precaution was the simple curfew or “couvre-feu”; on the ringing of the evening bell, resounding all over the eleventh-century city, all fires were supposed to be covered and the ashes raked. If a fire did rage, then the bells of the churches rang backwards to spread the alarm; it was as if the devil had suddenly re-emerged in the roar of the flames. Barrels of water were kept outside the larger houses and, by the twelfth century, there were elaborate regulations for the quenching of the flames and the pulling down of burning thatch.
In the fifteenth century it was decreed that each new sheriff and alderman, within a month of taking up office, “shall cause 12 new buckets to be made of leather for the quenching of fire.” The successor of the humble bucket was “a kind of syringe or squirt,” which was in turn followed by an early pumping device; this was pulled by the firemen, calling out their familiar cry of “Hi! Hi! Hi!,” and has been termed “the first ‘fire engine’ to reach the streets of London.” It was succeeded in the early seventeenth century by “an Engine or Instrument” which “with the help of tenne men to labor” could pump more water “than five hundred men with the helpe of Bucketts and laydels.” This was the engine celebrated by Dryden, in Annus Mirabilis; he described the spectacle of the flames, and how “streets grow throng’d, and busy as by day.” The impression, again, is of fire as some alternative sun flooding the streets with light. One of the earliest fire insurance companies named itself “The Sun,” and its mark can still be seen on many houses. Fire by a sudden leap of metaphor then becomes the source of energy and power, as if it represented the sporadic and violent irruption of the city’s own heated life. One of the greatest maps of London, “Horwood’s Plan” of 1799, was dedicated to the Phoenix Fire office in Lombard Street which had risen soon after the fire of 1666; again it is a mark of the importance of those who deal with fire in the capital. Curiously enough, the first chief executive of the Phoenix was a Mr. Stonestreet.
Over the centuries the shouts of the firemen were replaced by handbells, then by mechanical and electric bells. Then came the siren, replaced in turn by a complex system of sound including the “two-tone,” the “wail” and the “yelp.” The first firemen themselves were placed in colourful regalia. One company, for example, was arrayed in “blue jackets with elaborate gold cuffs, and gold braiding” with “black knee-breeches, white stockings and gold garters”; on days of ceremony they marched with silver staffs and badges. They were themselves fired by duty-“hearts aglow,” as Hilaire Belloc appropriately put it. Such was their prestige that the headquarters of many fire offices were described as “resembling in design highly-enriched palaces.”
Two children pass the Phoenix Fire office in a novel by Edith Nesbit. “Fire?” one says. “For altars, I suppose?” Yes, for the great sacrificial altar of London.