When London's Lord Mayor was woken at 3 a.m. to be told the city was on fire, he looked out the window, said 'A woman might piss it out,' and went back to bed.
In the early hours of September 2, 1666, a fire broke out in a bakery on Pudding Lane in the City of London. The city was primed to burn: it hadn't rained properly in months, the streets were packed with timber-framed buildings leaning so close together they nearly touched overhead, and a strong east wind had been blowing for days.
Lord Mayor Thomas Bloodworth was woken with the alarm at around 3 a.m. He surveyed the fire, famously dismissed it with a crude remark, and went back to sleep. That decision cost London everything — the delay in ordering controlled demolitions to create firebreaks allowed the blaze to become a roaring inferno within hours.
Over four days, the fire destroyed an estimated 13,200 houses, 87 churches (including the medieval St. Paul's Cathedral), and the commercial heart of one of Europe's greatest cities. The molten lead from St. Paul's roof ran through the streets like rivers. An area of 373 acres — roughly 80% of the medieval City — was reduced to ash.
The official death toll was remarkably low — just six recorded deaths — though historians now believe the true number was far higher, particularly among the poor whose deaths went unrecorded. Some 80,000 people were left homeless, forced to camp in fields outside the city in what became a refugee crisis.
In the panicked search for a scapegoat, a French watchmaker named Robert Hubert confessed to starting the fire as an act of Catholic sabotage. He was hanged at Tyburn despite the fact that he hadn't even arrived in England until two days after the fire started. His confession was almost certainly coerced and false.
The fire triggered a revolution in how London was built. Rebuilding laws required new construction to use brick and stone rather than timber. The architect Christopher Wren was commissioned to design 51 new churches, including the new St. Paul's Cathedral, which still dominates the London skyline over 300 years later.
The Great Fire also accidentally gave birth to the modern insurance industry. Merchants and homeowners, traumatized by their losses, began organizing fire insurance societies in the years afterward. These early insurers even ran their own fire brigades — but only put out fires in buildings displaying their insurance plaques.