The housing crisis caused by the Great Fire of London
In September 1666, the destructive Great Fire of London left thousands of people homeless. What did they need to do to get roofs back over their heads?
Image: Public Domain
In recent years, it’s been hard to escape news of wildfires ripping through people’s homes. The 21st century has already seen the biggest wildfires in recorded history. This could be merely the shape of things to come as climate change turbocharges summer temperatures, making them even hotter.
Perhaps surprisingly, our 17th-century forebears could teach us a thing or two about how to buttress our homes against the risk of an unexpected inferno. The 2nd September 2026 marks the 360th anniversary of the Great Fire of London, which destroyed about 13,000 houses across the English capital.
As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Similarly, London couldn’t be rebuilt in a day. So, where did those residents who found themselves homeless as a result of the fire go in the meantime? Here’s what we at Sky HISTORY have uncovered about their fate - and how London itself recovered from the crisis.
What was the Great Fire of London?
The Great Fire is thought to have grown out of a few initially rather innocuous-looking flames at Thomas Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane. When the Farriner household became aware of the blaze in the early hours of 2nd September 1666, they fled through an upstairs window. All except their maidservant, who became the first of the few recorded fatalities claimed by the Great Fire.
Back then, London homes were predominantly wooden structures with thatched roofs. Worse, they were pretty close together by today’s standards, especially where projecting upper floors known as ‘jetties’ would almost kiss. In a world long before the discovery of electricity, people also relied on old-fashioned fire for lighting, heating and cooking. It all made for a disaster just waiting to happen.
In fact, it already had - many times. Unfortunately, small-scale fires were actually pretty common in Restoration-era London. So, on this occasion, authorities didn’t realise the true danger posed by the fire until it had grown out of control. This conflagration went on to engulf the capital’s medieval core — the ‘City’ within the Roman walls - before finally being put out on 5th September.
How a new housing crisis emerged
The Great Fire left as many as 100,000 people homeless. While some London suburbs remained relatively unscathed, landlords in these areas hiked their prices. That is what happens when demand for rental abodes outstrips supply. So, for many of the financially stricken homeless, relocating to these still-intact parts of the capital wasn’t really an option.
Hence, hurriedly-built makeshift homes soon sprung up, and even remained standing years later. However, there was another alternative to these shanty towns: moving out of London altogether. Reigning monarch Charles II encouraged this strategy, calling on other towns and cities across England to welcome in displaced Londoners.
The king’s motives here probably weren’t entirely altruistic. As Londoners struggled to recover from the Great Fire, they inevitably started looking for people to blame for it. Rumours were rife that the fire had been started by foreign provocateurs, given the Anglo-Dutch War going on at the time. Did Charles fear that some of London’s newfound homeless could start riots on his doorstep if they didn’t leave before then?
How did London literally rise from the ashes?
Several architects put forward ideas for how London could be rebuilt in the wake of the Great Fire. Many of these proposals sadly turned out to be non-starters. At the time, the capital was a complex patchwork of both public and privately-owned land. So, to make these ideas work, the redevelopers would have had to pay off landowners at dauntingly heavy expense.
Besides, London urgently needed to be put back together quickly. So, it ended up being remodelled along similar lines to before. One notable exception was Sir Christopher Wren’s revival of St Paul’s Cathedral. With the original 11th-century structure having been reduced to a charred husk, Wren redesigned St Paul’s in the Baroque style we know it for today.
Many new residential properties went up, too - but it would take decades for the fire-ravaged London to be properly rebuilt. In fairness to the builders, they did need to tread carefully to get it right. They now had many new building regulations to heed. Most notably, new homes were now required to be built from brick and stone rather than the notoriously flammable timber and thatch. London was forever transformed.
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