The Great Fire of London

In the early hours of Sunday, 2 September 1666, a fire started in London. It began at a bakery on Pudding Lane, owned by the King's Baker, Thomas Farriner. A long, dry summer and a strong east wind created perfect conditions for disaster. Farriner and his family awoke to find their house ablaze. They managed to escape by climbing out of an upstairs window and scrambling across the roof of a neighbouring house. Their maidservant, however, was too frightened to follow them. She remained behind and became the fire's first recorded victim. Farriner himself insisted until his death that he had properly raked out his oven's embers the night before. But in the tightly packed, timber-framed city, the small fire was already growing into an inferno.