The Great Fire of London

Untold numbers perished; great buildings and ancient districts disappeared; knowledge acquired and stored over centuries was lost forever. The Great Fire of London accomplished what the Spanish Armada and the plague had failed to do, it reduced the world's most majestic city to utter ruin.

On a balmy evening in September 1666, Samuel Pepys sat in a pub by the River Thames and watched London burning. He wrote in his diary: “all over the Thames, with one's face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops…and in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, we saw the fire …It made me weep to see it.”

There had, of course, been other fires. Four hundred and fifty years before, the city had almost burned to the ground. Yet the signs from the heavens in 1666 were ominous: comets, pyramids of flame, monsters born in city slums. Then, in the early hours of 2 September, a small fire broke out on the ground floor of a baker's house in Pudding Lane. In five days that small fire would devastate the third largest city in the Western world.

Dan Jones, Suzannah Lipscomb and Rob Bell take a look at the Great Fire of London by walking the route the fire took across London to uncover what really happened during this inferno.