London Burning: The Great Fire of 1666 and Wren's Phoenix City, from the Tower to St Paul's

Follow the four days that destroyed medieval London and the man who rebuilt it: Pepys and his buried cheese, the baker of Pudding Lane, the Monument, Bow Bells and Wren's dome

London · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Tower of London: The Fortress Full of Gunpowder

   Tower Wharf, Tower of London, London EC3N 4AB, United Kingdom

   Listen · 2:32

   Stand on the riverside wharf with the Thames at your back and the whole fortress rising in front of you: the cannons along the wharf, the dry moat, the grey curtain walls, and above them the pale White Tower with its four turrets, begun by William the Conqueror almost a thousand years ago. Today it is a postcard. In September 1666, it was the most dangerous building in London.

   In the small hours of Sunday the 2nd of September, a fire broke out in a bakery in Pudding Lane, a few hundred metres to the west of here. A dry summer, a strong east wind, and streets of timber houses packed with pitch, oil and hay did the rest. That morning the diarist Samuel Pepys, who lived just round the corner, came to the Tower and climbed up to look out over the city. He saw the houses at the end of the bridge burning and people throwing their goods into the river.

   Now think about what was inside these walls. The Tower was the kingdom's great arsenal, and it held huge stores of gunpowder. If the fire had reached it, the explosion could have flattened this whole corner of London. As the flames crept east, the garrison did the only thing they could think of: they blew up the houses around the Tower to create a firebreak.

   Watch the lawns inside the walls for big black birds. The ravens of the Tower come with a legend: if they ever leave, the kingdom will fall. The story is usually pinned on Charles the Second, the king during the Fire, but historians suspect it is a much younger, Victorian tale. Still, at least six ravens are kept here at all times, just in case.

   Over the next four days the fire would destroy around 13,000 houses, 87 parish churches and old St Paul's Cathedral, and then a young astronomer called Christopher Wren would spend nearly half a century rebuilding the city. This walk follows that story from the flames to the dome. Walk up past the moat to Tower Hill, cross Byward Street, and head up Seething Lane to a small dark church in Hart Street.

2. 2. St Olave Hart Street: Pepys and the Buried Parmesan

   St Olave's Church, 8 Hart Street, London EC3R 7NB, United Kingdom

   Stop by the gateway into the little churchyard and look at the stone arch above it. It is decorated with grinning skulls and crossed bones, carved in 1658. Charles Dickens loved this gate and nicknamed the church Saint Ghastly Grim.

   St Olave's is one of the very few medieval churches in the City of London that the Great Fire did not touch. The flames came within a short walk of it, and then the wind dropped and the firebreaks held. It was also the parish church of Samuel Pepys. He lived and worked a few steps away, in the Navy Office on Seething Lane, where he was a senior official responsible for supplying the fleet.

   On the evening of the 4th of September 1666, with the fire racing towards the Navy Office, Pepys and his neighbour Sir William Penn dug a pit in the garden. Into it went their wine... and, as Pepys recorded in his diary, his Parmesan cheese. Priorities. He had already sent his money and valuables out of London on a cart, and he slept, when he slept at all, on a borrowed quilt on the floor of his office.

   If the church is open, look high up on the wall of the sanctuary for a marble bust of a young woman with a slightly open mouth, as if she were about to speak. That is Elizabeth Pepys, his wife, who died in 1669 at only twenty-nine. Pepys put her there so that he could see her from the Navy Office pew in the gallery. When he died in 1703, he was buried here beside her.

   The church did not survive everything. German bombs in 1941 gutted it, and what you see inside is a careful post-war restoration. But the stones of the walls are the same ones Pepys walked past every day. Walk back down Seething Lane, past the small garden on the site of the Navy Office, and cross Byward Street to the church with the green copper spire.

3. 3. All Hallows by the Tower: Pepys's Lookout

   All Hallows by the Tower, Byward Street, London EC3R 5BJ, United Kingdom

   In front of you stands All Hallows by the Tower, with a sturdy brick tower topped by a slim copper-green spire. That brick tower is a rarity in itself: it was built in the late 1650s, under Oliver Cromwell, when almost no churches were being built at all.

   This is the oldest church in the City of London. It was founded in 675 by the great Abbey of Barking, which is why for centuries Londoners called it All Hallows Barking. Inside, a Saxon arch still stands, built partly out of reused Roman tiles. It is older than the Tower across the road.

   On the morning of Wednesday the 5th of September 1666, Samuel Pepys climbed up this very tower. The church had only just been saved: the fire had scorched its porch, and sailors from the naval dockyards had blown up the houses around it to stop the flames. From the top Pepys looked west across the city and wrote that it was the saddest sight of desolation that he ever saw. Everywhere, fires still burning in cellars and smoking ruins as far as he could see.

   This church has also seen the end of many lives. Tower Hill, where traitors were beheaded, is just outside, and the bodies of the executed were often brought here for burial. Archbishop William Laud lay here for nearly twenty years before he was moved to Oxford. But it has happier records too: William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, was baptised here in 1644, and in 1797 John Quincy Adams, the future American president, married his wife here.

   In the crypt there is a small museum, with a fragment of Roman pavement found right under the church. German bombs gutted the building in 1940, and the copper spire was added only when it was rebuilt after the war. Walk west along Great Tower Street, then turn left down St Dunstan's Hill, to a church that has lost its roof and found a garden.

4. 4. St Dunstan-in-the-East: The Garden in a Ruin

   St Dunstan-in-the-East, St Dunstan's Hill, London EC3R 5DD, United Kingdom

   Step through the old Gothic doorway and you are inside a church with no roof. Stone walls rise around you, the empty tracery of the windows is laced with ivy and climbing plants, and where the congregation once sat there is a lawn and a small fountain. Office workers eat lunch on the benches as if nothing were strange about it.

   St Dunstan-in-the-East was a medieval church, and the Great Fire of 1666 badly damaged it but did not destroy it completely. The parish patched up the walls, and then, at the very end of the century, Christopher Wren gave it a new tower and spire. Look up at it. It is Gothic, with a slender spire balanced on four thin flying buttresses, and it is one of the very few Gothic towers Wren ever built. He had little love for the style, but here he matched the old church.

   The story goes that one night a great storm swept across London and damaged steeple after steeple. Someone rushed to tell Wren that all the spires had suffered. Wren is said to have replied, without even looking up: not St Dunstan's, I am quite sure. And the spire was, of course, untouched.

   Then came the Second World War. In 1941 German bombs destroyed the body of the church, and once again it was Wren's tower that stood. There was no money, and no congregation left in the emptied City, to rebuild. So in 1971 the City of London did something gentle and clever: it turned the ruin into a garden.

   And that is the point of this stop. Most of what you will see on this walk is London's answer to the Fire, a city of stone and white spires. This is the one place where you can stand inside the wound itself, with trees and birdsong growing out of the damage. Now walk back up the hill and turn left along Eastcheap, then left again down Pudding Lane, towards the tall column topped with golden flames.

5. 5. Pudding Lane & The Monument

   The Monument, Fish Street Hill, London EC3R 8AH, United Kingdom

   Crane your neck: a fluted stone column rises above the street, and at its very top a gilded urn bursts into golden flames. This is the Monument to the Great Fire of London, and it is not just tall. It is a measurement.

   A few steps away, on Pudding Lane, a plaque marks the spot of Thomas Farriner's bakery. Farriner baked bread for the King's navy, and in the early hours of Sunday the 2nd of September 1666, his house caught fire. The family escaped over the rooftops, but their maid was too frightened to follow, and she became the fire's first victim. The Lord Mayor, called out of bed, looked at the blaze and declared it so small a woman could put it out... and went back to sleep.

   The Monument was designed by Christopher Wren and his brilliant friend Robert Hooke and finished in 1677. It is 61 metres high, and it stands exactly 61 metres from the site of the bakery: lay it down to the east and the flames on top would land on Farriner's oven. Three hundred and eleven steps lead up to the viewing platform. And Hooke, a scientist to the bone, designed the hollow shaft as a giant zenith telescope, with a laboratory underneath.

   Walk round to read the inscriptions on the base. One of them once blamed the fire on the treachery and malice of the Catholics. There was no evidence at all, but in an age of plots it was believed, and the accusation was carved in stone in 1681. It was only chiselled away in 1830.

   Look down the hill to the church of St Magnus the Martyr. Old London Bridge, covered in houses, began beside it, and the fire ran onto the bridge within hours. It stopped only at a gap left by an earlier fire in 1633, and so Southwark was saved. Officially just a handful of people died in the Great Fire, though historians suspect many more. Now walk north, up Gracechurch Street, to a glittering Victorian market.

6. 6. Leadenhall Market & Lloyd's: The Fire That Invented Insurance

   Leadenhall Market, Gracechurch Street, London EC3V 1LT, United Kingdom

   Walk under the glass and iron roof of Leadenhall Market: cobbles underfoot, cream and maroon paintwork, gilded details and lanterns hanging over the lanes. It feels like a stage set, and that is because, in a way, it is one.

   There has been a market here since the Middle Ages, selling poultry, meat and cheese, but this building is Victorian, designed in 1881 by Horace Jones, the same architect who built Tower Bridge. And under your feet lies something far older: the remains of the Roman basilica and forum, the largest Roman building ever found north of the Alps. Fans of the first Harry Potter film will know the lanes too. They were used for Diagon Alley.

   Now walk to the eastern end and look up at the building covered in steel pipes, ducts and glass lifts crawling up the outside. That is the Lloyd's building, designed by Richard Rogers and finished in 1986, and it is the heart of a market that the Great Fire helped to create. After 1666, Londoners realised that a whole city could vanish in four days. Within a few years a builder and speculator called Nicholas Barbon set up one of the first fire insurance offices in the world.

   Insurance companies soon fixed metal badges, fire marks, to the walls of the houses they insured, and ran their own teams of firemen. It is often said that those firemen would turn up at a burning house, look for their company's badge, and walk away if it belonged to a rival. Historians think that is exaggerated... but the badges are real, and you can still spot old ones on London walls.

   Lloyd's itself began around 1688 in Edward Lloyd's coffee house near the river, where merchants and ship captains met. Men who agreed to share the risk of a voyage signed their names underneath the details, and that is where the word underwriter comes from. Leave the market by its western end and walk along Cornhill to the great temple front at Bank junction.

7. 7. The Royal Exchange: Gresham's Grasshopper

   Royal Exchange, Bank, London EC3V 3DG, United Kingdom

   You are at Bank junction, where streets pour together from every direction. To your north, the blank, windowless wall of the Bank of England. To your south, the columns of Mansion House, home of the Lord Mayor. And in front of you, a great Greek temple front with eight columns and a crowd of carved figures in the pediment: the Royal Exchange.

   The first exchange on this site was built by the merchant Sir Thomas Gresham in the 1560s, modelled on the stock exchange of Antwerp, so that London's traders no longer had to do business in the street. Queen Elizabeth the First visited in 1571 and declared it the Royal Exchange. Look up at the weathervane on the tower: it is a golden grasshopper, the emblem of the Gresham family.

   In September 1666 the Great Fire swept through it. Around the courtyard stood statues of the kings and queens of England, and one by one they crashed down from their niches into the flames. Pepys noted that only one statue was left standing: Sir Thomas Gresham's. Londoners took it as a sign that trade, at least, would survive.

   It was rebuilt, and then, in January 1838, it burned down again. The story goes that as the flames reached the bell tower, the bells began to play a tune by themselves, a Scottish song with the line there's nae luck about the house. The building you see now was opened by Queen Victoria in 1844. And the grasshopper? It is said to have survived both fires, and it still turns in the wind above you.

   After 1666 Wren drew up a plan to rebuild London from scratch, with wide avenues and grand squares radiating from this very spot. It was never built. Every landowner wanted his old plot back, so the city rose again on its medieval street plan, but in brick and stone. Now walk past Mansion House, and slip down the narrow street called Walbrook beside it.

8. 8. St Stephen Walbrook: Wren's Rehearsal for St Paul's

   St Stephen Walbrook, 39 Walbrook, London EC4N 8BN, United Kingdom

   From the outside, St Stephen Walbrook hardly looks like anything: a plain stone wall and a tower squeezed in behind Mansion House. But if the door is open, climb the steps and walk in. Light pours down from a great coffered dome that seems to float above a forest of slender columns.

   The medieval church here burned in 1666, and Christopher Wren rebuilt it in the 1670s. He was a local: Wren himself lived on this street, and this was his parish church. Here, on a small scale and with nobody watching too closely, he tried out the idea that obsessed him... a dome resting on a ring of eight arches, set over a square room. A few years later he would build the same idea, enormously bigger, at St Paul's.

   Stand in the middle and turn around. The church manages to be a long nave and a centred, domed space at the same time, and the columns are arranged so that you never quite know which you are in. Architects have argued about it for three hundred years, and many call it the finest of Wren's City churches.

   In 1953 the rector here, Chad Varah, was haunted by the funeral of a fourteen-year-old girl who had taken her own life. He put an advertisement in the paper offering a telephone line to anyone thinking of suicide, answered right here in the church. That was the beginning of the Samaritans, which today answers millions of calls a year. The original black telephone is kept in a glass case inside.

   In the centre stands a huge round altar of pale stone by Henry Moore, installed in 1987 after a long legal battle over whether a round altar was allowed at all. City workers nicknamed it the Camembert. When you come out, walk west along Queen Victoria Street to a tall stone tower with pinnacles on Watling Street.

9. 9. St Mary Aldermary: The Gothic Surprise

   St Mary Aldermary, Watling Street, London EC4M 9BW, United Kingdom

   Stop at the corner of Watling Street and Bow Lane and look up at the tall stone tower with four pinnacles. It looks medieval. It is not quite. Like almost everything around you, St Mary Aldermary burned in 1666, and what you see was rebuilt afterwards... only in a style that was supposed to be out of fashion.

   The name means the older Mary, because it was believed to be older than the other great church of Mary nearby, St Mary-le-Bow. After the Fire, money for the rebuilding came from a private bequest, and the tradition is that the donor wanted the church put back the way it had been, Gothic, with pointed arches. So Wren's office, which normally built in the clean classical style, produced a Gothic church.

   If the door is open, step inside and look straight up. The ceiling is covered in fan vaulting, spreading out from the columns like the ribs of palm leaves, with round saucer shapes in the middle. It looks like stone carved in the age of Henry the Seventh. In fact it is plaster, made in the 1680s, and it is the only fan-vaulted ceiling among all the City churches rebuilt after the Fire.

   There is a literary footnote here too. In 1663, three years before the Fire, the poet John Milton, already blind and working on Paradise Lost, married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, in the old church on this site. The church he knew burned three years later, with almost everything around it.

   Outside, notice the street name. Watling Street echoes the name of one of the great Roman roads, and the lanes around you still follow the medieval plots. When the people of 1666 refused to give up their land, they saved the shape of old London... which is why you can walk it today, lane by lane. Follow Bow Lane north, a narrow alley of shops, to Cheapside and the most magnificent steeple of them all.

10. 10. St Mary-le-Bow: The Bow Bells

    St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, London EC2V 6AU, United Kingdom

    Stand on Cheapside and look up at the steeple: tier after tier of columns and arches, climbing like a wedding cake into the sky, and right at the top, a big golden dragon turning in the wind. Many people consider it the most beautiful of all Wren's spires, and it was one of the most expensive.

    This is the home of the Bow Bells. The old saying goes that a true Cockney is someone born within the sound of Bow Bells. And the name of the church has nothing to do with bows or ribbons: it comes from the bows, the stone arches, of its Norman crypt, which survived the Fire and is still under your feet.

    Here is the most famous story. A poor boy called Dick Whittington, so the tale goes, gave up on London and was walking away up Highgate Hill with his cat, when he heard the Bow Bells ringing behind him: turn again, Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London. He turned back, made his fortune, and became Lord Mayor. The cat is legend. But Richard Whittington was real, a rich merchant who was Mayor of London four times, around 1400, and left his fortune to the city.

    The medieval church burned in 1666, and Wren rebuilt it in the 1670s, putting the grandest steeple on the main shopping street of the City. In 1941 German bombs brought it down again, and the bells crashed to the ground. During the war the BBC broadcast a recording of the Bow Bells to occupied Europe, a sound of hope from a city that refused to give in. The church was rebuilt after the war and the bells were recast and rang again in 1961.

    Cheapside itself was the great market street of medieval London, where cheap simply meant market. Bread Street, Milk Street, Honey Lane... the names around you are the old shopping list. Now walk west along Cheapside. Very soon a great grey dome will fill the sky ahead of you.

11. 11. St Paul's Cathedral: Look Around You

    St Paul's Cathedral, St Paul's Churchyard, London EC4M 8AD, United Kingdom

    Come out of Cheapside and stop as the dome of St Paul's Cathedral fills the sky in front of you, grey-white against the clouds, with its golden ball and cross on top. For more than two hundred and fifty years nothing in London stood taller than that cross. This is where the story of the Fire ends... and where Christopher Wren's life's work is crowned.

    Old St Paul's, the medieval cathedral, was even longer than this one. In 1666 the booksellers of the neighbourhood thought its stone walls were safe and stuffed their stock into the crypt. On the third night of the fire the scaffolding caught, the roof caught, and the paper below turned the church into a furnace. Witnesses wrote that the molten lead from the roof ran down the streets like a river.

    Wren was thirty-three when the city burned. His first designs for a new cathedral were rejected by the clergy as too strange, too foreign. So he got approval for a safer design, with a clause allowing him to make ornamental changes... and then quietly built something very different. Legend says that when the centre of the dome was being marked out, a workman brought a fragment of an old gravestone from the rubble. Carved on it was one Latin word, Resurgam, I shall rise again. You can see that word under a phoenix on the south side of the cathedral.

    The dome is really three: an inner dome you see from inside, a hidden brick cone that holds up the heavy stone lantern, and an outer dome of timber and lead that you see from the street. The cathedral was declared complete in 1711, when Wren was nearly eighty. He died in 1723, at ninety, and lies in the crypt under a plain black slab. Above it, the Latin says: reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.

    And the story did not end in 1666. On the night of the 29th of December 1940, the Blitz set the City ablaze again, and volunteers of the St Paul's Watch fought the fire bombs on the roof. The photograph of this dome rising above the smoke became a symbol of a city that would not burn down twice. So, at the end of this walk, do as Wren asks. Look around you.