What was destroyed in the great fire of london

The fire soon took hold: houses quickly collapsed and the strong east wind spread the flames further, jumping from house to house. The fire swept through the warren of streets lined with houses, the upper stories of which almost touched across the narrow winding lanes.

Efforts to bring the fire under control by using buckets quickly failed. Panic began to spread through the city. As the fire raged on, people tried to leave the city and poured down to the River Thames in an attempt to escape by boat. Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, the diarists, both gave dramatic, first-hand accounts of the next few days. This was done with hooked poles, but to no avail as the fire outstripped them!

By the 4th September half of London was in flames. The King himself joined the fire fighters, passing buckets of water to them in an attempt to quell the flames, but the fire raged on.

As a last resort gunpowder was used to blow up houses that lay in the path of the fire, and so create an even bigger fire-break, but the sound of the explosions started rumours that a French invasion was taking place…. As refugees poured out of the city, St. The acres of lead on the roof melted and poured down on to the street like a river, and the great cathedral collapsed.

Luckily the Tower of London escaped the inferno, and eventually the fire was brought under control, and by the 6th September had been extinguished altogether.

The proclamation paraphrased the U. Before their forces suffered final defeat, Antony and Cleopatra broke though the enemy lines and fled to By the summer of , the defeat of Japan was a foregone conclusion.

The Japanese navy and air force were destroyed. The Allied naval blockade of Japan and intensive ATMs went on to revolutionize the banking industry, eliminating the need to visit a bank to conduct basic Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox.

North Vietnamese officials announced his death the next day. Ho Chi Minh had been the heart and soul of Vietnamese communism since the earliest days of the movement. Born in , he Bush was forced to bail out of the plane over the ocean. According to the On September 2, , white miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, brutally attack their Chinese coworkers, killing 28, wounding 15 others, and driving several hundred more out of town.

The miners working in the Union Pacific coal mine had been struggling to unionize and strike for McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac, saw much of his army transferred Live TV.

This Day In History. History Vault. Art, Literature, and Film History. World War II. Built in , this lion-topped Jacobean palace was once an imposing feature of Charing Cross, by the equestrian statues of Charles I from It belonged to the illustrious earls and dukes of Northumberland, perfectly located to attend court and parliament. It was originally one of a parade of gilded medieval and Tudor riverside palaces, of which only Somerset House survives today, albeit rebuilt, but giving a sense of their former grandeur.

It had a richly carved oak facade, with gradually protruding bays meeting in a turret-like shape at the front, and tiny panes of glass with fine patterning. If it had, then this wonderfully overwrought four-storey townhouse bulging over the corner of Chancery Lane and Fleet Street, depicted by the antiquarian engraver John Thomas Smith in , would almost certainly have been lost.

Today a tasteful, but less characterful, auburn Victorian building occupies the site. For most of its life, it housed the Cock and Magpie pub which, according to the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London in , was nearly years old though this is questionable. In its twilight years, it became a bookshop. At sunset each night, poor pilgrims, strangers and children would stream in to pray, wash, sleep and perhaps consult a physician or surgeon. These houses escaped the fire by the skin of their teeth — but were then destroyed in the early 20th century.

Fashionable glazed windows were something of a luxury in Elizabethan London, and at a time when so many dwellings had only a cloth or greased paper behind a lattice to let light in, this timber-framed mansion in Crutched Friars, to the north of the Tower of London was a work of almost criminal ostentation.

It was made almost entirely from glass, with the load-bearing beams adorned with particularly hideous gargoyles as a foil to the beauty of the glass.

It was dismantled at the end of the 18th century, having become an antiquated curiosity. In later years it was a tavern, lying-in hospital, general dispensary, and finally shops. It owed its Great Fire survival to the city walls at Aldersgate — but it was unceremoniously ripped down in Now a barren, unlovely stretch pounded by traffic, 17th-century Aldersgate was once reckoned the most Italianate street in London, with harmonious buildings and a graceful width.

He lectures on the history of London and leads tours through the city.