The media are in overdrive over the possibility of an outbreak of swine flu, and the fear of an epidemic hitting London is clearly apparent. At the time of writing the dreaded swine flu is yet to spread in the city, but if does it will be yet another chapter in the city’s long history of epidemics.

The history of disease in ancient London is always difficult to matter to address. Disease was often misunderstood and poorly recorded and thus historical evidence is often in short supply. In approximately AD150, Roman London is thought to have been hit but a devastating outbreak of the Plague of Galen, a disease brought back by soldiers fighting on the eastern frontiers of the empire. Alongside the fires, which destroyed much of the city at the time, the plague appears to have led to the almost total abandonment of the city for nearly 100 years.

During the 5th and 6th centuries historians record a significant stagnation in London’s development, and it has often been speculated that the effects of frequent outbreaks of disease was largely responsible for this significant pause in London’s otherwise unstoppable development. The venerable Bede writes of a ‘sudden pestilence’ in southern England in 664 that destroyed ‘a great multitude’.

In later history the records of disease become far more vivid. The ‘Black Death’, or rather the “Great Mortality” as it was referred to in documents from the time (the name ‘Black Death’ not being cited until centuries later), in the 1340’s was a pandemic outbreak of bubonic plague, which killed an estimated 75 million people worldwide. London was not spared its share of the wrath, and the Black Death remains the most disastrous outbreak of disease to ever affect London. It has been opined that 20,000 to 30,000 of London’s population of approximately 70,000 died in the course of the Black Death. This is a death rate of 30 to 40 percent of the population, an almost unimaginable horror for any community to suffer.

Bubonic plague long cast a terrible shadow over the city. However there is some historical confusion over the disease. From the 14th to the 17th Century the illness is recorded as seemingly endlessly reoccurring and causing death on almost unimaginable scale. In Elizabethan London in the 16th Century bubonic plague, known merely as ‘the plague’ due its recorded frequency and ferociousness, is said to have had a breakout on average every four years. It is however highly unlikely that they were all the same disease and is more likely that all manner of epidemic diseases were being witnessed, but the lack of medical knowledge meant that the label of bubonic plague was incorrectly applied in the vast majority of cases.

The Great Plague of London peaked in the stiflingly hot summer 1665. On the 7th of June of that year Samuel Pepys described “the hottest day that I ever felt in my life”. The disease began to take hold in St-Giles-in-The-Fields, but soon spread to the rest of London and Westminster. Fear of the disease was great and the King and his court moved out of the city before the disease spread. It was remembered as the ‘Great Plague’ largely because it was the last major outbreak of plague in the city (largely thanks to the Great Fire of London and the carefully considered reconstruction of the city in its wake).

The official death toll of the Great Plague of London was recorded as 68,000, but the disruption caused by the disease made it very difficult to accurately record the total deaths, and the powers that be were concerned for the damage to the city’s reputation and were keen to keep recorded deaths as low as possible. The Earl of Clarendon, one of the few aristocrats to stay in the city throughout the plague estimated the total dead at 160,000. An often-accepted figure of the death caused by the Great Plague is 100,000, and with a population of 500,000 at the time, this represents a 20 percet death rate in the city. Clearly more people died in the Great Plague of 1665 than in the Black Death of the 1340’s but the earlier disease was proportionally more devastating.

The plague was brought to London, as a result of international trade and so too was another of the great infectious diseases to stalk London, cholera! Cholera could kill disturbingly rapidly, within 24 hours a healthy adult could be killed by the disease. Originating in India the disease reached London in 1832, where poor public health and filthy conditions meant the cholera could flourish. The first cholera outbreak in London killed 6,500 inhabitants and when it returned in 1848 it there were 30,000 recorded cases of which 14,000 were fatal.

Despite the severity of the illness the medical world was at a loss to explain the disease and were clueless as to its causes. Then in 1849 physician John Snow published a paper suggesting that the disease was carried by polluted water, the idea was rubbished by many medical contemporaries and John Snow set out to produce evidence. When the disease returned in 1854 John Snow pioneered the process of event mapping and identified that all of the victims of the most recent outbreak had drank from a water well on modern day Broadwick Street in Soho, which was very close to an open sewer. John Snow insisted that the handle of the pump be removed and the death rate fell immediately.

Many other physicians initially challenged John Snow’s findings and they pointed out that the 1854 outbreak had also claimed the lives of two persons a great distance from the well, one a lady in Hampstead and her niece who lived in Islington, neither of whom had been in Soho! Snow visited their relatives and discovered that the woman in Hampstead had long ago lived in Soho and she was convinced that the water in the suspect well tasted superior to the local Hampstead water, as such she had her servant routinely visit the well to bring back the water to Hampstead. It still took over a decade for John Snow’s findings to be accepted but through new laws governing water provision and through vigorous monitoring of standards the disease was largely unheard of by the end of the century. Indeed by 1896 the disease was rare enough to be classified as an ‘exotic disease’.

Pandemic diseases are still a real threat to London, but history is a lesson to us all. With sage planning and good hygiene the city should be able to avoid the worst excesses of the past, and so lets hope that the latest scare is nothing like the diseases of old!

On the 2 September 1666 a small fire started in a bakery on Pudding Lane. As the fire spread, and action was required, the Lord Mayor of London is famously quoted as saying “Pish! A woman could piss it out”. This was of course a lack of judgement perhaps not matched until 1 January 1962 when executives from Decca Records rejected The Beatles, saying that “guitar groups are on the way out”! As the fire grew it destroyed 13000 houses, 87 church’s, 52 Livery Halls, St Paul’s Cathedral, London’s Guildhall, the Royal Exchange and most other buildings of note within the 436 acre site of what became known thereafter as ‘The Great Fire of London’.

However 1666 was not the only time that the devastation of fire visited the inhabitants of London, and indeed was not even the first blaze to be entitled the ‘Great Fire of London’!

Emperor Hadrian visited London (or rather Londinium as the Roman city was then called) in the year 122 to see an important commercial outpost of his vast Empire. However sometime over the next 10 years a huge fire or possibly a number of fires caused untold damage to the city, between Newgate Street and what is today the site of the Tower of London. Few buildings managed to survive, with only some of the more important stone structures, such as the Roman fort at cripplegate, being robust enough to survive the flames. Through archaeological evidence it is estimated that most buildings within the 100-acre area were so severely damaged that much of the area was unoccupied for almost a century following the first Great Fire of London!

Fires were a regular occurrence in the pre Norman London. During the seventh century, the first St Paul’s Cathedral, which was a wooden construction, was burnt to the ground. Houses and whole streets were often raised to the ground and the lives of the city’s inhabitants, largely housed within thatched cottages, were blighted by the threat from candles and fires.

When the Norman’s arrived in 1066 they attempted to reduce the threat of fire by introducing a “couvre feu” or curfew forbidding fires and lights to be used after 8PM. The results of Norman leadership are questionable, in the year 1077 London was gripped by huge fire and in the year 1087 poor old St Paul’s Cathedral was once again raised to the ground along with most of the city!

In 1135 a massive blaze struck London. Starting near Cannon Street the day after the Christmas festival the blaze rapidly spread eastwards and eventually burnt down the then wooden London Bridge and once more St Paul’s Cathedral was destroyed! The fire was so significant that for almost a century the blaze was referred to as the ‘Great fire of London’.

That was until the year 1212 when another Great Fire of London wrought its destruction on the weary inhabitants of London. The fire broke out on the 12 July in Southwark and with stunning rapidity laid waste to all in its path, including much of Borough High Street and the church of St Mary Overie, which was on the site of the current day Southwark Cathedral. It is not sure how many people died (records from the era are notoriously unreliable), but is almost defiantly more than any of the other Great Fires (including that of 1666, which was surprisingly only about half a dozen). Many Londoners lost their lives after fleeing onto London Bridge, when the winds changed and the blaze took root on the northern end of the bridge their fates were tragically sealed. Further Major fires of London are noted in 11^th century London in the years 1220, 1227 and 1299, but none that had the impact of the Great fire of 1212.

In the era of Henry the VIII as tobacco smoking became a popular past time of the upper classes fires were regularly started by people smoking in bed. It is a sad truth that to this day smoking in bed is major cause of fire and proof that in history lay lessons for us all!

33 years before the most famous ‘Great Fire of London’, in 1633 a major fire broke out and burnt down a third of all the properties, which then existed on London Bridge. A number of people were killed and the embers smouldered for over a week. The buildings on London Bridge where never rebuilt and it was due to this lack of reconstruction that the Great Fire of 1666 was unable to spread to the south side of the river.

After the fire of 1666 precautions were taken, fire engines were built and men were trained in the skills of fire fighting. However fire is a determined enemy and fire often revisited the city.

In 1698 Whitehall Palace a 23 acre pride and joy of the nation was burnt to the ground along with 150 nearby houses. In 1707, 100 houses were destroyed in Shadwell killing10 people. In 1715, 50 people died in a blaze in Wapping. In 1834 the 12^th century Houses of Parliament were almost entirely destroyed by fire. The Royal Exchange again burnt down in 1838 and the Tower of London followed just 3 years later in 1841 destroying thousands of historic relics. The list goes on.

Today fire still presents a threat to life and property in the metropolitan area of London, and with professional public fire fighters and state of the art fire fighting equipment we can still struggle to hold back the flames, which have haunted the city for centuries. Indeed the history of London fires is an ever updating story and certainly not the exclusive property of historians. In 1987 the King’s Cross Fire killed 31 people and lead to major changes to safety regulations on public transport. In recent years we have seen the massive 2005 blaze at the Hemel Hempstead oil depot and in 2007 the 19^th Century Cutty Sark, docked at Greenwich, was gutted in a sudden fire. In 2008 a significant section of the world famous Camden Market was burnt to the ground and at the time of writing is still being rebuilt.

So the next time somebody mentions the Great Fire of London, be sure to ask which one!

About the Author:

Simon Collins is a local London historian and a Tour Guide. Simon offers world class London Tours throughout the year!