Set in 1666 with the plague and the great fire…..fleas, no toilets, thousands of wooden buildings, rats galore. The children had fun learning about life in 1666.

We learnt that the fire started in Pudding Lane in a bakery. It was a narrow lane with houses very close together.

We could hear horses and church bells in Pudding Lane. The children brought Pudding Lane to life with its warehouse filled with flammable things, washers, fish sellers (very smelly), fruit sellers, children playing hopscotch and skipping as well as the bakery (with the oven).

Then on the fateful day of September 2nd 1666….

Just after midnight a spark leapt out of the oven, maybe because the oven door was not shut properly, and because the bakery was made of wood….it caught alight. So did the surrounding houses. It spread through London as the wind also blew it.

The fire lasted 4 days.

Some people managed to escape the fires by getting to the river Thames and getting on a boat.

Samuel Peyps was an eyewitness. He saw the fire and wrote about it. He would write his diary, but he would write in code.

His diary said his servants told him about the fire, when he saw it from their window, he thought it was a long way away, so he went back to bed!

When he realized hundreds of houses had burnt down, he was worried his would also burn. So he went to see the king. King Charles II. He told him to pull down some buildings to make a fire break. When Samuel told the Lord Mayor to pull down some houses, he said “No” because he didn’t think it was that serious. What a mistake that was.

The people had to fill leather buckets and pass them along to put the fires out.  That was very hard, they used hoses too. They even tried to pull houses down themselves. Eventually the king ordered the use of gunpowder to bring buildings down and stop the fire. Eventually it stopped.

100 thousand people lost their homes in the great fire.

Christopher Wren was asked to design and re-build lots of new buildings around London.

Now houses are made of bricks, roads are wider and we have fire fighters in case of fires.