The 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London of 1666 is commemorated across the capital this weekend with various events and exhibitions, including the lighting of a huge wooden model on the River Thames. It will be fascinating, but the aftermath of the Fire is in many ways more interesting than the conflagration itself. Not just one phoenix, but a whole flock of them, rose from the ashes.
The Great Fire incinerated a medieval city and left 50,000 people temporarily homeless, but in its place a new London was built; a London which, though abundant with guilds, churches and a splendid new St Paul’s Cathedral, was an urban home fit for a major international trading centre. The smart decisions taken by people at the time laid the foundations of today’s City of London.
Here are just five “good things” to emerge from the Fire for which we should still all be grateful.
Insurance
The Fire led to the first commercial pooling and protection against risk. Insurance first appeared as fire insurance with the foundation of the Insurance Office for Houses by the economist and property developer, Nicholas Barbon in 1681. Within a few years there were several such enterprises, with names like the Hand in Hand (an early mutual) and the Sun Office (which effectively still exists as part of RSA). Fire insurers ran their own fire brigades and, in an attempt mitigate the appearance of moral hazard, gave their own clients decorative plaques to stick on their houses, some of which can still be seen dotted around London. By the 1690s, a financial revolution was underway of which insurance, including a wholesale market pioneered in Lloyd’s Coffee house, was a critical component.
The terraced house
Soon after the fire Charles II issued a proclamation which among other items praised “the notable benefit of brick” in construction, as opposed to timber or stone. Subsequently, Parliament passed An Act for the Rebuilding the City of London which laid down strict regulations for the design of houses. Although terraced houses already existed in Holland and France, this Act mandated the creation of one of Britain’s great domestic architectural achievements to one of the deepest and most liquid property markets in the world. Over the next two centuries, terraced houses up and down the land were enhanced by numerous other housing acts applied to London and the provinces.
A practical approach to planning
Christopher Wren’s elegant 1667 proposal to rebuild London can be seen in the British Library. But the truth is that it was the rejection of such elaborate plans which made the speedy rebuilding of London possible. A wholesale redesign would have necessitated endless legal disputes with landowners and vast expense and delay. Instead, Wren was appointed as a rebuilding commissioner by the King and the City appointed Robert Hooke as surveyor, thereby creating one of the most effective architectural collaborations of all time.
The peaceful and orderly settlement of property disputes
Just two decades prior to the Fire, Britain had been engaged in a brutal civil war which included the forced confiscation of property by both sides, a sadly commonplace occurrence. Yet when it came to settling the numerous real estate claims after the Fire, a Fire Court was set up under The Fire of London Disputes Act which speedily and legitimately settled who owned what. Ever since, property rights in the UK have been essentially secure.
A culture of rational improvement
Overall, what is striking about the response to the Fire is its rationality and its endorsement of “improvement” as desirable. The government created the right legal framework and even levied a tax on coal to pay for public works, such as repairing the City Churches, but for the most part it was businesses and entrepreneurs who put reconstruction into action. Superstitious, unscientific explanations for the Fire itself and grandiose proposals to rebuild London were all discarded. This new mindset by the authorities and by those who lost their homes in the tragedy is rarely remarked upon now, but is striking and even modern.
This new, empirical and reasonable culture – also to be found in the proceedings of the Royal Society and the experiments of Isaac Newton – provided the intellectual foundation for London’s and Britain’s economic advancement over the next few centuries. The robust response to the Great Fire thereby furnishes a powerful example of one of history’s most important lessons: a crisis can actually prove to be a good thing in the end.
