The Museum of London has launched a Great Fire of London website to mark the 350th anniversary of the blaze, tracking the course of the fire that broke out in the small hours of 2 September 1666, and over four days tore the heart out of the medieval city.

The site is intended as a permanent resource for information on the fire, and brings together interactive maps as well as images and information from 11 partners, including the museum’s own collections, the Guildhall art gallery and the London Metropolitan Archives.



The dome of St Paul’s Cathedral is illuminated with a projection of a blaze as part of the London’s Burning festival created by Artichoke to mark the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire. Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA

It includes key objects bearing witness to the intensity of the blaze, such as melted window glass found by archaeologists on a site only a few yards from where the fire started, in a bakery on Pudding Lane.

A handful of people, perhaps as few as six, died in the fire, but the site reminds users of earlier disasters, including a devastating fire in Southwark in 1212 in which about 3,000 people are said to have burned to death or drowned by jumping into the Thames, after London Bridge caught fire and cut off their escape route.

A close-up of Martin Firrell’s Fires Ancient and Modern display at St Paul’s Cathedral, part of the London’s Burning festival created by Artichoke. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex/Shutterstock

Exhibitions and events marking the anniversary include a weekend of public art installations for the London’s Burning festival created by the arts charity Artichoke which will culminate in a 120-metre-long burning sculpture of 17th-century London on the Thames on Sunday night, and a major exhibition that continues at the Museum of London.

One of the most unusual exhibitions is at the Royal College of Physicians, showcasing recipes and remedies for burns and scalds used at the time of the fire.



A Fire Garden, designed by French fire masters Compagnie Carabosse , is performed outside the Tate Modern in central London as part of the London’s Burning festival.

The remedies incorporated ingredients including horse manure – from animals raised “at grasse” only, the prescription stressed – onions, chicken droppings, and a mixture of boiled mutton fat and butter.

The physicians are now based in a modernist 1960s building in Regent’s Park, designed by Sir Denys Lasdun, but in 1666 had to be rehoused in a new building designed by Robert Hooke after their medieval headquarters in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral was burned to the ground. Some of their silver, books and paintings that were rescued, many scarred and scorched, will also be on display.

