A silver tankard engraved with scenes of the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London
Tankard engraved with scenes of the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London, 1673/74
Marked Pudding Lane

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Plague and fire in London

In 1665 the Great Plague killed about 100,000 Londoners, perhaps a quarter of the city. In September 1666 a fire that began in a bakery in Pudding Lane burned for four days and destroyed most of the old City.

Date
1665 to 1666IX · Oceans crossed
Place
Pudding Lane · St Paul’s · Eyam · The MonumentEurope
Laid out as
A cityOne city, district by district, from its centre outwards.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IThe bills of mortality
  2. IIEyam, the village that shut itself in
  3. IIIPepys’s diary
  4. IVPudding Lane
  5. VFour days of fire
  6. VIWren rebuilds

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Samuel Pepys
  • John Evelyn
  • Thomas Farriner
  • Christopher Wren

Objects

  • Bills of mortality
  • Pepys’s diary
  • Burnt pottery from Pudding Lane

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1665 to 1666. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?