Telling the Stories of the Great Fire of London

London’s Great Fire of 1666 continues to attract historians, though today they are more interested in the fiscal mechanics of reconstruction than on its architectural and cultural significance. Meanwhile, among those concerned with urban disaster more generally, the story encompasses global comparisons: the fires in Edo (Tokyo) in 1657, say, or Istanbul in 1660. Almost a century older than these scholarly trends is a more trans-historical type of analysis. In the face of 20th- and 21st-century urban disasters — the Great Kantō earthquake and fire of 1923, the bombing of London in 1940-41, and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001 — this kind of writing has sought the lessons of London’s recovery after the Fire. This lecture examines all these stories of the Fire and its aftermath, while exploring the possibilities of new ones.