What is in the book
It started with one unwatched oven. Four days later, most of old London was gone.
In September 1666, a small fire in a Pudding Lane bakery met a timber city, a bone-dry summer and a gale from the east, and grew into a firestorm that destroyed more than 13,000 homes, 87 parish churches and St Paul's Cathedral itself, while the Lord Mayor went back to bed and a diarist named Samuel Pepys carried the news to the King.
This Turbo History short tells the whole story at speed:
- A tinderbox city that had been warned for years, and the Lord Mayor whose one bad call let the fire win
- Four days of chaos: the lead roof of St Paul's melting like water, bankers scrambling gold out of Lombard Street, and the Tower garrison blowing up whole streets to save its own gunpowder stores
- The innocent man London hanged for it, and the lie about a Catholic plot that stayed carved on a public monument for nearly 150 years
- How the ashes produced brick-built London, the first fire insurance company, and the direct ancestor of the London Fire Brigade
The fire lasted four days. What it changed is still standing.
Read it in under an hour. Free on Kindle Unlimited.
These are not academic books. You will not find footnotes to chase, family trees to memorise, or ten pages on the logistics of a treaty. Every book ends with a page of proper ones to go to next if you want that depth. If you want the story and the big picture in an hour, you are home.
This book is free sometimes. Want to know when?
Great Fire of London goes free on Amazon from time to time, along with the rest of the series. Leave your email and we will tell you the moment it does.
More from the series
One figure or one event per book. Under an hour each.
