Book description
There had, of course, been other fires, Four Hundred and fifty years
before, the city had almost burned to the ground. Yet the signs from
the heavens in 1666 were ominous: comets, pyramids of flame, monsters
born in city slums. Then, in the early hours on 2 September, a small
fire broke out on the ground floor of a baker's house in Pudding Lane.
In five days that small fire would devastate the third largest city in
the Western world.
Adrian Tinniswood's magnificent new account of the Great Fire of
London explores the history of a cataclysm and its consequences. It
pieces together the untold human story of the Fire and its aftermath -
the panic, the search for scapegoats, and the rebirth of a city. Above
all, it provides an unsurpassable recreation of what happened to
schoolchildren and servants, courtiers and clergyman when the streets
of London ran with fire.
Adrian Tinniswood is a historian and educationalist. He lectures
regularly in Britain and USA, and was for many years consultant to the
National Trust on heritage education. He is the author of eleven
previous books on social and architectural history, including
The
Polite Tourist: A History of Country House Visiting, Visions of Power:
Ambition and Architecture
, and, most recently, His Invention So Fetile, his acclaimed biography
of Sir Christopher Wren, also published in Pimlico.
