A giant replica of 17th-century London is to be set ablaze in the city today to mark the 350th anniversary of the devastating Great Fire of London.
The 1666 inferno destroyed most of the walled inner city dating back to Roman times — a bustling, congested maze of tightly packed wooden houses.
It forced London to rebuild anew from the ashes.
Photo: AFP
Now the city is looking back to when it lay in ruins — with a few shuddering sights to remind Londoners of the peril faced by their predecessors.
The London’s Burning program of events commemorating the disaster is to culminate in the torching of a 120m-long wooden replica of old London — moored in the River Thames to prevent the fire from spreading again.
“It will look spectacular,” said Helen Marriage, director of creative events company Artichoke, which is staging the London’s Burning program.
The recreation was built by US “burn artist” David Best and can be watched worldwide on a livestream from 7:25pm GMT.
The Great Fire of London broke out in Thomas Farrinor’s bakery on Pudding Lane shortly after midnight on Sept. 2, 1666, and gradually spread through the city.
The fire was finally extinguished on Sept. 5, with about 80 percent of the walled city in ruins.
It consumed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches and Saint Paul’s Cathedral.
Only six deaths were officially attributed to the fire, though an estimated 70,000 of the 80,000 residents were forced to flee, most to squalid camps outside the city walls.
Various scapegoats were blamed, chiefly Catholics and foreigners.
Robert Hubert, a French watchmaker, confessed to starting the blaze and was swiftly hanged — although he was actually at sea when the fire broke out.
The London of today, with its English Baroque architecture in gray Portland stone, was built from the ashes of the wooden city, though the old street layout was retained to respect property rights.
The Monument column commemorates the fire near where it started, but Pudding Lane itself is now an unremarkable concrete-lined back road.
The new St Paul’s Cathedral, still the centrepiece of the city, was completed 44 years after the Great Fire.
Flames are to be projected onto the cathedral’s dome today, while 23,000 blocks arranged as a domino run will be felled to show how the fire spread through the city.
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