When fire shot through the City of London over the course of three days in early September 1666, razing everything in its path, the future of England's capital – its very existence –was in jeopardy. Although the estimated death toll remained remarkably low for a fire that wreaked such destruction, the City itself looked much different when the final smouldering was extinguished. More than 13,000 houses had been destroyed, along with nearly 90 churches. Some significant buildings were lost to the flames, including the original St Paul's Cathedral and the Royal Exchange, as well as the city gates at Aldersgate, Ludgate and Newgate.
The subsequent history of England would havelimited to the City of London. A few historians have even suggested that, in some regards, the Great Fire turned out to be a force for good. The principal tenet of this line of thinking revolves around the Great Plague. The belief is that, when fire broke out, the epidemic – which had ripped so easily through the eheek-by-jowl living quarters of the City the previous year – would have found it much harder be transmitted; in short, that the fire killed off the epidemic, certainly in London.
