What the Great Fire of London can teach us about modern climate change

A drought lasting months. A blisteringly hot summer that dried up rivers, baked the ground, and made wood as dry as tinder. Warnings of disaster in the face of inaction, ignored for too long, with devastating consequences.

This is not, in fact, the story of climate change and the summer of 2026, but one of the most momentous events in English history. September 2026 marks the 360th anniversary of the Great Fire of London — a conflagration that laid waste to four-fifths of the capital.

As a writer of historical fiction, I can’t help but look for parallels across time. This summer, as I read the terrifying reports of wildfires that spread across Europe and the UK, the sense of human drama felt familiar to me. Homes lost, thousands displaced and untold millions in damage, it all felt like sobering echoes of a past that looms large in our consciousness as Londoners.

I write novels that imagine what Samuel Pepys did after he finished writing his famous diary in the summer of 1669. In my version of history, he becomes a reluctant investigator for the crown. In real life, Pepys was an eyewitness at some of the biggest events in English history. And nowhere was his writing more visceral than his descriptions of the Great Fire. Take this, from September 2, 1666 — the day the fire broke out:

“So I went down to the water-side, and there saw a lamentable fire… Poor people staying in their houses till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats… And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loathe to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies till they were burned, their wings, and fell down.”

No wonder his accounts have become staples of school history lessons. Details such as Pepys burying a Parmesan cheese in his garden are, of course, irresistible. But what’s equally fascinating is how, at first, he went about his day as normally as he could. There were appointments to keep. He went to lunch and met up with his wife in St James’s Park. But then, urban fires were a fact of life in the 17th century. And while the severity of this one took everyone by surprise, many people already knew that a major disaster was inevitable, someday.

In April 1665, King Charles II wrote to the incoming Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, expressing concern at the city’s vulnerability to fire, and offering new powers to prevent them. The Mayor did not respond. Now, you know that internet meme about how the mayor from Jaws is still the mayor in Jaws II and that’s why it’s important to vote in local elections? That’s basically how historians feel about Sir Thomas Bloodworth. When woken in the early hours and told about the fire, Bloodworth is said to have responded, “A woman might piss it out,” and gone back to bed. His dithering over whether or not to pull down houses to act as a firebreak would later turn a disaster into a catastrophe that would doom his city.

Over five days, the Great Fire destroyed an estimated 13,400 buildings. The cost in blood and treasure was immense. Ignore the pernicious myth that hardly anyone died — the fire simply consumed the bodies. Then there’s the economic price to consider. To mark the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire in 2016, the insurance analyst Policy Expert estimated the cost of rebuilding London after the fire to have been around £477 billion in modern terms — closer to £700 billion today.

Statistics like this may pack a punch, but we must remember that behind every one of them lie thousands of untold human stories. To the people who were there, this was no history lesson. It was real life. And life went on after the flames went out. So I invite you to imagine what it must have been like to actually live in London during the years after the Great Fire. People still had to go to work, pay the bills, do the shopping. Just getting your bearings would have been a challenge. For a time, there was still the ominous, burned-out husk of the old St Paul’s Cathedral to aid in navigation. But as new walls went up, viewpoints changed. Higgledy-piggledy timber frames of a lost medieval city replaced with hard-edged brick and stone.

My new book, Seething Lane, takes place in the winter of 1670. By that time, the process of rebuilding London was in full swing. The air would have rung to the clamour of construction. Traffic must have been a nightmare. What an exciting time that must have been — disorienting, but filled with possibility. A new city was literally rising from the ashes of the old. London was reborn.

As this summer ends and we look at the wreckage of forests and houses destroyed by the fires, Pepys would have considered us lucky. But our fires are a warning, like the one given to Mayor Bloodworth by Charles II. We have to be ready for hotter and drier summers. We need a plan.