The Monument

The Fire Didn’t Start Where You Think

Stand at the base of the Monument on a busy weekday morning and watch what happens. Tourists stop, crane their necks upward, take the photograph, and move on. Almost none of them walk the extra forty seconds to Pudding Lane. And those who do find a plaque on the wall of a modern office block, erected by the Worshipful Company of Bakers in 1986, which says the Great Fire started near this site.

The truth is stranger and more interesting than the official story. The bakery where the Great Fire of London began in the early hours of 2nd September 1666 does not sit beneath Pudding Lane. It sits beneath Monument Street. Specifically, beneath the tarmac of Monument Street, somewhere near its junction with Pudding Lane. Thomas Farriner’s oven, the hearth that cooked the seventeenth century and remade the city we live in today, is entombed under a road that didn’t exist until 1887.