The Great Fire of London: Pudding Lane to Pye Corner

A short time after midnight on Sunday 2 September 1666, a fire broke out at Thomas Farriner's bakery in Pudding Lane. The family fled through an upstairs window to the house next door, but the maidservant, too frightened to try, died when the house burned down: the fire's first victim. The Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, was summoned and refused to have the neighbouring houses pulled down, since most were rented and the owners could not be found. The lane still runs between Eastcheap and Thames Street, and a plaque on nearby Faryners House marks the bakery's site.

Location precision: The bakery site was paved over when Monument Street was built in 1886–87; the pin marks Pudding Lane beside it.

Visitor guidance: Pudding Lane is a public street; the Bakers' Company plaque of 1986 is on the wall of nearby Faryners House.

Later that Sunday morning Samuel Pepys climbed the Tower's battlements to look at the fire. The fortress mattered: five to six hundred tons of gunpowder were stored there. On Tuesday, as the flames crept east against the wind, the garrison waited all day for help from the Duke of York's firemen, who were busy in the west, then took matters into their own hands and blew up houses on a large scale around the Tower. The firebreaks halted the advance. The castle still stands on the north bank of the Thames.

On Monday the fire reached "the financial heart of the City". The bankers' houses in Lombard Street began to burn in the afternoon, and there was a rush to save their stacks of gold coins before they melted. The Royal Exchange, a market and shopping centre in one, caught fire in the late afternoon and was a "smoking shell" within a few hours. A second Exchange, designed by Edward Jarman, opened on the site in 1669. The present building, by Sir William Tite, stands on the same ground.

Visitor guidance: The present Royal Exchange stands on the same site in the City.

The Duke of York set up his command post at Temple Bar, where the Strand meets Fleet Street, to stop the fire reaching the Palace of Whitehall. He hoped the River Fleet would form a natural firebreak. Early on Tuesday morning the flames jumped the Fleet, driven by the unabated easterly gale, and his firemen had to run. The old gate here escaped the fire; Wren's new gateway replaced it in 1669–72. Today a dragon-topped Temple Bar Memorial, with statues of Queen Victoria and Edward VII, stands in front of the Royal Courts of Justice to mark the place.

Visitor guidance: The Temple Bar Memorial stands in the street in front of the Royal Courts of Justice; Wren's gateway was re-erected in Paternoster Square, next to St Paul's.

St Paul's looked like a safe refuge: thick stone walls and a wide empty plaza as a firebreak. It was crammed with rescued goods, and its crypt held the tightly packed stock of the printers and booksellers of Paternoster Row. But Christopher Wren's restoration had wrapped the church in wooden scaffolding. It caught fire on Tuesday night, and within half an hour the lead roof was melting and the books and papers in the crypt were burning. The cathedral was demolished, and the present St Paul's was built on the site.

Visitor guidance: Wren's present cathedral stands on Ludgate Hill, on the site of Old St Paul's.

The wind dropped on Tuesday evening, and by Wednesday the Great Fire was over. Pepys climbed the tower of this church (called Barking Church in his diary) and called the view "the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw". The church owes its survival to Admiral William Penn, father of William Penn of Pennsylvania fame, whose men from a nearby naval yard blew up the surrounding buildings. Coal still burned in cellars two months later. Badly damaged in the Blitz, the church was rededicated in 1957.

Visitor guidance: The church stands on Byward Street, overlooking the Tower of London.

North of the City wall lay Moorfields, marshy open ground where a great encampment of homeless refugees grew up. Charles II feared rebellion and announced that bread would be brought into the City every day. On Wednesday night a light in the sky over Fleet Street started a story that 50,000 French and Dutch immigrants had risen and were marching on Moorfields to murder and pillage. Panicked crowds attacked foreigners until the Trained Bands and Life Guards pushed them back. Finsbury Circus now covers much of the old fields.

Location precision: Sources place the camps on the open Moorfields without a precise spot; the pin marks the area around Finsbury Circus.

Visitor guidance: Finsbury Circus and the streets around it, near Moorgate, cover part of the old fields.

A small gilded wooden boy on the corner of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane marks the spot where the fire was stopped, as the Monument marks where it started. The inscription under him reads that the figure was put up for the late fire of London, "Occasion'd by the Sin of Gluttony 1666". The boy was made prodigiously fat to enforce the moral. Gluttony was one explanation offered for the disaster; Catholics were another, and the Monument later blamed them.

Visitor guidance: The figure is set high on a building at the corner of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane, in Smithfield.

The Monument is a fluted Doric column of Portland stone topped with a gilded urn of fire, 202 feet tall, standing 202 feet west of the spot in Pudding Lane where the fire began. Robert Hooke developed the design for Wren, and it was built between 1671 and 1677 on the site of St Margaret, New Fish Street, the first church the fire destroyed. A winding staircase of 311 steps climbs to a viewing platform. A line blaming Catholics was added to its inscription in 1681 and chiselled out in 1830.

Visitor guidance: Climb the 311 steps to the viewing platform near the top of the Monument.