The Great Fire of London 10-11

Read the text and do the tasks.

THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON

The fire began one Saturday evening in 1666. As history has it, the king’s baker went to bed as usual after a long day in his bakery in pudding lane. The trouble was that accidentally he had left a small flame still flickering in on of his ovens in the bakery just beneath his bedroom. The fire that the small flame sparked off brought tremendous destructions and went down in history as the Great Fire of London. The fire started at about 2 o’clock in the morning, when the sparks rising from the bakery chimneys reached a haystack in the courtyard. Because Pudding Lane lay in the middle of a densely populated area, it was soon crowded with thousands of on-lookers from the neighboring streets who had come to watch the fire. If fires had not been such a frequent occasion in old London, the inhabitants of the city would have been more alarmed and informed the king at once. But Londoners did not do so until midday on Sunday, for it was only then that they realized how grave the situation was. On Sunday due to a strong wind blowing from the east the fire spread uncontrollably to the west. Soon it reached the River Thames and the river warehouses containing coal, oil and brandy. One after another they exploded like bombs. Documents say that at a certain point the blaze might have been stopped had it not been for the unfortunate fact that the fire-fighters, aiming to fill their buckets with water more quickly, smashed the water pipes thus cutting off the area’s water supply. The fire lasted from Sunday to Wednesday. During these few days it destroyed about 13,000 houses, burned down 87 churches and blackened more than 30 acres. At St Paul’s Cathedral the ruinous heat caused the stonework to explode and the tombs to burst open.

Unbelievably, only eight people died in the Great Fire of London. Most people had enough time to escape into the surrounding countryside.

By Wednesday night the fire was almost extinguished, to a great extent due to the personal intervention of the king, who ordered the fire-fighters to knock down buildings thus preventing the fire from spreading even further. The baker’s mistake had some positive effects, however. In a single week the slums of central London were demolished. Besides the fire eliminated the last traces of London’s previous disaster, the Great Plague of 1665, which had claimed numerous victims.

Choose and tick the correct answer.

The fire started because __ .

Choose the correct answer.

People __ .

Choose the correct answer.

On Sunday __ .