Hello and welcome to Home School History.

I'm Greg Jenner, the historian behind TV's Horrible Histories, and the host of the

BBC podcast, You're Dead To Me, although that one's mostly for the grownups.

I'm here to deliver a snappy history lesson to entertain and educate the whole family,

who says that home schooling can't be fun.

Today we are journeying back to 1666 to get to grips with a calamity that changed the

city of London forever, the great fire of London.

Let's fire away.

The London of the 1660s was way smaller than today's capital city, but at the time it was

one of the biggest cities in the world.

So what caused this disaster?

Well loads of things really.

In 1666 buildings were so tightly packed together that they blocked out the light, and these

buildings were made of wood, and what does wood do?

Yeah, it goes on fire.

There was no electricity back then either, so the only way to light or heat these buildings

was with a fire.

Yeah, so far, so flammable.

A deadly disease known as the plague had also spread through London the summer before,

and people believed that a good way to ward it off was with smoke, from lighting fires,

and smoking tobacco pipes, and even from setting off guns.

But only was this useless, it was a massive fire hazard.

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