“On October 16 1834, the Houses of Lords and Commons caught fire. In one night, Britain's parliamentary history went up in smoke - a stunning spectacle, as the fire rose into the London sky and was reflected in the Thames. Turner was there among the masses, whose gawping faces crowd the south shore in his stupendous canvas The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834. The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons is a prodigious painting: the ferocity of the yellow fire, turning to gold and bronze in the river, the sense of space Turner creates from the eddies of smoke in the air.”
The Parliament building burned in 1834. The fire was caused by tally sticks.
The account of this historic event in 1834 is due to the English novelist Charles Dickens Speaking at a conference on governmental reform, Dickens told how counting devices destroyed "the halls of government".
"... it took until 1826 to get these sticks abolished. In 1834 ... there was a considerable accumulation of them. ... [W]hat was to be done with such worn-out worm-eaten, rotten old bits of wood? The sticks were housed in Westminster, and it would naturally occur to any intelligent person that nothing could be easier than to allow them to be carried away for firewood by the miserable people who lived in that neighborhood. However [the sticks were no longer] useful and official routine required that they never should be, and so the order went out that they should be privately and confidentially burned. It came to pass that they were burned in a stove in the House of Lords. The stove, overgorged with these preposterous sticks, set fire to the panelling; the panelling set fire to the House of Commons; the two houses [of government] were reduced to ashes; architects were called in to build others; and we are now in the second million of the cost thereof."
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Four days of burning, 1666
“The only plagues of London...are the immoderate drinking of fools and the frequency of fires.” William Fitz Stephen, the chronicler of St Thomas Becket (archbishop of Canterbury) had penned these words around 1173, but Londoners living here in 1666 would have found them particularly apt. Having barely recovered from yet another round of plague, some 100,000 were rendered homeless by the Great Fire. Embers from the king’s baker’s oven sparked off the four-day burning, reducing St Paul's and over 13,000 houses and churches to ashes. Incredibly, only nine deaths were recorded.
• Sir Thomas Bludworth, Lord Mayor of London, did not take the Great Fire seriously when it first started, claiming that “a woman might piss it out”.
London was rebuilt with astonishing speed, this time with stone and brick houses and slightly wider streets. At the behest of Charles II, religious reconstruction fell to Christopher Wren, a gifted Oxford astronomy professor who had turned his talents to architecture. Wren designed 52 new parish churches and the fifth and final version of St Paul’s. The Great Fire also resulted in an insurance boom: by 1710, more than 25,000 Londoners owned fire insurance.