Surviving 1660s London: Fire, Plague, Crime and the Curious Pleasures of a City on the Edge
- dthholland
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Imagine stepping out of your timber-framed house in London, sometime in the mid-1660s. The air is thick with acrid smoke from hundreds of coal fires, the streets are ankle-deep in filth, and every church bell you hear may be tolling for another plague victim. Just last summer, thousands died from the Great Plague. And before you’ve even had a chance to fully mourn or recover, a fire sweeps through the city, reducing it to a blackened shell of its former self.
The 1660s were not kind to Londoners. But despite pestilence, poverty, pollution and public executions, life in this chaotic, combustible capital carried on with surprising energy. There was theatre, music, dancing, and even the first sips of coffee. This blog takes you on a vivid journey through one of the most tumultuous and fascinating decades in the city’s history.
Plague and Fire: London’s Double Tragedy
The Great Plague of 1665 wasn’t London’s first brush with epidemic disease. In fact, plague outbreaks had scarred the city repeatedly throughout the early 17th century. Notably in 1603 and again in 1625, tens of thousands perished. But 1665 was different in both scale and impact. In that year alone, the plague killed an estimated 100,000 people—almost a quarter of London’s population at the time. Corpses were carted away by the wagonload. Red crosses appeared on doors to signal infected homes. Public prayers and desperate herbal remedies did little to halt the spread.
Whole neighbourhoods fell silent. The rich fled to the countryside, while the poor were left behind in airless rooms, with death often coming without warning or mercy. Streets were filled not with people, but with the smell of death and the wails of mourning. In an effort to track mortality, the authorities published bills of mortality—weekly death tallies listing not only numbers but causes, some of which read more like black humour than medical records.
Just as the city began to recover, the Great Fire of London struck in early September 1666. What began in a bakery on Pudding Lane became a firestorm that consumed most of the medieval city within four days. Over 13,000 houses, 87 churches, St Paul’s Cathedral, and dozens of important civic buildings were reduced to rubble and ash. Yet astonishingly, only a handful of deaths were officially recorded—perhaps because many poor victims left no one behind to speak for them.
The fire erased half the city—but it also cleared away the unsanitary housing and tight-packed alleys where the plague had thrived. In that sense, the destruction may have helped save lives in the long run.
Death in the Details: Bills of Mortality and Bizarre Ends
The plague was not the only killer in Restoration London. A closer look at the bills of mortality from 1665 reveals a grim diversity of death. Aside from more than 7,000 plague deaths in a single week, the bills list deaths due to ailments such as:
Spotted fever (probably typhus): 110 deaths
Consumption (tuberculosis): 134 deaths
Convulsions: 64 cases
Griping in the guts (likely dysentery): 51
Wind: 3 (yes, deadly flatulence)
Childbirth: 43 women in a single week
Other entries speak to fatal accidents and oddities: a man “burnt in his bed by a candle” and another who “fell from the belfry” of a church. These weren’t just curiosities—they were stark reminders of how easily life could end.
Doctors at the time were often helpless. The London Pharmacopoeia, an official list of medical remedies issued by the College of Physicians, recommended ingredients like dog faeces, powdered human skull, and even the saliva of a fasting man. Little wonder that many turned to herbalists, astrologers, or charlatans who promised miracle cures using even stranger methods.
A City Choked by Smoke and Stench
Long before Victorian smog, 17th-century London’s pollution was already infamous. Fires in almost every home burned sea-coal, a cheap, sulphur-rich fossil fuel that belched out black, oily smoke. Visitors often commented on the choking air and its impact on health.
Naturalist and diarist John Evelyn described how the smoke led to “importunate rheumatisms,” spitting of “corrupt matter,” and unrelenting coughs. He estimated that up to half of London’s deaths were caused by the poisonous air.
The streets, meanwhile, were a sensory assault of filth. A 1662 Act admitted that roads were “noisome, dangerous and inconvenient,” and they weren’t exaggerating. With little to no drainage, rain turned the unpaved roads into sludge. Human waste, animal droppings, and rotting food were routinely flung into the street, sometimes landing on the heads of unlucky pedestrians. This led to a peculiar street etiquette: the safest route was under the overhanging upper floors of timber buildings, out of range of falling waste. But those walkways were so prized that pedestrians often fought for space. Fights occasionally ended fatally.
Crime and Punishment: London’s Dangerous Nights
If plague and fire didn’t get you, crime just might. The city was poorly policed, and its labyrinth of alleys made it a paradise for thieves. Highwaymen began prowling the edges of the city, often targeting travellers just as they left the safety of the walls.
The most infamous was Claude Duval, a French-born dandy turned highway robber. His legend—much embroidered after his death—includes a tale where he invited a nobleman’s wife to dance by moonlight on the roadside after robbing her husband. Whether true or not, Duval became a folk hero. He was eventually captured drunk in a pub in Chandos Street, tried and hanged at Tyburn in January 1670.
But most criminals were less glamorous. Petty theft was rampant. Pickpockets, housebreakers, and desperate vagrants stole what they could—bedlinen, candlesticks, even food. The legal response was brutal. Theft over the value of 12 pence (roughly the cost of a meal) was technically punishable by death. And while some magistrates exercised leniency, many did not. Executions at Tyburn—public, theatrical, and grim—became a common spectacle.
Restoration Pleasures: Theatre, Music and Maypoles
With the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the city’s moral compass swung from Puritan to party. Under Cromwell’s Commonwealth, dancing, theatre, and even Christmas celebrations had been banned. But the new king brought a wave of indulgence.
Theatres reopened, with new venues at Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. For the first time, women were allowed on stage, and actresses like Nell Gwynne shot to stardom. Gwynne famously went from orange-seller to leading lady to royal mistress.
The return of the maypole was symbolic. John Aubrey noted that “the tallest maypole ever seen” was erected in the Strand. Londoners were reclaiming public joy, even amid loss and rebuilding.
Music filled homes and streets. Samuel Pepys, our best chronicler of the time, adored it. He played the flageolet and sang regularly. He hired a dancing master for his wife, then grew jealous of her lessons—and took them himself. Evenings in the Pepys household were often filled with singing, dancing, and mild flirtation, showing that joy and domestic drama coexisted comfortably.
Cruel Spectacles and Public Curiosity
Of course, not all amusements were wholesome. The Bear Garden in Southwark remained a hub for violent “sports”: bear-baiting, bull-baiting, and cock-fighting. Even refined figures like Pepys and Evelyn admitted to attending, if not enjoying, such events. In 1666, Pepys wrote about “good sport” watching a bull toss dogs into the crowd—disgusting, yet popular.
Executions were another major draw. After Charles II’s return, regicides (those who had signed his father’s death warrant) were hunted down and beheaded. Their severed heads were displayed atop city gates. Oliver Cromwell, though long dead, was dug up, hanged posthumously, and his skull placed on a spike at Westminster Hall—where it remained for decades.
Curiosities, Coffee and Chocolate
Curious Londoners could explore early museums—called cabinets of curiosities. In the Strand, one collection featured an Egyptian mummy, and John Tradescant’s collection boasted Native American relics, including a cloak supposedly worn by Chief Powhatan.
Coffeehouses were the era’s newest trend. The first opened in 1652 by Pasqua Rosee, a Sicilian-born entrepreneur. By 1662, there were nearly 100 coffeehouses across London. They were male-only venues filled with smoke, chatter, and newspapers. Some became hubs of trade and politics. Not everyone was thrilled: a 1674 pamphlet titled The Women’s Petition Against Coffee claimed the drink left men impotent and inattentive. Tea and chocolate were also gaining popularity, but coffee was the drink of the moment.
Eating in the Age of Excess
Food in 1660s London was abundant—for the wealthy. One surviving menu from 1663 details a feast including rabbit fricassee, boiled mutton, lobsters, and lamprey pie. Vegetables were often unmentioned, seen as too humble to list. Meanwhile, the poor rarely ate meat at all, subsisting on bread, porridge and occasionally oysters, which were plentiful and cheap.
Without refrigeration, food spoiled quickly. Pepys once hosted a dinner where a prized sturgeon was found crawling with worms—a humiliating experience for a man who prided himself on hospitality.
London Endures
For all its dangers, discomforts and dramas, 1660s London was defiantly alive. Its people endured pestilence, fire and political upheaval, yet still made time for plays, dance, drink, and delight. The decade marked the end of medieval London and the beginning of its rebirth as a modern capital.
There’s something eternally London in that spirit—stubborn, dirty, creative, chaotic, and always on the verge of reinvention.
