The Great Fire of London
An information text about the Great Fire of London in 1666, with eight questions on causes, vocabulary and writing a summary.
Read the passage
A city of wood
In 1666, London was a crowded city of narrow streets and wooden houses. Most houses were made of timber, and many were coated in tar to keep out the rain. The buildings were so close together that their upper floors almost touched. It had also been a long, dry summer. In a city like this, one small spark could be disastrous.
The fire begins
In the early hours of Sunday 2 September, a fire started in a baker’s shop in Pudding Lane. The baker, Thomas Farriner, and his family escaped, but the flames spread quickly. A strong east wind carried sparks from house to house, and soon the fire was out of control. The streets were so narrow that people could not easily escape with their belongings, so many fled across the River Thames by boat.
Fighting the fire
People tried to stop the blaze with leather buckets and hand-held water squirts. Soldiers and citizens pulled down houses with hooks to make gaps, called firebreaks, which the flames could not easily cross. At last, the wind dropped, and the fire died down by Thursday 6 September, four days after it began.
What was lost
Around 13,000 houses and 87 churches were destroyed, including the great St Paul’s Cathedral, and tens of thousands of people lost their homes. Many families camped in open fields outside the city. Remarkably, very few deaths were officially recorded.
Rebuilding
After the fire, a new law said that houses must be built of brick or stone, and the architect Sir Christopher Wren designed a new St Paul’s. The writer Samuel Pepys buried his wine and his cheese in the garden to protect them, and wrote about the fire in his diary, so we know a great deal about what it was like.
Answer the questions
- In which street did the fire start? (1 mark)
- Give two reasons why the fire spread so quickly. (2 marks)
- What are “firebreaks”, according to the text? (1 mark)
- For how many days did the fire burn? (1 mark)
- Why do you think the law was changed so that houses had to be built of brick or stone? (2 marks)
- How do we know so much about what the fire was like? (1 mark)
- Summarise the whole text in no more than three sentences. Cover how the fire started, the damage it caused and what happened afterwards. (3 marks)
- The text says very few deaths were “officially” recorded. Why might the writer have used the word “officially”? (2 marks)
Answer key for parents and teachers
1. Pudding Lane. (1 mark)
Finding information (2b). A fact to find in the second section.
2. Any two of: the houses were made of timber and coated in tar; they were close together; the summer had been dry; a strong east wind carried sparks. (2 marks)
Finding information (2b). Collecting causes from more than one place in the text.
3. Gaps made by pulling down houses, so the flames could not easily cross. (1 mark)
Word meaning (2a). Working out a word from the sentence it sits in.
4. Four days. (1 mark)
Finding information (2b). Using the dates to find a number that is stated in the text.
5. Brick and stone do not burn as easily as timber, so a future fire would be less likely to spread. (2 marks)
Inference (2d). Joining the cause of the fire to the changes made afterwards.
6. Samuel Pepys wrote about it in his diary. (1 mark)
Finding information (2b). Finding out why a source matters.
7. One mark each for: how it started and spread (a baker’s shop in Pudding Lane, timber houses, strong wind); the damage (thousands of houses, 87 churches and St Paul’s destroyed); the result (new building laws, rebuilding, Pepys’s diary). (3 marks)
Summarising (2c). A good summary keeps the main ideas and leaves out the small details. This is the core Year 5 and 6 reading skill.
8. It suggests that more people may have died than were written down in official records. (2 marks)
Inference (2d). One careful word can change the meaning of a sentence. Noticing it is a Year 5 and 6 skill.
What this practises
Finding information (2b), Word meaning (2a), Inference (2d), Summarising (2c). The codes in brackets are the reading content domains from the national curriculum test framework. Marks and answers are a guide: accept any sensible answer that is backed up by the text.
Now try the writing task
Imagine you are a Londoner in 1666. Write a diary entry about the night the fire began.
Aim for eight to twelve sentences. Read it back aloud together and fix anything that does not sound right.
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Free to print and copy for your own family or classroom. Please do not sell or republish. The passage and questions were written for LiteracyLab AI.