Urban History, 46, 2 (2019) © Cambridge University Press 2018

doi:10.1017/S0963926818000275
First published online 19 June 2018

Towards a fire history of

European cities (late Middle Ages
to late nineteenth century)
DAVID GARRIOCH∗
School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies, 20 Chancellor’s
Walk, Monash University, Australia, 3800

abstract: Fires are often seen as a constant in early modern European towns,
changing only in the modern era when inflammable building materials replaced
wood. This article argues that the incidence, nature and risk of fire shifted
repeatedly over time. Fire danger was determined not only by building materials
but also by forms of construction, by the everyday uses people made of flame and
by wider factors such as climatic variation and shifts in world trade and consumer
demand. It was influenced by urban social and political change, including the way
governments and populations responded to the risk. Responses to new fire dangers
in turn helped change the way urban government functioned.

As the recent Grenfell tragedy and similar disasters elsewhere remind

us, fire was and remains a major threat to city dwellers. Yet the history
of urban fires is most often told as a story in two parts: a period when
wooden towns burned repeatedly followed, in more recent times, by one
when they did not, once flammable building materials were replaced by
stone and brick. Such a two-part schema revives a division between ‘pre-
modern’ cities and ‘modern’ ones that has been seriously questioned in
almost every other domain. It risks perpetuating a perception, current
since the nineteenth century and noted by a number of recent scholars,
that large urban fires belong in an unenlightened European past, and that
their continued occurrence in other parts of the world is evidence of the
less civilized nature of those societies.1
∗ I wish to thank Andrew May, Susie Protschky and the Urban History reviewers for
invaluable suggestions on earlier drafts; the many helpful archivists in London, Paris,
Vienna, Venice and Stockholm; Jana Verhoeven, Georgie Arnott, Jess O’Leary, Veronica
Langberg and Amanda McLeod for research assistance; seminar audiences at Monash
University, the University of Sheffield and the EHESS in Paris; and the Australian Research
Council for funding that made the research possible.
1 C. Zwierlein, ‘The burning of a modern city? Istanbul as perceived by the agents of
the Sun Fire Office, 1865–1870’, in G. Bankoff, U. Lübken and J. Sand (eds.), Flammable
Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World (Madison, 2012), 82–102
(at 82–3); C. Frierson, ‘Imperial Russia’s urban fire regimes, 1700–1905’, in ibid., 103–5;
S. Pyne, ‘Afterword. Fire on the fringe’, in ibid., 392–4; J.-L. Pinol and F. Walter, ‘La ville
Fire history of European cities 203
This survey offers a different overview of what a fire history of European
towns, from the late medieval period to the late nineteenth century, might
look like. Stephen Pyne, the pre-eminent historian of fire, has pithily
defined a ‘fire history’ as ‘the explanation of why particular kinds of fires
exist in particular places at particular times’.2 Climate and weather play a
role, but at the most basic level the incidence of fires is influenced primarily
by three things: sources of ignition, the fuel available and the preventive or
control measures undertaken. The second and third of these are also crucial
in determining the scale of a fire. In urban environments, the building
materials represent part of the supply of fuel, but a fire history also needs
to consider the uses made of fire, the flammable substances people used
and stored, the precautions they took (or did not take) and the way they
responded when fires broke out.
A fire history of cities helps explain not only how and why
conflagrations occurred, but also how changing uses of fire have shaped
urban history more generally. It is not exclusively concerned with great
conflagrations, but rather with fires in general and with the changing
human behaviours underpinning them. The treatment in this survey is
necessarily very general, focusing on the major factors that influenced the
risk of accidents and on some of the impacts that changes in fire had on
European cities. Each location to some degree had its own ‘fire regime’, a
particular combination of factors that determined the way fires happened,
but those differences are beyond the scope of this survey.3 The study is
further complicated by the fact that the vast majority of fires were small
and many were never reported, so that even in the nineteenth century the
statistics are unreliable. Furthermore, attributions of causes often reflect
social and political preoccupations of the day: fires attributed to arson or to
‘moral failings’ such as tobacco smoking and drunkenness may have had
other causes, and the negligence of servant girls and apprentices was so
routinely blamed as to strain credulity. Nevertheless, the extant sources –
the deliberations of municipal councils, fire regulations, urban chronicles,
diaries, newspapers, official reports, claims for compensation and later the
records of insurance companies – enable us to identify the contexts and
probable causes of a large number of fires, as well as the circumstances in
which small fires became large ones.
There has been fine historical work on certain aspects of urban fire,
particularly on large blazes. Valuable studies have documented their
impact on urban planning and morphology, and the displacement of
religious explanations for disasters by secular ones, accompanied by a
greater investment in prevention, fire-fighting and insurance. There has

contemporaine jusqu’à la seconde guerre mondiale’, in J.-L. Pinol (ed.), Histoire de l’Europe
urbaine, 2 vols. (Paris, 2003), vol. II, 9–275 (at 41).
2 S.J. Pyne, Vestal Fire. An Environmental History, Told through Fire, of Europe and Europe’s
Encounter with the World (Seattle and London, 1997), 9.
3 Bankoff, Lübken and Sand (eds.), ‘Introduction’, in Flammable Cities, 8–9.
204 Urban History
been fine work on arson, and excellent studies of the social divisions
revealed by disastrous conflagrations.4 But little attention has been
given to the wider nature of urban fire, perhaps because its causes and
destructive progress seem evident and perennial. A candle left unattended;
a baker’s oven burning overnight; a torch carelessly carried through
night streets: any of these might set alight crowded wooden buildings.
As already noted, these causes of fire are generally perceived to be
characteristic of older cities, coming to an end as flammable building
materials were replaced with fire-resistant ones and as new technologies
of fire-fighting and prevention were developed. All this fits neatly into
a narrative of state development, industrialization, even (in popular
histories of fire-fighting) of ‘progress’.
A few studies take a different approach, although they retain this key
turning point in the incidence of large blazes. Lionel Frost and Eric
Jones documented the appearance of a ‘fire gap’, when the number of
big fires ceased to follow the curve of population growth and instead
declined.5 Frost and Jones identified this gap as opening up, in Britain,
North America and Australia, in the mid-nineteenth century, at the very
moment when industrial cities were expanding rapidly. They attributed
it, in Britain, primarily to fire-resistant building materials, and in the New
World mainly to the larger sizes of urban building lots. The chronology
suggested by Frost and Jones has been questioned: Robin Pearson has
placed the ‘fire gap’ in the late eighteenth century and Cornel Zwierlein
has argued, using a huge statistical base covering the years 1000–1939, that
in central Europe it appeared in the first half of the eighteenth century.6
Critiques of the methodology used by Frost and Jones have also led some
authors to reject the whole hypothesis of a ‘fire gap’, at least in certain
cities.7 Despite these disagreements over chronology and interpretation,
however, new materials and forms of building continue to be widely seen
as the crucial determinants of the impact fire had on cities.

4 Among other studies, D. Underdown, Fire from Heaven. Life in an English Town in the
Seventeenth Century (New Haven and London, 1993); C.A. Frierson, All Russia is Burning.
A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia (Seattle and London, 2002); C.M.
Rosen, The Limits of Power. Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America (Cambridge,
1986); P. Roberts, ‘“Agencies human and divine”: fire in French cities, 1520–1720’, in
W.G. Naphy and P. Roberts (eds.), Fear in Early Modern Society (Manchester, 1997), 9–27;
Zwierlein, ‘Burning of a modern city?’, 82–102.
5 L.E. Frost and E.L. Jones, ‘The fire gap and the greater durability of nineteenth century
cities’, Planning Perspectives, 4 (1989), 333–47.
6 R. Pearson, Insuring the Industrial Revolution. Fire Insurance in Great Britain, 1700–1850
(Aldershot, 2004), 33–8; C. Zwierlein, Der gezähmte Prometheus. Feuer und Sicherheit zwischen
Früher Neuzeit und Moderne (Göttingen, 2011), 82.
7 M. Barke, ‘“The devouring element”: the fire hazard in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1720–
1870’, The Local Historian, 43 (2013), 2–13; S. Ewen, ‘The problem of fire in nineteenth-
century British cities: the case of Glasgow’, in M. Dunkeld (ed.), Proceedings of the Second
International Congress on Construction History, vol. I (Cambridge, 2006), 1061–74, available
at www.arct.cam.ac.uk/Downloads/ichs/vol-1–1061–1074-ewen.pdf, accessed 30 Nov.
2017.
Fire history of European cities 205
Stephen Pyne also identifies these two factors as crucial, but takes an
entirely different approach. He describes a shift from one fire ecology
to another, driven primarily by technologies of fire and of construction.
Until flammable materials were replaced with fire-resistant ones, urban
fire functioned in the same way as wildfire, because the fuel was essentially
the same. Subsequently, industrialization enclosed fire in steam engines,
furnaces and stoves, while electricity later removed flames almost entirely
from workplaces and homes.8 Pyne thus emphasizes changes in the uses
of fire, as well as in building materials, although his basic periodization
remains the same.
A few historians have recently suggested other factors that significantly
shaped the fire histories of cities and towns. Zwierlein’s remarkable
study has demonstrated that the greatest number of fire disasters in
central Europe were related to war, but that there were also peaks linked
to climate.9 Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lübken and Jordan Sand take a more
comparative approach, in an innovative collection on cities in different
parts of the world that undermines any notion of a single, universal
history of urban fire. Their introduction nevertheless suggests a broad
link between government responses to fire and the dominant modes of
production: where governments had a strong investment in the wealth
of cities, because of their political or economic dependence on merchant
capital, they acted to limit fire. Where governments were more feudal, they
took little action and fires were far more frequent and disastrous.10
This survey builds on all of these insights. While acknowledging the
importance of building materials as a fuel source, it suggests that even their
history is complex. Focusing on larger urban centres where the problems
were often most acute, it considers the role played by technologies of fire
and by the responses of city governments and populations to the danger
of conflagration, and it argues that the nature of urban communities and
their connections to other parts of the world are also important. When all
these factors are considered, we can see the long-term history of urban
fire in Europe not as a linear story in two parts, but as one with multiple
turning points. In some ways, large fires did decline as a product of urban
modernity, yet in other ways, they mutated and posed new challenges,
at the very moment when improved prevention and control of fire were
reducing older dangers.

Risk factors: climate and flammability

The starting point for a fire history must be climate. Stephen Pyne has
identified three distinct European fire ‘provinces’, as well as numerous
local variations. The south had wet winters and long, hot, mostly
8 S.J. Pyne, Fire. A Brief History (Seattle, 2001), 102–18.
9 Zwierlein, Der gezähmte Prometheus, 82–117.
10 ‘Introduction’, in Bankoff, Lübken and Sand (eds.), Flammable Cities, 8–9.
206 Urban History
dry summers when strong winds were common: that was when most
woodland fires occurred. The northern climes had long winters, but the
short summers could be warm and dry and were when forest fires typically
broke out. The zone in between was characterized by a more restricted
temperature range and by rainfall fairly evenly distributed across the year,
higher in the west and lower in the east. In central Europe and the eastern
interior, the climate was warmer in summer and colder in winter. Where
towns were largely constructed of flammable materials, they were subject
to the same calendar as woodland environments.11 Hence in Stockholm,
largely built of wood until the late eighteenth century, between 1500
and 1800 only 2 out of 36 serious fires (those that burned more than 40
houses) took place during the winter months, whereas 13 happened in
summer. This was despite the fact that heating and lighting were needed
far more during the colder part of the year. In Vienna too, where the
winters were cold, both large and small fires occurred mainly in spring
and summer, with far fewer in winter. The seasons made less difference in
cities like London or Paris, where both rainfall and fires were fairly evenly
distributed across the year.12
Yet climate is not constant, and the Little Ice Age introduces another
variable into the history of urban fire. Heavy snowfalls and wetter
summers made fires less likely, but required people to use heating for
more of the year. We cannot measure the impact of those factors, but the
effects of so-called ‘anomalies’ that accompanied climatic change are clear.
Despite the overall fall in temperatures that began in the late Middle Ages
and lasted until around the early nineteenth century, much of Europe
experienced unusual fluctuations at particular moments. Thus, 1540 and
1666 had exceptionally long, dry, hot summers, and Cornel Zwierlein has

11 Pyne, Vestal Fire, 14.

12 Data for Stockholm (641 fires, 1297–1856) primarily from the John Swensk collection in
Stockholms Stadsarkiv: Swensk BI:1 – BI:10, compiled from court, municipal, police and
fire service records and from diaries and travel accounts. Vienna data (418 fires, 1250–1870)
primarily from W. Chitil, Die Entwicklung des Feuerlöschwesens in der Städten und Ländern
Österreichs (Vienna, 1911); F. Czeike, Das Feuerlöschwesen in Wien. 13.–18. Jahrhundert
(Vienna, 1962); H. Bouzek, Wien und seine Feuerwehr (Vienna, 1990); F. Loidl, ‘Brände
und Brandbekämpfung im barocken Wien. Aus dem Protokoll des Augustinerklosters’,
Unsere Heimat, 19/1–2 (1948), 26–30, supplemented from Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv,
Unterkammeramt, Bauamt A2 Faszikel A: 6 - F: Feuersachen Nr 1236–3741 (1777–1831),
from Gazette de Vienne, 1757–69, and from city histories and travel accounts. London
data (453 fires, 1500–1861) from the London Metropolitan Archive (LMA), repertories of
the Court of Aldermen and Middlesex Sessions Books; LMA Guildhall Broadside 11.91;
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspapers in British Library Newspapers Database
(2007– ), accessed Oct. 2014; supplemented by chronicles and diaries. Paris data (412 fires,
1563–1847) mainly from Registres des délibérations du bureau de la ville de Paris, 20 vols.
(Paris, 1883–1984); S.-P. Hardy, Mes loisirs, ou journal d’événements tels qu’ils parviennent à
ma connaissance, ed. P. Bastien, S. Juratic and D. Roche, 12 vols. (Paris, 2012– ); Archives
nationales (AN), Y series (Châtelet); Bibliothèque nationale de France, Joly de Fleury
Collection; and Archives de la Préfecture de police AA, AD and DA collections. Major
fires are mostly well documented, but a wider search would uncover many more small
fires in all these cities.
Fire history of European cities 207
shown that these were the years when the largest numbers of bad fires
occurred in central Europe. In 1666, the Great Fire of London followed six
weeks of unusually hot weather that dried out wooden roofs and helped
to limit supplies of water for fire-fighting.13
Climate aside, fire risk was determined first and foremost by the fuel
available, and the primary fuel in towns was the buildings. The shift from
wood and thatch to brick, stone and later iron and glass was indeed a
key turning point, although that transformation was less clear-cut and
dramatic than it is often represented. It was also accompanied by changes
in the form of buildings and in the other kinds of fuel available in the urban
environment.
There is no universal chronology. By the fifteenth century, stone had
largely replaced timber not only in Spain and Italy but in some towns
further north – in Freiburg, for example – while brick was common
in central Spain, Flanders and the Hansa ports around the Baltic, and
was spreading in England.14 But it appears that in many places, the
rapid population growth of the early modern period encouraged a return
to wooden construction. Only with the growing prosperity of the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, combined with new architectural
styles and stricter building regulation, did rebuilding see brick, stone and
plaster once more replace wood on a large scale. This generally happened
earlier in southern and western Europe, where timber for building was
in short supply, and later in northern and eastern Europe. In Vienna, some
wooden shingle roofs remained in the early eighteenth century, even when
most houses were built of stone, while across Scandinavia and Russia,
timber was still widely used in the nineteenth century.15
Yet the growing use of inflammable materials did not entirely prevent
large conflagrations, although it did make them less likely and slowed

13 Zwierlein, Der gezähmte Prometheus, 104, 108–9. On anomalies, F. Mauelshagen,

Klimageschichte der Neuzeit, 1500–1900 (Darmstadt, 2010), 61–76.
14 J.A. Wight, Brick Building in England from the Middle Ages to 1550 (London, 1972); K.U.
Tremp, ‘“Brandmauer-Geschichten” in den Freiburger Notariatsregistern des Mittelalters’,
in M. Körner, N. Bartlome and E. Flückiger (eds.), Stadtzerstor̈ung und Wiederaufbau:
Zerstor̈ungen durch Erdbeben, Feuer und Wasser, 3 vols. (Bern and Vienna, 1999–2000), vol.
I, 37–56; P. Boucheron and D. Menjot, with M. Boone, ‘La ville médiévale’, in Pinol
(ed.), Histoire de l’Europe urbaine, vol. I, 285–592 (at 467–9); D. Keene, ‘Fire in London:
destruction and reconstruction, A.D. 982–1676’, in Körner, Bartlome and Flückiger (eds.),
Stadtzerstor̈ung und Wiederaufbau, vol. I, 187–211 (at 197).
15 S. Porter, The Great Fire of London (Godalming, 1998), 17–19; E.L. Jones, S. Porter and
M. Turner, A Gazetteer of English Urban Fire Disasters, 1500–1900, in Historical Geography
Research Group of the Institute of British Geographers, Research Paper Series, no. 13 (Norwich,
1984), 51–64; A. Cowan, Urban Europe, 1500–1700 (London, 1998), 127–8; H. Gamrath, ‘The
great fire of Copenhagen in 1728’, in Körner, Bartlome and Flückiger (eds.), Stadtzerstor̈ung
und Wiederaufbau, vol. I, 293–302 (at 295); L. Nilsson, ‘The end of a pre-industrial pattern:
the great fires of Sundsvall and Umeå in 1888’, in Körner, Bartlome, and Flückiger (eds.),
Stadtzerstor̈ung und Wiederaufbau, vol. I, 277–92; Czeike, Das Feuerlöschwesen, 151, 66; J.
Kräftner, ‘Das österreichische Bürgerhaus: Typen und Elemente; mit einem Exkurs über
das Bürgerhaus in der Architekturtheorie und Kunstliteratur des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts’,
Doktor der technischen Wissenschaften, Technischen Universität Wien, 1986, 13, 27.
208 Urban History
their progress. In London, the century after the Great Fire witnessed at
least five very large blazes in areas that had been rebuilt in brick. Each
one destroyed 50 to 100 houses. This was perhaps partly explained by the
addition of further storeys in timber, yet it was also because even brick
houses made extensive use of wood for frames, roof supports, floors and
stairs. The quality of the bricks was often poor, and single brick walls
would fall once the wooden frame burned, showering the neighbourhood
with embers. Furthermore, substantial hardwood timbers like oak were
becoming scarce almost everywhere in Europe, and were replaced with
lighter softwoods that ignited far more easily. On the inside, rooms were
often lined with panels of wood or leather.16 Hence, stone and brick
houses could and did burn, as many did in Edinburgh in 1824. Even stone
cities, furthermore, contained many wooden buildings in courtyards and
in the suburbs outside the walls, as population and social segregation
increased.17 There is a broad correlation between pressure on housing
and shoddy, fire-prone construction that continues today in the absence of
effective regulation, as the Grenfell Tower disaster again demonstrates.18
Other factors, however, might be just as important as building materials
in determining the nature of urban fires. Glazing, for example, widely
adopted across seventeenth-century Europe, could change the way a fire
developed, since if the doors and windows were tightly closed it was
deprived of oxygen. Water thrown onto it would turn to steam and help
dampen the flames. On the other hand, if the glass shattered, the flames
would get a sudden injection of air and would explode outwards.19
The height, volume and design of buildings might be as important as
the materials they were made of. As land prices rose and populations
grew, houses became taller: there were only 26 five-storey houses in
Vienna in 1664 but 376 in 1795, while in Paris, residential buildings of
six to eight storeys became common in the eighteenth century.20 This
made it harder for fire-fighters to get at the flames. In buildings with a
single, open stair-well, convection currents would quickly spread a fire
upwards. For this reason, James Braidwood, commander of the London
Fire-Engine Establishment, was critical of the new ‘monster’ warehouses

16 Pearson, Insuring, 60, 85; E. McKellar, The Birth of Modern London. The Development and
Design of the City, 1660–1720 (Manchester, 1999), 71, 75–9, 159–60, 171, 177–9; P. Guillery,
The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London. A Social and Architectural History (London
and New Haven, 2004), 52, 70–3; Kräftner, ‘Das österreichische Bürgerhaus’, 132–3.
17 S. Ewen, Fighting Fires. Creating the British Fire Service, 1800–1978 (Houndmills, 2010), 31–3;
W.C. Baer, ‘Housing the poor and mechanick class in seventeenth-century London’, London
Journal, 15 (2000), 13–39; Guillery, Small House, 27–48, 125–37.
18 See the observations by S. Wetherell, ‘The Grenfell fire and the destruction of the
British council estate’, www.historyandpolicy.org/opinion-articles/articles/the-grenfell-
fire-and-the-destruction-of-the-british-council-estate, accessed 16 Jun. 2017.
19 Pyne, Brief History, 104–5.
20 J. Daum, Das Wiener städtische Mietwohnhaus in der Zeit von 1700–1859 (Vienna, 1957), 41.
See also D. Schubert, ‘The great fire of Hamburg, 1842. From catastrophe to reform’, in
Bankoff, Lübken and Sand (eds.), Flammable Cities, 212–34 (at 14).
Fire history of European cities 209

Figure 1: London warehouse, Illustrated London News, 31 Aug. 1850.

Rare Book Room, Monash University.

that developed after the mid-1820s, built with open wells and stairways
(Figure 1).21
The buildings themselves, however, were only one source of fuel. Their
contents were equally important, and here too great changes were taking
place. Even in humbler dwellings, the boom in consumer products that
began in the seventeenth century – earlier in certain social groups – led
to a proliferation of flammable goods. People of all ranks owned more
clothes and furnishings. Curtains became far more common: easily set
alight by a carelessly positioned candle, they were the source of many
fires that then spread to wooden furniture and walls. Flammable textiles
such as linen, cotton and silk competed with more fire-resistant wool,
and were used not only for clothing but in bedding, furnishings and wall
linings. In mid-nineteenth-century London, women’s dresses catching
alight was perhaps, thought Braidwood, the largest single cause of fire
deaths (Figure 2).22 Homes packed with consumer items were vulnerable,
21 J. Braidwood, Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction (London, 1866), 40–1.
22 M. Hellman, ‘Enchanted night: decoration, sociability, and visuality after dark’, in C.
Bremer-David (ed.), Paris. Life and Luxury in the Eighteenth Century (Los Angeles, 2011), 91–
113 (at 105); D. Roche, The Culture of Clothing. Dress and Fashion in the ‘Ancien Régime’, trans.
Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1994; first publ. Paris, 1989), 118–50; R. Sandgruber, Die Anfänge
210 Urban History

Figure 2: (Colour online) James Gillray, ‘Advantages of wearing Muslin

dresses’ [1802].
Source: Library of Congress http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3g08774.

even in the nineteenth century when more buildings were relatively fire-
resistant. In Paris between 1850–4 and 1875–9, the population almost
doubled but the number of recorded fires (excluding chimney fires)
increased 2.4 times.23 A similar increase took place in Glasgow.24
Yet domestic houses contained far fewer flammable materials than
shops, warehouses and manufactories, and these too have a history.
The rise in consumption and in trade across the early modern period

der Konsumgesellschaft. Konsumgüterverbrauch, Lebensstandard und Alltagskultur in Österreich

im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1982), 268–319; B. Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton
Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1991); W.D. Smith, Consumption
and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (New York and London, 2002), 47–9; L.-A.
Aldman, ‘Consumers and markets for “new” textiles in seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century Sweden’, in J. Stobart and Bruno Blondé (eds.), Selling Textiles in the Long Eighteenth
Century. Comparative Perspectives from Western Europe (Houndmills, 2014), 46–66 (at 52–7).
On curtains, L. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760
(2nd edn, London and New York, 1996), 7–8, 40, 76; Braidwood, Fire Prevention, 35.
23 ‘Tableau chronologique présentant le nombre des feux de cheminée et des incendies qui
se sont manifestés chaque année dans la Ville de Paris depuis l’année 1800 jusqu’à 1879
inclusivement’, in State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, ‘Documents divers’, presented to
the State Library by the French government, 1881. Population figures from L. Chevalier,
La formation de la population parisienne au XIXe siec̀le (Paris, 1950), 284.
24 Ewen, ‘The problem of fire’, 1064.
Fire history of European cities 211
led to growing concentrations of dangerous products. Little sugar was
consumed in fifteenth-century Europe but a great deal by the eighteenth.
In major port cities, the expansion of trade required growing quantities
of naval stores: pitch, tar and turpentine for waterproofing, hemp for
sails and timber for shipbuilding.25 Firewood and coal consumption was
driven by population growth but later by industrial uses, while dangerous
chemicals such as hydrochloric, sulfuric and nitric acid became far more
widespread in the late eighteenth century. Manchester became notorious
for the fires that broke out in its cotton factories and warehouses. By the
mid-nineteenth century, gasometers represented a huge danger to entire
neighbourhoods, as the inhabitants of London discovered in 1865 when
the Nine Elms gas factory exploded, killing 12 people and destroying 100
houses.26
It was not only the nature of the products that enormously increased
the fire risk, but the ever larger quantities stored. A series of fires in
Liverpool in the 1830s and 1840s consumed vast quantities of goods stored
in huge warehouses, including cotton and turpentine, while the Tooley
Street fire in London in 1861 burned through several warehouses and
caused an astronomical two million pounds of damage.27 Any fire that
broke out in these new structures was likely to be huge and to reach higher
temperatures than an ordinary house fire: Braidwood urged the use of
brick pillars in large warehouses, rather than cast iron ones that would
melt in large fires and fracture when water was pumped in.28
The fuel available for urban fires, therefore, did not only take the form
of building materials, and nor did less flammable buildings always result
in a reduction in the fuel available. As the nature of the buildings and their
contents changed, the type of fires also evolved.

The uses of fire

A second crucial element in a fire history is the uses that urban dwellers
made of flame. Heating and lighting were primary necessities, and
the technologies of both underwent very significant transformations.
Fireplaces with chimneys appeared in the late medieval period, replacing

25 D. Garrioch, ‘1666 and London’s fire history: a re-evaluation’, Historical Journal, 59 (2016),
319–38 (at 330); R.B. Outland III, Tapping the Pines. The Naval Stores Industry in the American
South (Baton Rouge, 2004), 5–44.
26 T. Le Roux (ed.), Les Paris de l’industrie, 1750–1920. Paris au risque de l’industrie (Grâne,
2013); Ewen, Fighting Fires, 23–4; J.-B. Fressoz, L’Apocalypse joyeuse. Une histoire du risque
technologique (Paris, 2012), 214–28.
27 C. Trebilcock, Phoenix Assurance and the Development of British Insurance, vol. I: 1782–
1870 (Cambridge, 1985), 416–19, 425; Ewen, Fighting Fires, 55–7. For French examples,
C. Sillans, ‘L’incendie dans les villes françaises du XIXe siècle: de la vulnérabilité à la
maîtrise du phénomène’, in G. Massard-Guilbaud, H. L. Platt and D. Schott (eds.), Cities
and Catastrophes. Coping with Emergency in European History (Frankfurt, 2002), 205–22 (at
206–7).
28 Braidwood, Fire Prevention, 48–53.
212 Urban History
fires lit in an open hearth, usually in the middle of the main room, whose
smoke escaped through windows or through a hole in the roof. Ordinary
houses in Paris, London and Venice probably acquired chimneys in the
1300s. Elsewhere, they arrived later: they are mentioned in Stockholm in
the 1460s and in a Prague fire ordinance of 1524. The earliest record of
chimney sweeps in the German cities seems to occur in Frankfurt in 1464,
indicating that tall chimneys were sufficiently common to keep them in
business. By 1612, Vienna had 100 sweeps.29
Chimneys heated more efficiently, but often increased the fire danger.
The chimneys themselves were initially made of timber, probably covered
in daub or plaster, and until chimney-pots came into common use, the
upward draught bore sparks onto neighbouring roofs of thatch or wood.30
In later times, stone or brick chimneys were often used to support roof
and floor beams or were set against wooden walls, and in sixteenth-
century Vienna they were the most common cause of fire. Even in the mid-
nineteenth century, hearths placed on wooden floors or joists caused many
fires in cheap housing in Glasgow.31
Chimneys made it possible to multiply the fireplaces in a building,
particularly on the upper floors, as population growth encouraged multi-
dwelling apartment houses. Cooking could then be done within living
spaces, rather than in the separate ground-floor kitchens common in the
medieval period. By the seventeenth century, fireplaces were appearing
in bedrooms and small apartments, producing innumerable tragedies
when people – especially women wearing long skirts – fell asleep by
the fire, or when small children stumbled into the flames. Another risk
was exacerbated, in the later seventeenth century, by narrower flues that
facilitated multiple hearths. The hot pipes often ran through roof spaces
used to store hay or wood. If not swept regularly, they easily became
blocked with soot that could catch alight, sometimes setting the whole
house ablaze.32
29 Cowan, Urban Europe, 129; D. Calabi, ‘Introduzione’, in Calabi (ed.), Venezia in fumo
(Bergamo, 2006), 14; E. Svalduz, ‘“Dal fuoco si rinasce”. Gli incendi a Venezia dal XV al
XVIII secolo’, in Calabi (ed.), Venezia in fumo, 41–82 (at 43); J. Schofield, London 1100–1600.
The Archaeology of a Capital City (Sheffield, 2011), 76; C.-G. Anderberg, Skorstensfejaryrket i
Sverige (Stockholm, 1997), 19; Chitil, Die Entwicklung des Feuerlöschwesens, 12; E. Reketzki,
‘Die Rauchfangkehrergewerbe in Wien. Seine Entwicklung vom Ende des 16.Jahrhunderts
bis ins 19.Jahrhundert, unter Berücksichtigung der übrigen österreichischen Länder’,
Vienna University Ph.D. thesis, 1952, 2; A. Schinnerl, Handbuch zur Feuerwehrgeschichte
(Vienna, 2005), 117; P. Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke. A History of Air Pollution in London
since Medieval Times (London, 1988), 30, 35.
30 G.V. Blackstone, A History of the British Fire Service (London, 1957), 15; J. van der Heyden,
A Description of Fire Engines with Water Hoses and the Method of Fighting Fires now Used
in Amsterdam (Canton, MA, 1996; first publ. 1690, translated and introduction by L.S.
Multhauf), xiii.
31 Czeike, Das Feuerlöschwesen, 107–8; Ewen, ‘Problem of fire’, 1066.
32 F. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, Fifteenth–Eighteenth Century, 3 vols. (New York,
1985; first publ. 1979), vol. I: The Structures of Everyday Life, 298–302; J. Fredet, ‘La maison
parisienne à pan de bois de l’époque gothique tardive: restitution du processus de mise
en œuvre’, in É. Hamon and V. Weiss (eds.), La demeure médiévale à Paris (Paris, 2012),
Fire history of European cities 213
Chimneys, then, offer an example of a new technology that made life
more comfortable but that in practice increased the fire risk. Certain simple
changes in lighting, on the other hand, gradually decreased it, notably
the use of enclosed lamps. Since naked candles caused a huge number of
fires, even the makeshift lanterns of greased paper or cloth that became
widespread in the seventeenth century probably saved many lives. In the
eighteenth century, lamps with protective horn or glass became available
(see Figure 3, below), but they remained expensive until the nineteenth. By
the 1830s, in the larger cities, wealthier people were acquiring gas lights.
These too were enclosed, they did not sputter, and because they were far
brighter, people did not need to move about with candles and risk setting
fire to furnishings, papers or curtains. On the other hand, a gas leak could
be disastrous.33 Here again, there is no simple, linear chronology.
It was not only the technologies of heating and lighting that were
changing, however, but also the times and the ways they were used.
Beginning in the seventeenth century with growing numbers of nocturnal
court festivities, the social elites began keeping ever-later hours. This
was a form of conspicuous consumption, since balls, theatres, gambling
establishments and cafes were brightly lit and sometimes well heated.34
Gradually, curfews disappeared. In Hamburg, until 1771 the law required
house doors to be closed at nightfall and all fires and lights to be
extinguished by 11p.m. In 1800, the deadline was midnight, but by 1841 it
had been completely abandoned. At the same time, institutions like cafes,
which had first appeared in the late seventeenth century, were permitted
to stay open later. Street lighting accompanied, and no doubt further
encouraged, growing use of the night hours.35 The same pattern can be
found in all the major European cities.
The leisure activities of the rich required their servants and others to
spend the night working. But night work was becoming more widespread,
across the eighteenth century, for other reasons. The growing cities
required food to be brought during the night so it would be in the shops
by morning. Increased concern about hygiene intensified efforts to clean
city streets, but more traffic made it difficult to do so during the day. Night-
soil – first recorded in print with reference to Westminster in 1721 – was (as

198–205 (at 205); J. Meyer and J.-P. Poussou, Études sur les villes françaises (Paris, 1995), 161,
278; A. Steidl, Auf nach Wien! Die Mobilität des mitteleuropäischen Handwerks im 18. und 19.
Jahrhundert am Beispiel der Haupt- und Residenzstadt (Vienna, 2003), 137.
33 H.-R. d’Allemagne, Histoire du luminaire depuis l’époque romaine jusqu’au XIXe siècle (Paris,
1891), 216–79, 527–82.
34 W. Nahrstedt, Die Entstehung der Freizeit: Dargestellt am Beispiel Hamburgs; ein Beitrag
zur Strukturgeschichte und zur strukturgeschictlichen Grundlegung der Freizeitpädagogik
(Göttingen, 1972), 247–9; C. Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York, 2011), 93–127; D. Roche, A History of Everyday
Things (Cambridge, 2000), 110–23.
35 Nahrstedt, Die Entstehung der Freizeit, 86, 94, 97, 118, 213–15.
214 Urban History

Figure 3: William Hogarth, Night (1738), 2nd of 2 states. National

Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Gift of John H. Connell, 1917 (843–3).

the name suggests) increasingly collected during the hours of darkness.36

Cities were very gradually becoming twenty-four-hour environments,

36 A. Cabantous, Histoire de la nuit. XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2009), 59–63; S. Delattre, Les
douze heures noires. La nuit à Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris, 2000), 212–46; Oxford English
Dictionary, ‘Night soil’.
Fire history of European cities 215
and the fire danger increased correspondingly, even with no changes in
technology or in building materials.
The danger was growing for other reasons, too. Alongside heating
and lighting, the main application of fire in early modern cities was for
industry, in an astonishing variety of trades. Metal-workers of all kinds
used fire, not only blacksmiths and founders but also nail-makers, pewter
manufacturers, kettle-makers and goldsmiths. Ovens or kilns were used
by bakers and other food industries, but also by potters, tile- and brick-
makers, enamellers and lime-burners. Brewers, laundrywomen, dyers and
candle-makers and many others used cauldrons in their daily work. Many
of these trades existed in medieval towns, but across the early modern
period the growth and movement of populations, and rising consumption,
led some industries to expand considerably, creating new fire hazards. A
good example is brewing. It was particularly hazardous, since the boilers
had to be kept going for long periods and large stocks of fuel and dry
grain (and later hops) were required. In England, brewing shifted from
home-based production to become, after 1500, an urban industry requiring
larger plant. The number of commercial brewers in London grew from a
handful in the early sixteenth century to around 200 by 1700, then declined
as the industry was concentrated in fewer hands. In Vienna too, beer grew
in popularity in the sixteenth century and around 1800 finally exceeded
wine in the quantity consumed. Brewing was subsequently to become an
export industry and one of the leading sectors of the industrial revolution.
By 1812, the Barclay factory in London had huge boilers in which the beer
was stirred by ‘rakes’ powered by a steam engine. By the second half of
the nineteenth century, there was a similar plant in Venice. Everywhere,
insurance companies recognized breweries as one of the greatest urban fire
hazards.37 Three London breweries burned in 1721–22 alone, and a large
fire in the London dockside suburb of Shadwell that destroyed over 100
houses in 1763 also began in a brewery.38
The best example of a largely new industry that created a major fire
risk, first in the Atlantic ports and later in cities all over Europe, is sugar-
refining. Until the sixteenth century, sugar was an expensive commodity
imported from the Middle East, although there was some production
in Sicily and Spain. Once Atlantic slavery made sugar relatively cheap,
refining began to be done in northern Europe, initially in the Low
Countries, but London rapidly became the most important centre. It faced
competition from Hamburg and in the eighteenth century from the French
Atlantic ports, although Orleans soon became the most important refining
37 P. Mathias, The Brewing Industry in England, 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 1959), 5–9, 22–5; I.S.
Hornsey, A History of Beer and Brewing (Cambridge, 2003), 366, 83–5; Sandgruber, Die
Anfänge der Konsumgesellschaft, 187–8; Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, vol. III: The
Perspective of the World, 597; A. Di Giovanni, Giudecca Ottocento: le trasformazioni di un’isola
nella prima eta industriale (Venice, 2009), 42; Zwierlein, Der gezähmte Prometheus, 177; P.G.M.
Dickson, The Sun Insurance Office, 1710–1960 (London, 1960), 83.
38 LMA Guildhall Broadside 11.91; Gazette de Vienne, 27 Jul. 1763.
216 Urban History
centre in France. In Stockholm, the first refinery dated from the 1640s, and
the Vienna sugar-bakers’ guild was formed in 1744, but only in the early
nineteenth century did large refineries proliferate in both cities. A further
revolution took place in the early 1800s when, prompted by the British
blockade of French ports, scientists managed to produce sugar from beet
that could be grown locally. Refineries then multiplied in Paris and other
inland cities.39 Since the refining process involved boiling down the sugar
syrup, then drying the crystals, it required prolonged use of fire as well as
large quantities of fuel, and the refined sugar itself was highly flammable.
English fire insurance companies quickly identified sugar-refining as one
of very high risk. In 1701, a fire in a London sugar house reportedly caused
2,000 pounds worth of damage. No fewer than 14 refineries burned in
Hamburg between 1795 and 1802.40
Other significant industries increased the fire risk, particularly in
larger cities. Glass production expanded massively from the late
1600s, and spread across Europe. As towns grew, brick and tile kilns
proliferated, as did those producing mortar and plaster.41 New chemical
industries, beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
contributed to a greatly increased danger of explosion and fire. Sulphuric
and hydrochloric acid were produced in huge boilers, for an ever-wider
variety of manufacturing uses. Oil-based varnishes invented for furniture-
making in the eighteenth century were applied to military helmets during
the revolutionary wars and caused a number of bad fires in Paris.42 Well
before steam and gas arrived on the scene, therefore, new industries and
vastly expanded production in older ones were creating a new era in
the fire history of Europe’s cities. Although the chronology varied from
region to region, the pattern was broadly similar. Not only was the scale of

39 S.W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power. The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985),
28–46; Zwierlein, Der gezähmte Prometheus, 115, 17; M. Villeret, ‘Une industrie nouvelle sur
les bords de Loire: implantation et essor des raffineries de sucre (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle)’,
Cahiers des anneaux de la mémoire, 16 (2015), 169–84; and Le goût de l’or blanc. Le commerce du
sucre en France au XVIIIe siècle (Rennes, 2017); J.-F. Belhoste and D. Woronoff, ‘Ateliers et
manufactures: une réévaluation nécessaire’, in R. Monnier (ed.), À Paris sous la révolution.
Nouvelles approches de la ville (Paris, 2008), 79–91 (at 89); G. Sjöberg, ‘Sockerindustrins
historia i Sverige intill frihetstiden Stockholm’, Karolinska förbundets årsbok (1981–82), 90–
147; W. Kohl and S. Steiger-Moser, Die Österreichische Zuckerindustrie und ihre Geschichte
1750–2013 (Vienna, 2014), 11–79; S. Kretschmer, ‘Wiener Handwerkerfrauen. Wirtschafts-
und Lebensform im 18. Jahrhundert’, Vienna University Magister thesis, Humanities
Faculty, 1998, 42.
40 Zwierlein, Der gezähmte Prometheus, 117; LMA MJ/SP/1701/04/005, petition of John
Buckland and John Nancorn; Dickson, Sun Insurance, 83.
41 D. Keene, ‘Material London in time and space’, in L.C. Orlin (ed.), Material London, ca.
1600 (Philadelphia, 2000), 55–74 (at 66); C. Maitte, Les chemins de verre. Les migrations des
verriers d’Altare et de Venise (XVIe–XIXe siècles) (Rennes, 2008); Cowan, Urban Europe, 128;
R.W. Brunskill, Brick Building in Britain (London, 1990), 19, 38; T. Le Roux, ‘Des fours à
plâtre dans Paris, histoire d’une parenthèse conflictuelle, 1765–1800’, Les articles du Musée
du plâtre (Jan. 2012), 1–8.
42 T. Le Roux, Le laboratoire des pollutions industrielles. Paris, 1770–1830 (Paris, 2011), 139–44,
187–223. On Hamburg, Zwierlein, Der gezähmte Prometheus, 110–17.
Fire history of European cities 217
industry greater, but the hazardous nature of many products caused blazes
that were larger and more fierce, and in the case of oil-based products,
water-resistant. These changes were driven in part by new technologies,
partly by greater industrial concentration, but most fundamentally by
growing consumer demand.
Meanwhile, the growth of early modern states was also producing new
fire risks. Fireworks began to be used for civic displays in Italian cities in
the fifteenth century, and became common in the sixteenth to mark royal
entries and military victories. They subsequently became a spectacular tool
of absolutist states.43 Squibs and rockets also became enormously popular
among individuals, their spread reflecting the growing availability of
gunpowder. They caused numerous urban fires.44 Their history parallels
that of the bonfires that the inhabitants were encouraged to light for civic
and royal celebrations, as well as for certain religious festivals. In London
in the 1660s, Samuel Pepys considered the number of fires an indication
of the popularity of the king, queen or government.45 By the eighteenth
century, official opinion had turned against their use and they were widely
banned.
Even more dangerous were the forms of fire used in the new theatres
and opera houses. These were enclosed spaces that depended heavily on
lighting so that audiences could see the performers (and each other, since
they too were places for display). Coloured flames and fireworks were
used for dramatic effect. The earliest permanent theatres (since ancient
times) appeared in the sixteenth century and the one in front of the Carità
monastery in Venice was among the first to burn, in 1569. The number of
theatre fires followed their spread, particularly in the nineteenth century:
99 went up in flames in the 1860s alone.46 Theatres and opera houses
were initially products of civic pride and princely patronage, but became
social markers that – according to the types of productions they hosted –
distinguished the cultured elites from the masses. In this instance, urban
fire mapped the spread of particular social and cultural practices.
Many other conflagrations, however, had their roots in political and
social conflict: war was one of the most widespread causes of destructive
town fires. Its incidence, however, was highly regional. The Thirty Years’
War in the German states produced a peak in town fires in the 1640s, but
elsewhere they occurred in other periods. The Danes burned Stockholm
several times in the early sixteenth century, while Turkish armies set

43 S. Werrett, Fireworks. Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History (Chicago and London,
2010), 16–22.
44 Van der Heyden, Description, 75.
45 Diary, 11 Feb. 1659/60, 6 Nov. 1660, 23 Apr. 1661, 15 May 1661, 21 Apr. 1662, 29 May 1662.
More generally, D. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in
Elizabethan and Stuart England (London, 1989).
46 G.M. Bergman, Lighting in the Theatre (Stockholm, 1977); A. Fölsch, Theaterbrände und die
zur Verhütung derselben erforderlichen Schutz-Massregeln, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1878–82), vol. I,
7, vol. II, 13.
218 Urban History
fire to Vienna in 1529 and 1683. An over-arching chronology, however,
was shaped by military technology. The relatively long-range iron rockets
attributed to William Congreve, used by the British to burn Copenhagen in
1807, were undoubtedly far more effective incendiary devices than earlier
ones.47

Responses to fire: prevention and fire-fighting

If urban blazes were primarily caused by human uses of fire and fed by
fuel in the form of buildings, consumer goods and manufactures, human
responses to fire risk also influenced the incidence and nature of urban
fires. Preventive measures and developments in fire-fighting have all been
amply documented by historians, although once again the story told has
often been one of linear progress. While the growing power of states and
city authorities and their greater willingness to intervene in defence of
public safety were certainly crucial, we must also recognize that the nature
and scale of the task they confronted changed considerably across the
centuries.
From early times, city ordinances attempted to restrict the use of
flammable building materials, to regulate the construction of chimneys
and to require firewalls. London introduced preventive building regula-
tions very early, and a major ordinance of 1212 also banned bakers and
brewers from working at night and required them to plaster the walls of
their premises.48 Other towns followed suit in the fourteenth century, often
after a disaster, as in Munich where a terrible fire in 1327 eventually led to
stricter building rules in 1342.49 The later chronology of fire regulations
similarly corresponds partly to the occurrence of bad fires, but equally to
the development of government and municipal authority. Thus, they often
appeared in the sixteenth century and multiplied in the seventeenth.50
Many fire regulations, particularly after 1600, parallel what has been
termed the ‘civilizing process’, aiming to get people to take quite simple
precautions.51 As Hogarth’s famous print (Figure 3) reminds us, it was
often carelessness that started fires. Ordinances therefore warned people
never to carry a naked flame into attics or to smoke in stables full of
hay, and required them to stack wood well away from the oven. Bans
on burning straw mattresses in the street and on private use of fireworks

47 F.H. Winter, ‘The Copenhagen rocket bombardment of 1807: some new views of early
rocket history’, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 47 (1994), 171–9.
48 Keene, ‘Fire in London’, 196.
49 H.F. Nöhbauer, München: eine Geschichte der Stadt und ihrer Bürger, vol. I: Von 1158 bis 1854
(Munich, 1982), 71.
50 M.L. Allemeyer, Fewersnoth und Flammenschwert: Stadtbrände in der frühen Neuzeit
(Göttingen, 2007), 37; Czeike, Das Feuerlöschwesen, 116.
51 L. Lorenzetti, ‘Introduction’, in Al fuoco!: usi, rischi e rappresentazioni dell’incendio dal
Medioevo al XX secolo (Milan, 2010), 19.
Fire history of European cities 219
were found across Europe by the 1700s.52 Yet preventive measures also
responded to shifts in the nature of the threat. The spread of stoves and of
new types of chimneys led to rules for their construction and installation,
while the arrival of firework-making as a sedentary urban trade sparked
widespread restrictions on its practice. Tobacco-smoking only became
common in the seventeenth century and thereafter was a key target of fire
regulations.53
The story of fire prevention is further complicated by uneven
enforcement. Regular inspections of houses were ordered in Vienna
in 1432, but were rarely systematic before the eighteenth or even the
nineteenth century. Even after the Great Fire of London, when very
stringent rules were introduced, they applied just to part of the metropolis,
only to new buildings, and in any case were not always obeyed.54
Nevertheless, the cumulative impact of these measures was significant.
Some of the medieval regulations seem to have had an effect, at least for
a while, but once again it was generally the growth of absolutist states
in the seventeenth century, and of paternalist governments influenced
by enlightened ideas in the eighteenth, that produced more effective
regulation. In Vienna, bakers had been relocated to the suburbs by
the late seventeenth century, and by the early eighteenth the city
magistrates were making strenuous efforts to enforce building regulations.
In Paris, the new police organization of the late seventeenth century
saw more rigorous enforcement of preventive measures, including exiling
dangerous industries from the city centre, although the growing power of
industrialists during the French Revolution and early nineteenth century
undermined this policy. Across England, stone party walls and more
frequent inspections seem to have helped reduce the numbers of multi-
house fires in the later eighteenth century.55
Ironically, some of the most effective measures against fire were
not introduced primarily for that purpose. Stone buildings were status
symbols, and rulers often attempted to aggrandize their capitals by
banning other materials, at least on the main streets. The creation of broad
avenues provided fire-breaks, yet similarly resulted from the sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century princely taste for magnificent processional routes

52 S. Zehnder-Joerg, ‘“Um Himmels Willen” – Die Freiburger des 16. Jahrhunderts angesichts
Feuersbrunst, Blitzschlag und andered Naturkatastrophen’, in A. Jermini, with H. von
Gemmingen and C. Margueron (eds.), L’histoire, l’incendie: éclairages (Fribourg, 2012), 57–74
(at 70).
53 L. Dermigny, La Chine et l’Occident: le commerce à Canton au XVIIIe siecle, 1719–1833, 4 vols.
(Paris, 1964), vol. III, 1253–4.
54 Czeike, Das Feuerlöschwesen, 30–1; Pearson, Insuring, 59–60.
55 Czeike, Das Feuerlöschwesen, 166–9; A. Weigl, ‘Gewerbliche Konjunkturen’, in P. Csendes
and F. Opll (eds.), Wien: Geschichte einer Stadt, 3 vols. (Vienna, 2001–06), vol. II, 146–61 (at
157); Le Roux, Laboratoire, 46–112, 65–439; R. Pearson, ‘The impact of fire and fire insurance
on eighteenth-century English town buildings and their populations’, in C. Shammas (ed.),
Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment. Europeans, Asians, Settlers and Indigenous
Societies (Leiden, 2012), 67–93 (at 90); Pearson, Insuring, 34.
220 Urban History
and vistas. The more general widening of thoroughfares and the clearing of
flammable rubbish and wooden street stalls, particularly in the eighteenth
century, was largely an attempt to improve traffic flow but was influenced
by new medical concerns about miasmas concentrating in narrow streets.56
Fire-fighting has a similarly complex history. There is a widespread
perception that before the Enlightenment, Europe’s inhabitants were
fatalistic about fire. This is often based on sermons and official pro-
nouncements, and occasionally on the supposed absence of precautions,
yet it is contradicted by the measures that urban authorities put in
place. Innumerable ordinances, from the Middle Ages onwards, ordered
householders to keep buckets and water in readiness. Local officials
were deputed to organize the population to fight fires, and to supply
buckets, ladders, fire-hooks and, by the 1500s, hand-pumps. Larger pumps
mounted on carts were described in the late sixteenth century and were in
use by the early seventeenth. By the late 1600s, improved engines were
deployed in southern German cities and in the Netherlands, and after
1672, flexible fire hoses gave them greater reach.57 Almost everywhere,
building workers were required to assist, since they knew how to scale
buildings and if necessary demolish them to prevent a fire from spreading.
Many cities had other groups who specialized in fighting fires. In Venice,
it was the workers of the Arsenal; in Paris and Vienna, friars from specific
religious orders; while in Valladolid, the Moorish community played a key
role. Other places reorganized the city watch to double as a fire service.58
It is true that early modern people were helpless in the face of really large
conflagrations, but in most places those were rare, and when smaller fires
occurred populations were anything but fatalistic. Neighbours mobilized
to draw water from wells, form bucket chains and operate pumps.
There is both direct and circumstantial evidence that they were generally
successful. This was one reason why London seems to have experienced
no big multi-house fires between 1212 and 1630, and why only one such
fire (in 1621) is recorded in Paris between the late Middle Ages and 1871.59
There is no doubt that the introduction of professional firemen, in stages
from the early sixteenth century in some cities, enabled house fires to
be put out more quickly, and by the late eighteenth century, they were
sometimes able to extinguish larger blazes. As they grew more practised,
crowd management became more important to stop bystanders getting

56 Pearson, ‘Impact of fire’, 70; D. Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (Berkeley, 2002),
209–31.
57 Czeike, Das Feuerlöschwesen, 76; Calabi, ‘Introduzione’, 17–18; Van der Heyden, Description,
viii.
58 Svalduz, ‘“Dal fuoco si rinasce”’, 56–9; Loidl, ‘Brände und Brandbekämpfung’; E.
d’Alençon, Les premiers pompiers de Paris, ou dévouement des capucins ds les incendies (Paris,
1892); Boucheron et al., ‘La ville médiévale’, 468.
59 D. Garrioch, ‘Why didn’t Paris burn in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?’, French
Historical Studies, forthcoming; D. Balestracci, ‘La lotta contro il fuoco (XIII–XVI secolo)’,
in Città e servizi sociali nell’Italia dei secoli XII–XV (Pistoia, 1990), 417–38 (at 430–7).
Fire history of European cities 221
in the way. Nevertheless, until well into the nineteenth century, most fire
brigades continued to rely heavily on public assistance.60
Permanent, professional fire services (paid or volunteer) became
important for another reason. Older methods were less effective as city
buildings grew taller and were not much use against the new kinds
of fires that were taking place in nineteenth-century factories, large
warehouses and theatres. Growing use of chemicals accelerated the pace
and heat of fires, and made explosions likely. Meanwhile, greater expertise
and more specialized equipment were required to handle fires in large
spaces filled with flammable materials, and to evacuate larger buildings.
Eighteenth-century concert halls and theatres were mostly small, whereas
nineteenth-century ones became huge, and the possible consequences
were demonstrated by the appalling fire in the Ringtheater in Vienna in
1881 that saw over 600 people die as they tried desperately to escape.61
This discussion of measures to prevent and combat fires reminds us
that a fire history is inseparable from that of urban political and financial
institutions. Paid firemen and expensive equipment required developed
forms of finance. So did the provision of ready supplies of water, an
increasingly scarce commodity in early modern towns with rapidly
growing populations, but without which fighting fires was impossible.62
Effective implementation of preventive measures was also expensive.
Much depended, therefore, on the nature of city government. Where it was
able and willing to introduce effective fire prevention and fire-fighting,
fires were usually kept small. There was no single type of civic culture
that was better at this than others: effective measures were sometimes
introduced by absolute rulers, as in Paris, and sometimes by the oligarchies
of city-states like Venice.
It is also important to note that institutional responses to fire risk did
not come solely from governments. ‘Civil society’ bodies also played
a key role, and the ability of insurance associations and sometimes
manufacturers to liaise with municipalities was often crucial. Most early
fire insurance schemes were mutual societies, while the later ones were
mostly joint stock companies, but both types had a strong interest in
reducing fire damage. In London, insurance companies established their
own fire brigades, while in Stockholm, the state-sponsored insurer, the
Brandkontor, was very active in fire prevention. The creation of these

60 Svalduz, ‘“Dal fuoco si rinasce”’, 55–6; Ewen, Fighting Fires, 51, 53; D. Garrioch, ‘Fires
and fire-fighting in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Paris’, French History and
Civilization, 7 (2017), 1–13 (at 5, 7, 10), at http://h-france.net/rude/wp-content/uploads/
2017/08/vol7_Garrioch.pdf.
61 C.T. Fockt, Der Brand des Ringtheaters in Wien am 8. December 1881. Eine wahrheitsgetreue
Schilderung der Katastrophe (Vienna, 1881).
62 D. Roche, ‘Le temps de l’eau rare, du Moyen Âge à 1’époque moderne’, Annales ESC, 39
(1984), 383–99; M.S.R. Jenner, ‘From conduit community to commercial network? Water
in London, 1500–1725’, in P. Griffiths and M.S.R. Jenner (eds.), Londinopolis. Essays in the
Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London (Manchester, 2000), 250–72.
222 Urban History
bodies, and their particular form, depended on the cultural and economic
character of each city, but they came into being at around the same time,
in the eighteenth century, and by the early nineteenth were to be found
almost everywhere.63

Some conclusions
The history of urban fire in Europe is not a linear story divided into two
acts: a first, long period when cities were made of wood and where candles
and open fires posed a constant threat, followed by a modern moment
when fire was controlled and older building materials were replaced
with less flammable ones. Rather, the nature and incidence of urban fire
changed repeatedly over the centuries. It is true that in Europe, spectacular
city-wide fires became rare in the nineteenth century, confined mainly to
wars, yet the apparently clear turning point represented by the shift to
stone, brick and iron is less simple than it seems.
Huge and costly fires continued to occur. The new building materials
caught fire less easily, but brick and iron allowed much larger structures
whose volume and design often facilitated the rapid spread of fires. When
combined with the new types of wares they contained, this produced
devastating blazes that were harder to contain than most earlier ones.
The cost was often huge. Robin Pearson has calculated that in England,
while multi-building fires declined in frequency after the mid-eighteenth
century, insurance losses increased.64 And if we measure cost not in
monetary terms but in human life, the new kinds of blazes were often
far worse: in London, some 383 people died from burns during the entire
period from 1654 to 1735, including seven or eight in the Great Fire of 1666,
whereas in 1881 alone, 609 died from asphyxiation or were trampled when
the Ringtheater in Vienna burned, and 200 died in similar circumstances
at the Nice Opera House.65
The history of urban fire was fashioned not only by factors internal
to cities, such as building materials and population growth, but also by
influences far beyond their boundaries. Climatic change reduced the fire
risk in cold, wet periods, yet greatly increased it when the anomalous
conditions associated with the Little Ice Age produced hot, dry weather.
Another wider factor was the growth in commerce, particularly maritime
trade, which brought new industries and highly inflammable products
like sugar, cotton and tobacco to European cities. In other words, the
fire history of European cities was profoundly influenced by long-term
shifts in their relationship with other parts of the world. Each product
63 B. Wright, Insurance Fire Brigades 1680–1929 (Stroud, 2008); M. Wickman, För all framtid.
Stockholms stads brandförsäkringskontor 250 år (Stockholm, 1996); Pearson, ‘Impact of fire’;
Ewen, Fighting Fires, 13–16, 23–5, 38.
64 Pearson, ‘Impact of fire’, 77–9. For the nineteenth century, Ewen, Fighting Fires, 31, 56–7.
65 C. Spence, Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London (Woodbridge, 2016), 67;
Fressoz, L’Apocalypse joyeuse, 228.
Fire history of European cities 223
and industry had its own chronology, and different cities and towns
were affected at different moments, but the cumulative impact, from the
seventeenth to the nineteenth century, was enormous.
It is not, however, simply a question of periodization. Making the
everyday uses of fire an object of study, rather than looking solely at
disasters, offers a different way of understanding the history of European
cities. Fire was not, as Stephen Pyne has pointed out, ‘an interruption of
normal history, a breakdown of order’, but part of the everyday existence
of city-dwellers and one of the forces that shaped their lives.66 Until the
advent of electricity, and sometimes even after that, people handled fire
every day. Yet their relationship to fire has a complex history. It was
shaped partly by technology – I have pointed to the way that chimneys
improved people’s lives yet created new risks. But fire use was inseparable
from social, cultural and political practices. Both lighting and heating
became forms of social display and differentiation, enabling the rich to
extend their activity into the night hours. This had profound implications
for the entire urban population, as cities gradually became twenty-four-
hour environments. The ability of governments to turn night into day,
temporarily in the case of fireworks and more permanently as street
lighting improved, were expressions of power and authority that also
entailed new risks. More disastrous were military uses of fire, also linked to
state formation, not only in wartime but equally through the production
and storage of gunpowder that produced many spectacular explosions:
in Paris in 1563, in London in 1650, in Vienna in 1752.67 Other socially
and politically determined factors, however, reduced the fire danger: the
prestige of stone construction and of processional avenues inadvertently
contributed to fire prevention.
A focus on fire also reveals another side of the consumer boom of
the early modern period. It is generally seen as a positive phenomenon,
producing greater comfort for many people and driving economic
growth. Yet the adoption of items like curtains and more flammable
textiles, in wooden-panelled rooms crowded with wooden furniture,
greatly increased the danger of fire. Ironically, the ease provided by
improved heating – as more efficient fireplaces proliferated and glazing
better contained the warmth – encouraged people to wear lighter, more
flammable fabrics. In certain respects, sparsely furnished early modern
houses were less dangerous than nineteenth-century ones packed with
consumer goods.
As fire risk shifted, city authorities responded with new strategies.
Stringent building rules, the exiling of dangerous industries from
city centres and bans on fireworks were not a tardy response to an
66 Pyne, ‘Afterword’, 390–3 (quotation 391).
67 Registres des délibérations du bureau de la ville de Paris, vol. V, 188; J. Entick, A New and Accurate
History and Survey of London, Westminster, Southwark, and Places Adjacent, 4 vols. (London,
1766), vol. II, 237; Bouzek, Wien und seine Feuerwehr, 100.
224 Urban History
ever-present danger, but efforts to deal with a new situation. New
forms of fire-fighting, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century,
were also a response to increased danger. Indeed, the need to deal
with fire was one of the drivers of change in municipal governments.
They began to interfere with private property by stipulating how people
could construct their houses; intervened in the economy by regulating
industry and attempted to modify individual behaviour with, for example,
bans on smoking. They imposed new taxes to meet the high cost of
fire pumps, firemen and more effective prevention. Fire thus played a
key role in the development of urban government and in changing the
relationship between municipalities and populations. It also, in many
places, encouraged the development of community and private-sector
financial institutions, with the growth of mutual and joint-stock fire
insurance companies, themselves to become lobby-groups for urban
reform.
Finally, this brief survey has suggested that early modern fire-fighting
was more effective than is generally recognized. Urban populations were
rarely fatalistic in the face of fire and they succeeded in preventing many
small fires from spreading. Combatting fires was a civic responsibility, and
a further dimension of the self-regulating nature of urban communities. It
helped to cement them, even if not everyone participated. Yet the changing
nature of fires, of urban buildings and of fire-fighting were making it
increasingly important for firemen to be specialists. Older methods of fire
management, based on the participation of the population, became less
effective. As in the case of prevention, the new, more professional fire
services were a response not to an old problem but to a new one.
Many aspects of this urban fire history deserve more attention than
is possible in a short survey. There was enormous variation between
individual towns and cities. Far more work remains to be done on the
links between climate change and urban fire. Comparison with other
parts of the world will be fruitful: several fine studies point to fascinating
differences in the kinds of fires and the responses of governments.68
Recognition of the changing place and nature of fire, and of its relationship
to human behaviours, can enhance our understanding both of the histories
of particular cities and of urban history more broadly.

68 See the essays in Bankoff, Lübken and Sand (eds.), Flammable Cities, and S. Yerasimos,
‘Istanbul ou l’urbanisme par le feu’, in S. Yerasimos and F. Fries (eds.), La ville en feu
(Champs-sur-Marne, 1993), 26–36.
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018