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Samuel Pepys

4 stories mention Samuel Pepys on DeadlyCurious.

The Cabinet June 27, 2026 · Pudding Lane, City of London

The Bakery Fire on Pudding Lane That Burned Four-Fifths of the City of London in Four Days and Killed Only Six Documented People

A fire began at the bakery of Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane in the early hours of Sunday 2 September 1666. By the time it was extinguished on 6 September it had destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, and St Paul's Cathedral across approximately 175 hectares — about four-fifths of the City of London. The documented death toll is six. The actual toll was probably higher but cannot now be reconstructed.

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The Footnote June 27, 2026 · Seething Lane, City of London

The Naval Administrator Whose Daily Diary Recorded the Course of the Great Plague of London in 1665 With a Bureaucrat's Specificity

Samuel Pepys kept his shorthand diary from January 1660 to May 1669. The 1665 entries — running through the worst of the Great Plague that killed approximately 100,000 Londoners — are the closest surviving day-to-day record of how the plague moved through the city, how the parish authorities tried to contain it, and how an educated middle-rank professional Londoner adjusted his daily routines around an active mass-mortality epidemic.

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The Cabinet June 24, 2026 · Pudding Lane, City of London

The Five Days in September 1666 That Burned Down Most of Medieval London

The Great Fire of London began in a Pudding Lane bakery on the night of 2 September 1666 and burned for five days, destroying about 13,200 houses and most of the medieval City. It killed almost nobody — official records list six dead — but ended the 1665 plague and gave Christopher Wren the largest urban-rebuilding contract in English history.

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