Beginning in a bakery on Pudding Lane in September 1666, four days of fire swept through the timber-built, densely packed City of London, destroying about 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches and the medieval St Paul's Cathedral. Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, among others, put forward ambitious plans to rebuild the City on broad grids and radiating avenues. These were set aside because untangling thousands of individual property claims would have been too slow and costly, so the City was largely rebuilt on its old street lines. The Rebuilding Acts, however, required brick and stone in place of timber.
It triggered modern building codes in the form of the Rebuilding Acts and a regular fire service, while demonstrating how entrenched property boundaries can defeat even well-conceived schemes to replan a city wholesale.