The Great Fire of London

On the morning of September 02, 1666, a fire broke out in Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane in the City, immediately engulfing adjacent buildings, and by the morning of September 03 it had spread north and west, destroying, among others, the Royal Exchange and St Paul's Cathedral. The fire lasted four days, and the basements of individual buildings blazed until November. The event went down in history as “the Great Fire of London”. It has been compared to the bombings of World War II in terms of devastation, causing enormous damage to London of several billion pounds (in today's money) and almost 100,000 residents to be homeless.

The logical conclusion from the London tragedy of 1666 was fire insurance. In 1680, Nicholas Barbon, an English physician trained as a medical doctor in Utrecht (the Netherlands), established the first insurance company specializing in fire insurance, called “The Fire Office” (later renamed “The Phoenix”). The company itself existed until 1712. However, it is Nicholas Barbon who is considered as “the founding father" of fire insurance, whose company offered both annual policies with a rate of 5% on wooden buildings or 2,5% on stone buildings, and policies for 21 years at a great discount. His company even had a fire department to minimize possible losses from fire. Later, insurance companies began to combine their efforts to establish fire brigades. An agreement between the leading insurance companies led to the creation of a single fire department in 1833, which was called the London Fire Engine Establishment. It is noteworthy that before 1760 houses in London did not have numbers. When an insurance company insured a building, the insurer's emblem was posted on its facade so that other insurers or firemen could understand that the building was under insurance coverage.