Household movement after the Great Fire

This chapter provides a groundbreaking analysis of residential movement after the Great Fire, primarily using the Hearth Tax and Fire Court records. It showed that the vast majority of burned-out Londoners did not return to the same location after the Fire. However, much of the movement was short-range and over half of those burnt out remained in the City. The Fire hastened the long-term trend of population movement away from the City to London’s suburban areas, although this was socially selective. Higher-status individuals moved west whereas others tended to relocate north and east.