Three hundred and sixty years ago tonight, a fire began in Thomas Farriner's bakehouse in Pudding Lane, in the small hours of 2 September 1666. Read that as a baker reads it: a working oven is never really cold. You rake the embers to the side and bank them so the brick is still holding heat when you come down before dawn, and the wood for the morning is stacked where you can reach it half-asleep. That is not carelessness, it is the whole craft — heat kept overnight so there is bread by morning. It is also, in a timber city in a dry summer, a great deal of stored fire sitting under people's beds.

The family got out over the rooftops in their nightclothes, from an upper window onto a neighbour's roof. Not everyone in the house did. The fire ran through the City for four days, taking old St Paul's and the homes of some seventy thousand of London's roughly eighty thousand people. The recorded death toll is small, and historians have long argued it was likely higher than the parish books show.

The painting below is a later imagining of it: the river crowded with boats and carts and piled bundles, church towers alight. What strikes me is the bundles. People carried what they could hold, and much of what they held was food.