The Great Fire in London
план-конспект урока по английскому языку (8, 9 класс) на тему

The Great Fire of London:  Part One 

What happens when a fire starts in a crowded^[1] city that is built almost entirely^[2] out of wood?  The unequivocal^[3] and unambiguous^[4] answer is easy:  everything burns. The best example of this is the Great Fire of London in September 1666.

In 1666, London was the largest city in England, and one of the largest cities in Europe. Historians^[5] believe that the population at the time was about half a million, making it the most important city in the country, larger than the next 50 towns and cities combined.^[6] The city was dirty, overcrowded, and dangerous. In one small area that today we call “the City” (the neighbourhoods around the modern day financial centres close to St. Paul’s Cathedral), more than 80,000 people. It was here that the fire started.

Though the city may well have been a world capital, life was certainly not easy in London in the middle of the 17th century. For example, in 1665 — just one year before the fire — an epidemic^[7] of the bubonic plague^[8] had killed as much as twenty per cent of the population in just a few months. Death and dying had been everywhere. Then, in the following year, the city itself was destroyed.

The old City of London was built on a very ancient system of narrow and winding^[9] streets. People used the main floors of their buildings for businesses and the upper floors for living quarters; quite naturally, so many open fireplaces meant that there was a constant worry about fire. At the time, fires were particularly^[10] dangerous because there was no fire department in the city: there was only a small volunteer fire fighting force that was ill-equipped.

Most of the structures in the city were made from wood because stone or brick was too expensive to use as a building material. This made the city a real fire hazard. In addition, the weather became an important contributing factor:  From November 1665 until September 1666, there had been a drought,^[11] leaving the city extremely^[12] dry.

The Great Fire of London:  Part Two 

Around midnight on Saturday night, September 2, 1666 a fire started in a bakery on Pudding Lane — a small street in the middle of the city, near the modern-day Monument underground station. This small, seemingly unimportant fire was the beginning of the catastrophe that nearly destroyed one of the greatest cities of Europe.

The family who lived upstairs, above the bakery, had left embers burning in the cooking oven, and this precipitated the fire. The family escaped but they were unsuccessful at extinguishing the fire. An hour later, when officials arrived on the scene, the fire was still burning and there was a fear that it would continue to spread^[13] to adjoining buildings. To stop this, the administrators ordered the two buildings on either side of the bakery be pulled down to stop the fire from spreading. The owners of these houses protested, however, and, as a result, the houses were not destroyed — leaving the fire to run out of control.

Nothing seemed to stop the flames. By 7:00 on Sunday morning, the fire had destroyed more than 300 buildings and, by late afternoon, the fire was creating its own weather:  Hot air, produced by the burning wood, produced^[14] strong winds that helped the fire to spread further.

By Monday morning, the fire was still burning. The streets were now filled with thousands of people trying to escape from the city — all of them carrying their possessions^[15] with them, making movement nearly impossible. The “General Letter Office” — equivalent to a modern-day post office — was destroyed on Monday morning, and the conflagration^[16] continued.

Tuesday was the day of greatest destruction.^[17]  Everyone had assumed that the old St. Paul’s Cathedral — an enormous stone building that had stood in the middle of the city for more than six hundred years — would provide a safe place to seek sanctuary^[18] or to store valuables.^[19] But workmen, who had been renovating the roof of the cathedral before the fire started, had erected a wooden covering on top of the old roof. This caught fire — and the whole building was destroyed.

By Tuesday afternoon, as the diarist^[20] Samuel Pepys — an eyewitness to the fire — wrote, the scale of the catastrophe was unimaginable. The fire had now been burning for a number of days, and the army was ordered by the king to stop it from moving any further:  gunpowder^[21] was used to blow up whole streets of houses. This successfully halted^[22] the fire in its tracks.

By Wednesday, the fire and the winds were finally beginning to stop — four full days after they started.

The Great Fire of London:  Part Three 

How we react to a disaster often helps to reveal our true nature: this truism was exemplified by the public’s reaction to the Great Fire of London. Some citizens helped victims; others helped only themselves. A few days before the fire, it was possible to rent a small wagon^[23] for cartage^[24] for a few cents; by Monday afternoon of the fire, rich people were paying the equivalent^[25] of £8,000 to rent a wagon to help move their possessions to safety outside the city.

As soon as the fire started, people had begun to ask if the fire had really been an accident, an ‘act of god’. “Was it a kind of urban^[26] terrorism?” some asked and soon stories were spreading as quickly as the fire was. Because England was engaged in a war with the Netherlands,^[27] people said that the fire had been started by Dutch^[28] soldiers or Dutch sympathizers.^[29] Others said that the French were responsible, and — just to be sure —  they lynched^[30] any foreigners whom they could find walking in the streets.

All in all, it is believed that 13,500 houses and 87 churches were destroyed in the fire. First the French and the Dutch were blamed. Then, for more than 150 years after the fire, other people were accused^[31] for what had really been just an accident:  until the 19th century, it was said that Catholics (unhappy with the government) had started the fire.

Understandably,^[32] it took a long time for the city to recover from what had been its most destructive fire. One architect, Christopher Wren, became famous for the work that he completed in rebuilding the city after the disaster. He designed more than 50 churches; his most famous creation was the new St. Paul’s Cathedral that replaced the old cathedral destroyed in the fire. The church is still standing today, having survived the later London Blitz of 1940 and 1941 when vast stretches of the city (in particular the East End) were destroyed by German bombing raids. It drew the eyes of the world in 1981 when Prince Charles chose it as the place to marry Princess Diana.

As a footnote, for centuries historians had said that the Great Fire of London in 1666 was destructive^[33] but, remarkably, that few people died. This theory has recently been reassessed:  Most modern historians now say that few rich people died — but there were probably thousands of poor whose deaths were never recorded.^[34]

It took decades following the fire before people had homes to live in again. The old, medieval^[35] centre of London was gone, and a new city was built. But this time very little of it was built from wood:  instead, it became a city of stone and brick.

Vocabulary

Match the terms on the left with the definitions on the right.

In each line, cross out the one phrase that is different from the rest.

Comprehension

Questions for Discussion