LARGE FIRE IN LONDON.

Dunstan Times, Issue 1163, 13 June 1884, Page 3

LARGE FIRE IN LONDON.

One of the most disastrous and extensive fires of modern times on the night of April 2 made a fearful gap in the wealthiest part of the city of London. The block on the north side of Paternoster Row, extending back to Newgate street and defined east and west by Queen’s Head passage and Ivy lane, including the spacious r<ar premises of Messrs Faudel, Phillips, and Sons, which face Christ's Hospital and King Edward street, has been almost totally razed from this locality. The fire, which broke out at Messrs Pardon and Sons,’ Nos. 1 to 3 Lovell’s Court, a narrow passage midway between the two scarcely wider thoroughfares above named, rapidly spread north, east," and west, attacking sp edily the eastward corner of the court, opposite Messrs Pardon’s and in the occupancy of Mr B. Williams, music publisher. When the flames had laid a firm hold on all the buildings which were doomed ultimately to fall a prey, the sight was as extraordinary as it was terrible. The body of fire reached far over the tops of the highest buildings ; and its fierceness was denoted by huge and appalling sheets of detached flame, high up in amid the Inrid smoke, changing in fantastic shape.with every puff of south-west wind, and often mounting above the level of the oncer gallery round the dome of St. Faul,s, while the bright sparks, like floating stars

amid there I brown clouds of rolling smoke, positively leached abovc the ball ami cross, it seined to those who savveyed the scene from a near point of view that the drift of these burning flakes iu a direction away from the cathedral was a happy accident. So accustomed are Londoners to regard St. Paul’s as a natural feature of London, standing rock-like and unassailable on “the city’s highest ground,” that the Very appearance of danger seemed like a fearful re velation. Not one man in a hundred* probably in a thousand, knows or thinks that the vast cupola is a wooden shell, masking a brick cone which is the real support of the stone lantern above, the space between this funnel-like substructure, and the graceful exterior “ dome,” as it has been called ever since the time of Wren, being occupied by a forest of dry timber beams, crossing this way and that. If burning sparks from a neighboring conflagration can assail an in* flammable roof so high, and seemingly so far removed from harm’s way as this majestic covering of. London’s basilica, a new terror may, without undue stretch of imagination, be dreaded. So thought many who watched the spread of this disastrous lire, and who congratulated themselves as Londoners and as Englishmen that the great cathedral was not immediately threatened, seeing that the breeze was driving the flakes of incandescent matter north instead of south.— Standard.