Large Fire in London.

Manawatu Standard, Volume IV, Issue 210, 1 August 1884, Page 2

Large Fire in London.

m One of the most disastrous and extensive fires of modern times on the night of April 2 made a fearful gap in the wealthiest pare of the City of London. The block on the north side of Paternoster Row, extending back to Newgate-street and defined oast and west by Queen's Head passage and Ivy lane, including the spacious rear premises of Messrs Faudel, Phillips, and Sons, which face Christ's Hospital and King Edwar.detreet, has been almost totally raged from this locality. The firo, which broke out at Messrs Pardon and Sons, Nos. I to 3 Lovell's Court, a narrow passage ruidway between the two .scarcely wider thoroughfares abovenamed, rapidly spread north, east, and west, attacking speedily the eastward corner of thft court, opposite Messrs Pardon's, and in the occupancy of Mv B. Williams, music publisher. When the flames had laid a firm hold on all the buildings which were doomed ultimately to fall a pi*ey, 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 appaling sheets of detached flame, high up amid the lurid smoke, changing in fantastic shape with every puff , of south-west wind, and often mounting above the level of the outer gallery round the dome of St. Paul's, while the bright sparks, like floating stars amid the red brown clouds of rolling smoke, positively reached above the ball and cross. It .seemed to those who surveyed the scene from a near point of view that the drift of these burning {lakes in 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 revelation. Not one man in a hundred, probably in a thousand, knows or thinks that the vast cupola is a. wooden shell, making a brick cone which is the real support of the stone lantern above, the space between this funnel-like substructure, and the graceful exterior Adonic," as it hasiieen called, ever since the time of* Wren., lieing occupied by a fores.l of dry timher beams, crossing this way and that. If burning sparks from a neighbouring conflagration can assail an inflammable roof so high, and seemingly so far removed from har-m's way as this majestic covering of London's basilioa, a new terror may, without undue stretch of imagination, be dreaded. So thought many who watched the spread of this disastrous fire, and who congratulated themselves as Londoners and as Englishmen that the great cathedral was not immediately threatened, seeing that the breeze was driving flakes of incandescent matter north instead of south,