The Great Fire of London is a well-studied subject and, particularly around the time of the 350th anniversary in 2016, has also received much attention beyond the academy. Jacob Field's book expands our knowledge of the fire and its aftermath in a variety of ways, but his central focus is on the reactions of the individuals directly affected. The book begins with a useful short day-by-day account of the outbreak and spread of the blaze over those fateful four days in September 1666, but the remainder of the volume is focused on careful analysis of its impact on the built environment, social geography, urban economy, and popular understandings of the disaster.

The rebuilding of the City was strongly shaped by new government regulations, even if the initial grand plans for a new urban layout were unrealized. As Field shows, the Fire Court was vitally important and “mostly effective” at solving disputes quickly, ensuring that the new structures that sprang up were legally secure and more safely constructed. This process was also aided by the distribution of over £16,000 over ten years raised by a nationwide charitable brief. This analysis shows that—as with much other philanthropy in this period—higher-status supplicants received larger sums, though he also finds that about half of recipients were widows.

Field devotes the largest part of the book to analyzing how the fire influenced London's social and economic geography over both the short and long term. Field pursues this through a variety of sources, most notably very effective use of Hearth Tax records and more closely focused work on the apprenticeship registers of the Merchant Taylors’ Company and the booksellers’ premises recorded on title pages. His findings are presented in impressive detail, but some broad patterns stand out.

In terms of the built environment, rebuilt houses were measurably larger in the City and the West End, especially but not exclusively in fired areas, and vacancy rates remained high in fired areas even a decade later. Using a dataset he created to nominally link 1,360 Londoners in the 1666 and 1675 Hearth Tax lists, Field finds that the fire did promote mobility, with only 13 percent of residents in the fired areas returning to their pre-fire address, though many more returned to adjacent or nearby locations, and other parts of the metropolis such as unfired Southwark experienced almost as much residential mobility in these years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, wealthy gentry and merchants were mostly likely to return whereas women and craftspeople were least likely. In fact, despite the headline figure, Field suggest that there was much “residential persistence” across this period, with neighbors recreating pre-fire neighborhoods in overlapping or nearby areas. In the next chapter, the members of the Merchant Taylors’ Company and metropolitan booksellers provide Field with two case studies for tracking changes in economic geography. Here, using 549 nominally linked masters, he notes a substantial shift from inside to outside the City walls for the Merchant Taylors, with the fire accelerating their long-term shift toward the West End. For booksellers, the short-term impact was more dramatic: over 90 percent of booksellers in fired areas had relocated in the period 1667 to 1769. However, Field finds that the vast majority shifted back to previous locations—most commonly Paul's Churchyard—by the 1670s. This shows the continuing importance of geographical clustering for at least one very visible trade.

Finally, there is a substantial chapter examining how contemporaries interpreted the fire. He surveys a broad selection of printed works—including many sermons that were one of the most popular genres of the age—to identify the overlapping responses. He finds plenty of evidence of “anti-popery” in which Catholics—and foreigners—were blamed for the disaster, even in a published semiofficial parliamentary report. Predictably, royalists tended to offer an accidental or providential narrative of the events whereas Whigs and nonconformists put more emphasis on anti-popish versions, with the high point of public debate reached during the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–1681. Yet this polemical interpretation faded soon after, with a shared providentialism increasingly prominent in the eighteenth century.

When assessed as a whole, there is much to praise about Field's new book and little to critique. He offers substantial amounts of new material and the focus on the aftermath rather than the spectacular events of the fire itself gives it a distinctive approach. Specialists might find slightly frustrating the lack of explicit historiographical positioning and minimal discussion of the primary sources in the introduction. But it would be difficult to fault the care and precision of Field's analysis of these underused records. Although it only rarely stated directly, this comes across as a fairly optimistic interpretation of the impact of the fire. As Field acknowledges, the immediate impact was deeply traumatic for those directly affected, yet he shows that the metropolis was very resilient in the face of disaster. Its people and its trade recovered extremely quickly, even as the rebuilding work dragged on, ensuring that it would continue to serve as an engine of the national and international economy for many decades thereafter.