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350 years ago, drinkers were given the choice to save their homes or their pub. Their choice might shock you

350 years ago, drinkers were given the choice to save their homes or their pub. Their choice might shock you

When the Great Fire of Northampton tore through the town in 1675, almost every pub inside the walls was destroyed – except one. According to a remarkable contemporary account, locals saved it by hauling barrels onto the roof and fighting the flames with beer

Illustrated scene of the Great Fire of London with flames consuming the city skyline while distressed figures watch from a hillside overlooking the River Thames.

Serafina Kenny

Published: June 5, 2026 at 11:45 AM

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When a huge fire broke out in Northampton in September 1675, drinkers in a local pub were faced with a choice – they could either save their homes or the pub. They chose to save the pub, while more than 80 per cent of the rest of the town burned down.

The Great Fire of Northampton ripped through the town in a similar fashion to the more famous Great Fire of London of 1666.

In 1675, Northampton was a market town specialising in leather tanning and shoemaking. Most of its buildings were constructed with wood, plaster, and straw, and packed tightly together. 1675 had been a particularly dry year thanks to a drought, so when an open fire was left unattended on St Mary’s Street, flames quickly engulfed the town.

The townspeople fled to the market square, with some bringing their possessions to try to save them – but the square was narrow and the stacked objects helped the fire spread.

The blaze took out around 700 of Northampton’s 850 buildings, including all of the pubs inside the town walls – apart from one, says Ian Mortimer, author of Mortimer’s A to Zs of English History, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.

Residents poured beer on a pub to save it from fire

“The Great Fire of Northampton took out all the pubs bar one, right in the middle. It was a pub called, appropriately, The Last,” Mortimer says. The ‘last’ referred to the foot-shaped piece of wood used to shape shoes, which would have been a common sight in Northampton due to its long history of shoemaking.

This story comes from the journals of Thomas Baskerville, a topographer who travelled around England and recorded his observations on the towns and places he visited.

Historic illustration of the Great Fire of London showing flames engulfing riverside buildings while people escape across the River Thames in crowded boats.

People flee across the River Thames during the Great Fire of London in September 1666. The fire destroyed much of medieval London, consuming thousands of homes, churches, and public buildings over four days. Similar urban disasters struck other English towns during the period, including the Great Fire of Northampton in 1675, which devastated much of the town centre and led to extensive rebuilding in brick and stone. Both fires transformed urban planning and building practices in early modern England. (Photo by Getty Images)

Baskerville wrote that the “straingeness [sic] of this preservation” of a single pub led him to ask the landlord how the building was still standing while “all the other houses for a good distance round about it burnt down.”

“The landlord said that when the fire broke out, all the drinkers in there decided whether they were going to go home and rescue their own homes, or stay and collectively try to preserve the pub. Being good drinkers, they decided to preserve their pub,” Mortimer says.

In the 1670s, pubs were important multifunctional spaces for eating, drinking, political meetings, and socialising. They were often the centres of community in towns, so it’s no wonder that the locals thought it so crucial to save.

“They hauled all the barrels of beer up onto the roof of the building and slowly poured it down the outside of the building to keep it cool throughout the fire,” Mortimer says.

In Baskerville’s account, he doesn’t specify that the people who saved the pub were patrons – he writes that it was the innkeeper’s “friends” who “hoist[ed] some hogsheads of beer out of his sellar [sic].”

But either way, Mortimer says, “It was a huge risk, and probably a moment in the annals of British firefighting that people decided to fight fire with beer and won.”

Rebuilding the town

The town’s Recorder, James Compton, the 3rd Earl of Northampton, held an emergency meeting the next morning to organise relief efforts, and got an Act quickly passed through Parliament to ensure the rebuilding of the town.

The townspeople benefitted from the lessons learned from the Great Fire of London nine years previously, because while a similar Act had taken six months to be passed in the capital, it only took six weeks in Northampton.

Local people, businesses, and universities donated a total of around £25,000 to help Northampton recover, one-tenth of which was pledged for the rebuilding of the main church.

King Charles II also donated more than 1,000 tonnes of timber to be used to reconstruct the church and reduced taxes on the town for seven years after the fire. A statue of him, dressed in a Roman toga, was erected on the new portico of the church.

The order in which the reconstruction efforts were conducted reveals people’s priorities at the time. Some of the first buildings to be tackled were Sessions House, the centre of justice and administration for the town, and All Saints Church. Sessions House would have dealt with law, order, and the administration of the local economy, while the church was a source of strength and community, showing how bureaucracy worked and how important religion was to the people at the time.

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The town was improved after the fire

Although the fire caused 11 deaths and made hundreds homeless, there was an upside. When Northampton was rebuilt, it was modernised in terms of its look, functioning, and urban planning.

The Act decreed that all new buildings be covered with lead, slate, or tiles to prevent fires, and new buildings were mostly made from far-less-flammable stone or brick. It also banned any “perilous trade” that involved fire in the main parts of the town, and ordered the streets and main square be widened, which would slow any future fires but also improve the layout of the town.

Visitors to Northampton saw the new buildings as a big upgrade. In Baskerville’s diaries from 1681, he wrote that the town had, “Phoenix like, risen out of her ashes in a far more noble and beauteous form, the houses of the streets being now built in very good order with excellent freestone and 'bellconies', and some of the inns are such gallant and stately structures the like is scarcely elsewhere to be seen.”

Baskerville even wrote that York “must have a purgation by fyre if ever it arise in beauty like Northampton or London.”

Ian Mortimer was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

Authors

Serafina KennyFreelance journalist

Serafina Kenny is a freelance journalist specialising in the history of health, relationships, and social culture