London was well acquainted with fires but the Great Fire was by far the worst London ever experienced. About two o’clock on Sunday morning, the second of September, 1666, an assistant to the king’s baker, who lived with the baker and his family above the bake house, awoke to find his tiny room full of …
Most of Rome, the Capital of the Roman Empire, was destroyed by fire in 64 On July 19, 64, the same date four and a half centuries earlier when the Gauls set fire to Rome, a fire broke out near the Circus Maximus and quickly spread all over the city of Rome. Large numbers of …
The city of Perm, lying on the European edge of the Ural Mountains 1,400 km (780 mi) east of Moscow, rarely appears in the international headlines, even though it is Russia’s sixth largest city with a population of over one million. On a weekend in early December 2009, however, it found itself facing the full …
When in June 2009 fire spread from a warehouse to a center minding the children of local workers, it set in motion a chain of events that shocked the whole of Mexico and left the residents of the northern city of Hermosillo inconsolable with grief. The fire started at around 15.00 in a heating unit …
When in 2004 fire ripped through an East London warehouse housing a large selection of British contemporary art, certain sections of the print media could scarcely contain their glee. Purporting to speak for their readership, they had always seen the Britart movement as a scam foisted on the British public by talentless artists and funded …
There is a growing body of opinion in developed countries that people’s freedom is becoming stifled by health and safety legislation and that somehow society has become too risk averse. However, it might be worth imagining a culture where such legislation is thin on the ground and where even this can be circumvented by greasing …