Life in London from 1500 to 1800, courtesy of Ethan Zuckerman, a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard:

“What’s harder to understand, for me, at least, is why anyone would have moved to London in the years from 1500 – 1800, the years in which it experienced rapid, continuous growth and became the greatest metropolis of the 19th century. First, the city had an unfortunate tendency to burn down. The Great Fire of 1666, which left as many as 200,000 in the city homeless, was merely the largest of a series of ‘named fires’ severe enough to distinguish themselves from the routine, everyday fires that imperiled wood and thatch houses, packed closely together and heated with open coal or wood fires. It’s likely that more Londoners would have been affected but for the fact that 100,000 – a fifth of the city’s population – had died the previous year from an outbreak of the bubonic plague, which spread quickly through the rat-infested city. (It didn’t help that the mayor of London had ordered all cats and dogs killed for fear they were spreading the plague – instead, they were likely keeping the plague rats in check.)“