3. The Impact of Fire and Fire Insurance on Eighteenth-Century English Town Buildings and their Populations

Abstract

Eighteenth-century England was the site of the first mass insurance industry, the risk business par excellence, and the location of important developments in scientific method, including actuarial science, inductive logic and the laws of probability. This chapter focuses on the relationship between the growth of fire insurance and changing attitudes towards the danger of fire in the built environment. The question to be explored is whether the efforts at risk management over the eighteenth-century fundamentally changed inhabitants' view of the threat of fire and their ability to do something about it. Long after the 1774 act, however, away from the polite facades of yellow brick and Coade stone, a wooden London survived among the back streets, alleys and tenements of the City, the riverside, the east end and the south London suburbs. Keywords:eighteenth-century England; fire insurance; populations; risk management