Cover Reveal & Research for “Ashes & Understanding”

Learn about the research behind Tiffany Thomas’s novel “Ashes & Understanding,” including the Great London Fire of 1666, the history of property insurance, the war with France, and the London theaters that burned down.

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My latest book “Ashes & Understanding” is now at the editor’s! I’m very excited to share this one with y’all – it’s got murder, a mystery, two fires, and more.

What do you think of the cover???

As always, I did quite a bit of research so I could make my book as historically accurate as possible. I want to share some of that research with you.

The Great London Fire

There is a tremendous amount of information regarding the Great London Fire of 1666. I wrote a guest post for Always Austen that will go live on July 1st, 2025 that talks about how this fire affected Jane Austen’s time period.

The Great Fire of London began in the early hours of September 2, 1666, in the bakery of Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane. A small flame, likely caused by smoldering embers left in the oven, quickly spread through the city’s tightly packed wooden buildings, fueled by dry weather, strong winds, and the lack of an organized firefighting force.

Over the course of four days, the fire consumed over 13,000 homes, 87 churches, numerous public buildings, and most notably, St. Paul’s Cathedral. Astonishingly, only a handful of deaths were officially recorded, though the true toll may have been higher.

Lasting Impacts

• Reconstruction and Urban Reform: The fire prompted a complete redesign of parts of London. Streets were widened, building regulations required brick or stone rather than timber, and the city became more structurally organized.
• Modern Firefighting: It spurred the development of organized fire brigades and better fire prevention laws.
• Insurance Industry: The disaster helped birth modern property insurance, with the first fire insurance companies forming shortly afterward to protect against similar loss.
• Public Health: Ironically, the fire also helped end the Great Plague of 1665, as it destroyed many of the rats and fleas that spread disease.

Property Insurance

Did you know that property insurance began in England because of the Great London Fire? So many homes and businesses were destroyed, and people had no way to recover their losses and rebuild.

Insurance companies began to form, but they were poorly regulated. Many of them were either scams or they went bankrupt. To help their success, the different insurance companies began forming fire brigades. Those brigades only protected their own properties, and not the properties that were uninsured or insured by other companies.

I used this PDF pamphlet as the basis for much of my research.

Cheapside

Figuring out where to start the fire and whether or not it could reach Cheapside took some real digging. I have never been to London before, and – quite frankly – I am terrible with directions.

Fortunately, I found this cool map of historic Cheapside (click on “Agas Map” to see it).

I also did some digging into Cheapside with this Wikipedia article, and I learned about wind direction from the Heathrow Airport website.

London Theaters

In 1808 and 1809, two of London’s largest theaters were burned: Royal Covent Garden and Drury Lane.

I used this article here as a primary source of research for both of those fires.