It is generally stated that the houseless people took refuge in Moorfields. This is only partly true. There were 13,200 houses destroyed and 200,000 people turned out into the streets. One remarks that if these figures are correct the crowding in the City must have been very great. For these figures give fifteen persons to every house, great and small, one with another. They did not all lie out on Moorfields simply because there was no room for them. Upper and lower Moorfields covered an area of about 840,000 square feet, or a square of 900 feet, very nearly. If we allow 15 feet × 20 feet for each hut to accommodate five people, we can find room for 2800 such houses without counting the lanes between them; so that Moorfields would contain about 14,000 people only. Evelyn says that the people were dispersed about St. George’s Fields, Moorfields, and as far as Highgate. “I then went towards Islington and Highgate, where one might have seen 200,000 people of all ranks and degrees dispersed and lying along by their heaps of what they could save from the Fire.” “Pitiful huts,” Maitland says, “were erected for their accommodation, and for their immediate needs the King sent a great quantity of bread from the Navy Stores to be distributed, and neighbouring Justices of the Peace were enjoined to send in all manner of victuals. It was reputed that the loss of life was only six, but I venture to think that this loss must be greatly understated. When one considers the rapid spread of the fire, the way in which the people lingered to the last to save a little more, and when one remembers how Evelyn noticed on his first visit to the ruins the “stench from some poor creatures’ bodies,” we cannot but feel persuaded that the losses were more than six. On Moorfields temporary chapels also were built. But when the fire ceased, and before the embers were cooled, the people began to creep back and the rebuilding of the City began. As there was still remaining that part of the City east of Billingsgate with the river and the shipping, business went on, though with broken wings. For the Royal Exchange they used Gresham College; the same place became their Guildhall; the Excise Office was removed to Southampton Street, near Bedford House; the General Post Office was taken to Brydges Street, Covent Garden; the Custom House to Mark Lane; Doctors’ Commons to Exeter House, Strand. For temporary churches the authorities appropriated the meeting-houses which had not been destroyed. They began to rebuild their City. Within four years, ten thousand houses, twenty churches, and a great many companies’ halls had been put up again. It took thirty years to complete the building of the fifty-one churches which were put up in place of the eighty-seven destroyed.