Great Fires: Did the Towns That Burned Rebuild Bigger?

Before 1900 many English towns were devastated by fire, and several were rebuilt in brick and stone as the Georgian towns admired today. I ask whether the towns that burned ended up bigger or richer than towns like them. I build an open record of great town fires by reading every dated fire sentence in the 1,681 Wikipedia articles linked from the lists of towns in England and Wales and of UK cities, together with Wikipedia's list of urban fires and its articles on individual great fires. A documented rule keeps fires with a year from 1000 to 1899 and town-wide damage, and sets aside single buildings, war burnings and modern fires. The record holds 102 great fires in 81 towns, 97 of them in England and Wales; 63% fall in the 1600s and 1700s, and they cluster in the market towns of the South, the Midlands and East Anglia (9.7% of towns there against 1.8% in the North). Comparing 1,079 towns in England and Wales outside Greater London, burned towns are about 24.8% larger in 2021 after allowing for region and Domesday households, but the 95% interval runs from -6.4% to +66.4%; 40 of 71 are bigger than a matched unburned town; and the gap vanishes once article length, a proxy for how well documented a town is, is allowed for. Household income in FYE2023 shows no clear difference. The record is a record of memory, not a complete gazetteer, and the results are associations, not causes. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/great-fires/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/great-fires. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/27/great-fires/.