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Article snippet: The fire that engulfed an apartment tower in London on Wednesday joins a list of disasters that have marked the city’s history. Few were more prominent than the Great Fire of 1666, which wiped out 80 percent of the city and led to a rebuilding that laid the groundwork for London as we know it today. Although modern Londoners live a life relatively sheltered from such destruction, some fires in recent history have shaped it. Here are five examples from the last 100 years. The Crystal Palace, built originally in Hyde Park for an industrial exhibition in 1851, was transferred to what was then the rural outskirts in southeast London a year later. There, the iron and glass structure stood as a Victorian-era leisure center, with a palm house and fountains. In 1936, it burned to the ground in a spectacular blaze that attracted a crowd of spectators. Among them, Winston Churchill, who later became prime minister, remarked that it was “the end of an age.” The names of a neighborhood and a soccer club recall the landmark, and park and some dinosaur displays remain on the site. In the final days of 1940, the Germans dropped incendiary bombs on London that started fires across the city. The night of Dec. 29 is remembered as “the Second Great Fire of London,” one of the worst of the Blitz, a series of air attacks against British cities during World War II. Two days later, The Times carried a first-person account of the bombing from William W. White, an Associated Press report... Link to the full article to read more