What engines are meant in the song London's Burning about the Great Fire of London? There would not have been fire engines then or did they have a form of fire engine?
Are you talking about the nursury rhyme? I don't know exactly how old the nusury rhyme is; they are not nearly as old as most people think. In any event, there were primitive pump engines in use by the 17th century in many of the larger cities in Northern Europe, including London and Hamburg. Here is an illustration of a typical design from the middle of the 17th-century from Germany. By late in the 17th century or the early 18th century, there were larger pump engines that could be pulled by men or horses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Keeling-fire-engine-illustration.jpg
However, getting a sufficient supply of water to the pump engine was always a problem right up until cities began to install municipal water systems in the 1820s, and even then sometimes the pipes would run dry if several nearby pumps were used simultaneously.
