During the Great Plague of London in 1665, people boarded coaches at Whitehall, then at the edge of urban London, in an attempt to escape. The King and court temporarily moved to Oxford to avoid the plague, while Samuel Pepys remarked in his diary on 29 June, "By water to Whitehall, where the Court is full of waggons and people ready to go out of town. This end of town every day grows very bad with plague".