Not just a fire… this was the end of people’s homes

Gazette reporter Alex Claridge was sitting in his flat on the Tannery estate when the fire broke out. Here he relives how a quiet Saturday afternoon turned into chaos

The Tannery blaze has inflicted a huge scar on Canterbury.

It has left one part of the city looking more like Raqqa, Basra or Beirut.

Whenever you cast your eye over a scene of devastation, it’s always those things linked to children that resonate most strongly.

My flat is directly opposite the block that caught fire. From my window, amid the chunks of building materials burned black, yellow insulation and white painted walls there are flashes of colour – a small green shirt here, pink pyjama bottoms there, and what looks like some sort of red scooter.

These one-time possessions now have their fate in the metal claws of a machine from Goody Demolition.

And yet when word first went round The Tannery development that there was a fire in the one of the flats, it all looked so untroubling.

At 2pm on Saturday I heard a shout in the road and looked out to see a fire engine sitting in Creine Mill Lane North.

Smoke was coming from a first-floor window, but it didn’t seem like it would be a big task for firefighters. Get in, kill it, job done.

But within about a minute of me reaching the street, it was clear the fire was spreading upwards into the floor above and was being pushed westwards by the wind.

This brought a new sense of urgency for fire crews, who set up a cordon and pushed onlookers back, and real panic for those people who had been evacuated from the flats.

As the fire took hold, a man standing near me called out “Oh, no!”. His cries became more and more despairing. I later saw him with his head in his hands as he realised that his flat had been destroyed.

At its peak, flames were shooting skywards from the roof.

This was the biggest blaze since the fire at the Courts furniture store at the foot of New Dover Road in autumn 2004.

Except that day, we lost a cutprice furniture store. On Saturday, families lost everything.

This fire will also raise profound questions about the way developers build homes, not least about the materials that are used.

On the outside, these flats

are tastefully designed and not as small as many others being built around Canterbury.

On the inside, however, there will inevitably be questions asked about how well they were made.

Now, everyone else in The Tannery is fearful of the con- sequences of a fire starting in their building. I am one of those people. But I cannot begin to feel how those whose flats were destroyed must feel.

Home is the most precious place in the world, and they’ve literally watched theirs go up in flames.

Firefighters tackle the blaze at The Tannery – it spread rapidly through the development

and was the biggest such incident since 2004’s Courts fire